authentication.getSession can return 'stuck' authentication requests

[peterbom]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes/No
Technically no, but that's because you need an extension to call the VS Code API.

• VS Code Version: 1.88.1
• OS Version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Invoke code which calls authentication.getSession() with createIfNone: true and silent: false
2. Accept the confirmation dialog and allow a browser tab to appear
3. Close the browser tab without completing the interactive authentication
4. Invoke code which calls authentication.getSession() with the same scopes and options as before

The last step will hang indefinitely, with no exception thrown. It can be observed in the Azure Resources extension, but is not limited to that extension.

I believe this is similar to this issue/feature request.

What seems to be happening (thanks to @TylerLeonhardt for helping confirm this) is that VS Code has no way of detecting if the user has closed the browser tab, and so it cannot throw an error when this happens. There might be a timeout, but if there is, it is very long and users will be left wondering what has happened.

It is possible for extensions to implement cancellation themselves, which would just abandon the getSession call and allow users to invoke it again. But this doesn't work, because getSession caches its requests and returns an existing promise, which in this case is blocked indefinitely. Thus, users cannot log in until they reload the window or restart VS Code.

[TylerLeonhardt]

With the PR above, the user will now see:

this is what we use for GitHub auth as well so it's a fairly common pattern.

[vscodenpa]

This bug has been fixed in the latest release of VS Code Insiders!

@peterbom, you can help us out by commenting /verified if things are now working as expected.

If things still don't seem right, please ensure you're on version fc8762e of Insiders (today's or later - you can use Help: About in the command palette to check), and leave a comment letting us know what isn't working as expected.

Happy Coding!

[peterbom]

/verified