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Microsoft Adds JUnit 5 Testing Support, More Java Features to Visual Studio Code

• By David Ramel
• March 20, 2018

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code team has added initial support for the JUnit 5 testing framework, along with other Java functionality via extensions to the open source, cross-platform code editor.

Previously, Microsoft added support for JUnit 4 to its Java Test Runner extension. After that support was implemented in January, the VS Code team received feedback from developers suggesting more test framework support. Specificially, said Program Manager Xiaokai He, developers mentioned JUnit 5 and TestNG, and the team responded by adding functionality for running and debugging test cases and generating test reports for JUnit 5.

The Java Test Runner extension, still in preview, has been installed 482,254 times as of this writing, earning a perfect 5.0 rating from four developers. It works with Language Support for Java by Red Hat and Debugger for Java to help run and debug Java test cases.

He also announced other new features for programming Java in VS Code, including expression evaluation-based breakpoints. "After introducing expression evaluation in our January release for the Java debugger extension, we are bringing the functionality to conditional breakpoints," he said. "Now, you can set your breakpoint to break when an expression evaluates to true. We believe this could be a very useful feature when debugging your Java application using Visual Studio Code."

Also announced were several other tweaks to Java Test Runner and other Java-related extensions, including Tomcat and Maven. You can read more about those in this post.