In this episode, hear about the InterSystems ObjectScript extension in Visual Studio Code that allows developers to easily connect to their InterSystems IRIS instances and write ObjectScript in a familiar and lightweight environment. Product Manager Raj Singh joins Zack Krowiak to discuss this topic in detail! For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.   EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, you'll hear an interview between Zack Krowiak and Raj Singh about the ObjectScript extension in Visual Studio Code.   Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode 15 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. If you caught our last episode, you heard about the Experience Labs that we held during Virtual Summit. If any of those caught your interest, be on the lookout — we're converting those labs into exercises that will be available in our learning catalog. So you can head over to learning.intersystems.com to check it out. In today's episode, my colleague Zack Krowiak will interview Product Manager Raj Singh. Raj is a Product Manager for the Developer Experience here at InterSystems. And one topic that falls squarely into that area is the ObjectScript extension for Visual Studio Code. This extension allows developers to work seamlessly in a familiar, free, and lightweight IDE like VS Code. So without further ado, here's Zack's interview with Raj.   Zack Krowiak 00:01:27 All right. Raj Singh, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.   Raj Singh 00:01:31 Thanks for having me.   Zack Krowiak 00:01:33 Yeah, so let's get started. So could you start by talking a little bit about how this project evolved from an open-source project, with Dmitriy, to a community collaboration with InterSystems?   Raj Singh 00:01:43 Yeah, so it was, this is pretty much a new process for InterSystems. We dipped our toes in the water earlier in 2019 with some open-source releases around iKnow and some other smaller things, less visible, but tackling an IDE, which is something all of our developers touch almost every day, if not multiple times a day, was a big commitment. A lot went into that decision, but that was partly mitigated by the fact that the ObjectScript extension that Dmitriy Maslennikov had already launched, had already shown a lot of popularity. There was hundreds of installs. People were using it every day. So from that perspective, it wasn't too scary. But just from a process perspective, we bank our reputation on sterling customer support and reliability, and so those kinds of things are easier to achieve when you have more control. So going to embracing open-source introduced a lot of degrees of freedom that we didn't know if we could be comfortable with. So we went into this with a good amount of research that showed that Visual Studio Code was a really solid platform. Very popular. Developers were coming to it in droves — first development platform to garner over 50% usage rate across the whole developer ecosystem, that I've ever seen, in years and decades, probably. So there are a lot of strong signs pointing to Visual Studio Code being a terrific platform to build upon. And then we had some of those signals that the ObjectScript extension that Dmitriy had created was also a good place for us to start. And so we went into the spring with the decision to try this out, and we would see how it would go in terms of our culture fitting in with the community culture, and having that collaboration process work well. You can't know until you try it...