JetBrains released Rider 2023.1 EAP 4 on February 12. The latest early access utility for Rider contains such features as the ability to debug startup code for WASM .NET applications, Astro tool support, full IDE augmentation, a feature related to importing Angular templates, and TypeScript support in Vue template expressions.

The Rider 2023 EAP 4 IDE can debug startup code for WebAssembly .NET applications. This is accomplished by changing the order in which the IDE launches the application. Rider waits for the target page to initialize, connects to the debugger, and only then starts loading the application correctly, Infoq wrote on the subject.

Previously, for most WASM projects, the debugger could only connect after the application was initialized, as calculating ports or initializing the connection took some time. The solution added in EAP 4 removes this delay and enables the capture of breakpoints set at the beginning of the application initialization logic.

This new version of Rider is the first to support Astro, an open source tool that can create static HTML sites using popular JavaScript frameworks like React or Vue, while loading fully interactive components when needed. The Astro plugin for Rider can be downloaded from the JetBrains Marketplace or installed directly from the IDE. The plugin includes basic features such as code completion with auto-import, syntax highlighting, refactoring, navigation or proper code formatting. JetBrains plans to add more advanced Astro support in future releases.

The ighlighted feature is related to scaling in and out of the IDE. Developers can increase and decrease the size of UI elements simultaneously.

The community reacted positively to the new release, especially to the information about the Astro plugin. Davor Pihac, senior software engineer, welcomed the Astro plugin support in the Twitter thread for Rider 2023.1 EAP 4.