Welcome page experience for extensions

[xorye]

Hi, it would be great if there was an "onExtensionInstalled" activation event that would trigger when a VS Code extension is first installed.

Our use case for this activation event, is that we would like to display a welcome page for our VS Code extension when the user first installs the extension.

[rjstone]

Same here and exactly the same use case. Using "*" for this would be absolutely horrible. Best I can think of right now is to use onView with an extension's view if it has one.

(Good work on vscode BTW!)

[sandy081]

I do not think such an activation event will help because we do not always activate an extension immediately after installing. Unfortunately there is no way for extension to hook into for showing welcome page.

@kieferrm FYI

[rjstone]

I agree that for my case the real issue is "welcome experience". There's another issue that also falls into this category but is more about convenience of the extension developer. We're currently just using a markdown preview for our "welcome" document, but this has some drawbacks that could be addressed by adding some features to the markdown preview:

• A way to set the title on the tab to something custom rather than "Preview welcome.md"
• A way to set the security policy on the view so that command: URIs can work (for jumping to the settings panel, etc.)

Again I know I can just use a webview for this but I don't really need the full capabilities of a webview and it would be kind of nice if the markdown preview could be used like a webview. (Maybe there's a way to obtain a reference to the webview used by the markdown preview but if so I don't know what it is.)

Anyway, just something else to think about.

[sandy081]

@rjstone Can you please file a separate issue for markdown preview issues?