Adding Extensions to your Visual Studio Team Services Environment

 

I was having a interesting discussion with an academic today, the discussion was around the development of interesting projects for students. One of the biggest opportunities I can see from the academic community is the development of extensions for Visual Studio and VSTS.

About 9 months ago Microsoft launched the extensibility platform for Visual Studio Products

So is the Extensibility Platform - extensions?

Extensions are simple add-ons that can be used to customize and extend your DevOps experience with Team Services. They are written with standard technologies - HTML, JavaScript, CSS - and can be developed using your preferred dev tools. They utilize our RESTful API Library in order to easily interact with Team Services and applications/services. The Visual Studio Marketplace is where extensions are published, where they can be kept privately for you and your team or shared with the millions of developers currently using Team Services.

Ways to extend Team Services

There are two ways to integrate with Team Services:

  • Utilize our RESTful API Library
  • Create service hooks to be notified of important events
  • Share and publicize in the Marketplace

  • Integrate within the web experience
  • Add new build tasks, dashboard widgets, and more
  • Share and publicize in the Marketplace

To Allow extensions to be included in VSTS And Visual Studio we have a Marketplace for Team Services and developers have really been developing and contributing some amazing extensions

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At present we have

  • Over 200 publicly published extensions…
  • Totalling over 110,000 acquisitions…
  • Across ~25,000 Team Services accounts who have extensions installed!

With such a rich set of publishers and extensions coming to our marketplace,

I wanted to give some example of some of my favourite extensions

Personas

This extension allows you to create and define the applicable Personas for your project. You can then assign Personas to work items by tagging the work item with the applicable Persona and bring up their details right from the work item form.

See it in the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=agile-extensions.personas

PERSONAS

 

Product/Concept Vision

With this extension you can easily set a product vision and make sure it is visible to all team members as a dashboard widget or under the work hub!

See it in the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=agile-extensions.product-vision

PRODUCTVISION

 
So if your looking to do an exciting project that will get you a some great references think about Visual Studio or VSTS. l be on the lookout for more specific extensions from and for the academic community  so if you’d like to see yours (or someone else’s) then let me know!

Happy coding!