It’s already been ten months since I published the first preview of Dart Code and today marks a significant milestone - version 2.0! It’s been some time in the making; this major update adds support for launching and debugging Android and iOS apps written using Flutter, including:

• When a Flutter project is open your selected device/emulator will be shown in the status bar
• If you have more than one connected device/emulator, clicking the device name in the status bar will allow you to switch between devices/emulators
• Pressing F5 with a flutter project open will build and launch your app on the selected device/emulator
• The usual debugging experience is available for Flutter apps, including breakpoints, call stacks, watch window etc.
• The debugger’s Restart button (or Ctrl+Shift+F5) has been mapped to Flutter’s hot reload feature and will update the running application without needing to rebuild (this usually results in sub-second updates!)

Bram Vanbilsen, who has started an excellent set of Flutter tutorials on YouTube has created a short video showing how this integration works with a demo of hot reload:

Download

In order to get up and running you’ll need to grab a few things:

• Visual Studio Code version 1.13.0 or later
• v2 of Dart Code
• A recent version of the Dart SDK
• For Flutter support you’ll also need to set up Flutter

Finally, to avoid manual configuration you should also add the Dart and Flutter SDKs to your PATH.

Feedback

If you do try it out, I’d love your feedback. You can find me on Twitter (@DanTup and @DartCode), post issues at GitHub/Dart-Code or find me in the Gitter chat room!