Code for IBM i 3.0.0 Release Schedule

[worksofliam]

A date to release Code for IBM i 3.0.0 has been decided: April 5th 2025.

New changes

You can check out our 3.0.0 milestone, but most of the changes for 3.0.0 have been for improvements to our internal API. For example, we worked on CCSID improvements, we removed source colours, we made it easier to work with ASPs, support more CCSIDs without issues, improvements to the source date support, and more.

Before March 2025, we are going to release 2.15.0, which will be the same as 3.0.0. We are going to use the time between 2.15.0 and 3.0.0 for fixes only and no new feature should be merged.

This release is mostly important because we have cleaned up a lot internally, so while this is a big release, it's not a huge impact to our day-to-day users.

Breaking changes

Users

Last year, we announced we are removing support for SEU colours in Code for IBM i. That change is complete and will not work in 3.0.0. This means those weird hex values may show up as invalid characters in VS Code. Read that announcement here.

For those who make use of source dates, take a look in the Connection Settings. There are two modes to track changes for source dates: edit and diff. In the 2.15.0 release, we are removing edit mode. See Tracking Modes in our documentation for Source Dates here for more info.

Developers ⚠️

This date is important for anyone or any business that is writing an extension that uses the Code for IBM i API. We are going to be deprecating a lot of class members and methods, particularly in the Instance and IBMi classes.

Code for IBM i 2.15.0 which will be released before March 2025 will have the types updated to indicate which properties will be deprecated. You should ensure that your extensions are updated to use the 2.15.0 API before 3.0.0 is released, which is when the deprecated properties will be removed, and your extension may stop working.