Sunsetting the Webview UI Toolkit

[hawkticehurst]

Toolkit project announcement

Hi all,

With a heavy heart I'm here to share that we will be deprecating the Webview UI Toolkit for VS Code by the end of the year.

As some of you may have seen, at the beginning of May the FAST project announced a project re-alignment which includes the deprecation of several core packages. Notably, FAST Foundation (one of the defining pieces of technology we used to build the toolkit) was on this list.

Since that announcement we've been working in the background to determine how we should move forward. Skipping some of the details, the only meaningful path forward is a full top-to-bottom rewrite of the toolkit using FAST Element (a lower-level library from FAST for building web components) and unfortunately the resourcing to complete this work was not allocated.

Packages / repositories

As part of sunsetting this project the following packages and repositories will be deprecated and/or archived.

• @vscode/webview-ui-toolkit NPM package
• microsoft/vscode-webview-ui-toolkit GitHub repository
• microsoft/vscode-webview-ui-toolkit-samples GitHub repository

Timeline

There will be two key dates for sunsetting this project.

• The toolkit samples repository will be archived on August 1, 2024 August 2, 2024
• The toolkit NPM package and main repository will be deprecated/archived on January 1, 2025 January 6, 2025

Ongoing maintenance

During the time between this announcement and formal deprecation, all feature and documentation work, along with most bug fixes, will be closed. Critical security issues will continue to be addressed until January 1.

Thank you

Those are the highest level details, but if there are any questions, comments, or feedback please feel free to leave a message on this thread and I'm more than happy to discuss.

Beyond that, thank you for the last few years of participating in and using this tool. It was a joy to serve and work with all of you. I wish you all the best in your future VS Code extension endeavors!