About three weeks ago, I made a mistake that cost me years of traction on my VSCode extension.
A bad update led to user complaints, so I thought unpublishing for a bit was a good idea. Turns out, once an extension is unpublished, the publishing ID is gone forever.
Microsoft support? Nothing they could do.
This means there's no real way to "pause" an extension without permanently destroying its install base. I had to rebuild from scratch.
Two weeks later, my new extension is already at 9,000+ installs. The resilience of the dev community amazes me.
Maybe we need a better rollback system for VSCode Marketplace? Or at least a warning before unpublishing?
If you’re curious, here’s my new extension → <a href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Sixth.sixth-ai" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Sixth.si...</a>