Rider 2024.1 EAP 5: Collections Visualizer, Sticky Lines, Improved GitHub Actions Support, and More

Sasha Ivanova

We are mid-way through  the Early Access Program for Rider 2024, which means the EAP 5 build has just been released, bringing a host of amazing updates. But before you go to download it, let’s go over the new features this preview contains.

Collections visualizer

Rider 2024.1 introduces the collections visualizer – a tool for inspecting collections such as arrays, lists, dictionaries, and other enumerable types during the debugging process. You can view the contents of these collections in a structured and interactive manner while stepping through your code.

The collections visualizer provides a graphical representation of the collection, allowing you to expand and collapse elements, view individual values, and easily navigate through the data structure. It’s helpful for understanding the state of your program’s data during debugging and for diagnosing issues related to collection, manipulation, or data processing.

Sticky lines in the editor

To simplify working with large files and exploring new codebases, we’ve introduced sticky lines to the editor. This feature keeps key structural elements, like the beginnings of classes or methods, pinned to the top of the editor as you scroll. This way, scopes always remain in view, and you can quickly navigate through the code by clicking on one of these pinned lines.

This feature will be enabled by default. You can disable it via a checkbox in Settings/Preferences | Editor | General | Appearance, where you can also set the maximum number of pinned lines.

Enhanced GitHub actions support

We’ve enhanced support for GitHub Actions in the latest EAP release of Rider. Our development focus is on enriching your CI/CD workflows by providing increased efficiency and intelligent features designed specifically for GitHub Actions.

The list of enhancements included in the EAP 5 build includes:

• Extensive autocompletion support for various GitHub Action contexts
• Branding feature for action.yml
• Docker image completion
• JavaScript file path completion

You can find more information about the extended GitHub actions support in this blog post from IntelliJ IDEA.

Decompiler enhancements

The Assembly Explorer inside Rider now supports the WebCIL packaging format for WebAssemblies. 

The support covers:

• Decompilation for WebCIL. 
• The ability to view .wasm files in the Assembly Explorer.
• Metadata subtrees for WASM nodes in the Assembly Explorer, including WASM and WebCIL headers.

Type dependency diagram enhancements

New entry points 

Type dependency diagrams is a feature we introduced in Rider 2023.3. In an effort to improve the discoverability of this feature and allow it to merge seamlessly into your workflow, we’ve introduced more ways to access the type diagrams:

1. In the main menu, go to Tools | Architecture | Show Type Dependency Diagram.
2. Inside the editor, put the caret in the type you’re interested in, invoke the Inspect this dialog, and select Show Type Dependency Diagram.
3. Inside the Show Usages pop-up, click on the Show on Diagram icon in the top right-hand corner.
4. Inside the Find tool window, click on the Show on Diagram icon in the left toolbar, or select a type and use the context menu to invoke Show Type Dependency Diagram.
5. Inside the Type Hierarchy view, click on the Show on Diagram icon in the toolbar. 

Drag and drop

There’s now an option to drag and drop project files onto the type dependency diagram. Here’s what it looks like:

Known issues

The Monitoring tool is currently not available for running applications on Linux. Monitoring is, however, available for debugging applications on this OS.

That’s it for this week! For the full list of changes included in this build, please check out our issue tracker.

As always, we’re happy to hear your thoughts on the latest updates in the comments section or on our social media. Please feel free to submit any issues you encounter to our issue tracker.

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