Disable pre-release toasts

[rongxin-liu]

Feature Request

Would it be possible to have a setting that allows users to disable pre-release toasts like this one?

In the educational context, many students use Codespace as their standardized online IDE. However, they rarely know what pre-release extensions would benefit them and might be distracting in most cases.

[rongxin-liu]

cc @dmalan

[sean-mcmanus]

The user would still have to set the setting though, right? Or are they getting the setting from some shared file?

We could also add a "More info" button that explains when the pre-release version should be used.

[dmalan]

In our educational use case, the student gets the setting from a common .devcontainer.json file. For instance, we set a number of C/C++ settings via key/value pairs like https://github.com/cs50/codespace/blob/44fa8e1811fddac4b9532c9582ff10c6b4a5423a/devcontainer.json#L47-L55.

Ideally, then, there'd be a similar setting via which we could suppress any prompts to switch away from the defined configuration, so that students don't stray from a standardized environment.

Thank you for considering!

[sean-mcmanus]

@dmalan Could you elaborate on "suppress any prompts to switch away from the defined configuration"? Are you wanting the setting to be more general or apply to other scenarios or just this one?

[dmalan]

Ah, just this one, ideally to suppress this toast, so that students don't opt into pre-releases:

[sean-mcmanus]

@dmalan I have a potential fix (pending review on Monday) at #12447 that just checks the extensions.ignoreRecommendations setting (which is already set to true in your devcontainer.json settings).

[dmalan]

Oh that sounds great, thanks very much!

[sean-mcmanus]

@dmalan Fixed with https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/releases/tag/v1.21.1 (although you'll have to wait till later this week for the 1.21.2 non-prerelease version).

[dmalan]

Thanks so much, @sean-mcmanus, much appreciated!

[sean-mcmanus]

@dmalan Now it's in non-pre-release: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/releases/tag/v1.21.2

[dmalan]

Thank you, @sean-mcmanus!