Developer integration to richer IDE tools such as Visual Studio /Visual Code

[EdGarabedian]

Although the code stage offers great ability to extend Blue Prism, the development experience is not good.   It would great to have some level of formal integration with Visual Studio, or other applicable IDEs, for a better development flow.
Clicking on the the code tab in BP would launch Visual Studio and saving would bring code and libraries into BP.  Ability to fully test code in the IDE, even while debugging a VBO. stepping into a code stage would launch VS into active debug mode and then back out.  More transparency and visibility into missing libraries, global code issues, code validation errors would be great.

[MelanieGiuliani]

Hi Ed,

Thanks so much for submitting your idea! We are moving it into the Under Consideration status while we route the idea through our internal review process. 

We will update you as your idea moves along the lifecycle.

Thank you!
Melanie 

[JasonCech]

This sounds like a well thought out list of features. Potentially one way of tackling this awesome feature set would be progressive deployment. Categorize them in priority or dependency-wise. Visual Studio is in no-way a light IDE. So, starting an instance on code tab may introduce a development latency. Perhaps just enriching the text area to be more code editor could be a small step? Or perhaps have a Visual Studio extension to support a new solution/project type that can read in VBO data stored in the database? (It is, after all, just an XML document.)

The live debugging features would be amazing. Right now, my work around for this is to have a simple code library and unit test project pair that contain the code stages. Hard part with this is that keeping the code in sync is more work.

[robert.nicklin]

Hi @EdGarabedian,

Having considered this idea and discussed with several others users, we've decided that we're going to make some improvements to code stages in the upcoming Blue Prism Enterprise 7.4 release, but we're not going to go as far as delivering what this idea suggests, which is full integration with third-party IDEs.

When considering the detail of this idea, the description seemed to be for that of a two way integration between Blue Prism and an external IDE, with data transferring backwards and forwards between the two. As we look to enhance code stages we may well leverage some aspects of these external tools for new features/capabilities, but we're likely to provide a much simpler integration than what is described here.

I hope this makes sense - I'm going to change this idea status to Not Planned as a result of this update.

Regards,

Rob