Standalone TypeSpec Editing

[ByronMayne]

Hey Folks,

First off, this is a super neat project and we have been adopting it at my company to user for our internal services. The services we work on are mostly Asp.Net core so that is the lens I am framing my question from.

Question: Is it possible to have the VSCode extension provide the alias without having to use any package management system?

Take for example the code below;

import "@typespec/http";
using TypeSpec.Http;

Without doing tsp init which copies the node modules you will have compiler errors because it can't resolve the types. This make the TypeSpec files not as portable as they could be. For example when working with OpenApi you just need to have the schema and you can author it anywhere, where as TypeScript requires a ton of boilerplate in a ecosystem that would not be familiar to all.

The workflow I am trying to get is what already exists with OpenApi and [NSwag[(https://github.com/RicoSuter/NSwag). The idea being that you could write TypeSpec with intelisense in one place and have a Source Generator run TypeSpec compiler.

Does this seem like a too crazy idea?

[allenjzhang]

Not at all. Every developer would love a hassle free and rich editing experience. Having said that, TypeSpec is a compiled language and based on separate node packages. I would compare it to a dotnet project where any non-core nuget packages must be specified before the IDE would recognize it and provides IntelliSense.

Reading your requirements, I could think of some possibilities such as below to make it more seamless:

• recognizing unreferenced import, IDE could prompt or scaffold a package.json in place so the intelliSense could work. The library packages version could default to latest.

Add @RodgeFu for feature request review.

[ByronMayne]

Yeah it would be really amazing if the plugins VSCode and the Visual Studio could pick up the versions from tspconfig.yml and if not there just fallback on the latest as mentioned.

Just having this experience I think will really improve it's adoption rate. I am hoping to make the use of TypeSpec part of our standardized development workflows.

[RodgeFu]

@ByronMayne, thanks for the feedback. Following issue has been filed to track this request. Feel free to let us know if you have any other feedback when using TypeSpec. thanks.
#5633