Extending VSTS with Project Template, Docs and more...

[News]

Today's Extension Monday post is about one of the coolest new extension opportunities, extension Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, fka Visual Studio Online).

To get you started creating VSTS extensions, Josh Garverick has shared a great Project Template...

VSTS Extension Project Template

This extension contains a Visual Studio project template supplying you with everything you need to create a Visual Studio Team Services extension.

This extension contains a project template consisting of:

• A simple TypeScript app
• The required vss-extension.json file
• A README containing links to further extensibility help
• The VSS.SDK.js file needed to bring your VSO extension to life
• Several typings to help with referenced libraries (jQuery, Q, Knockout, VSS)

A Project Template is great, but you want to scan the doc's? Serkan Inci has just the post for you...

Documents and Samples for Visual Studio Online Extensions

We have been working hard to get ready for making Visual Studio Online Extensions public and one of the most important piece for us is documentation and samples. Last couple of months, we worked hard on this and added a lot of docs and samples to our site.

As I mentioned in my last post, we encourage you to use TypeScript for extension development since you can get nice tooling support using the declare file we provide. Our codebase is based in TypeScript as well, which gives as a chance to write our own tool generate API docs automatically.

Here are list of some docs we added lately:

• Core Client SDK: This is the API doc for VSS.SDK.js, which extension developers use to interact with Visual Studio Online on the client side.
• Rest Client Libraries: These are the TypeScript client libraries to talk to various REST endpoints on Visual Studio Online including:
  • Build
  • Projects and Teams
  • Test Management
  • Git
  • Version Control
  • Work
  • Work Item Tracking
• UI Controls: Controls which can be used by developers in their extensions with a less effort. VSS.SDK.js can set up everything necessary for controls (scripts and styles) which makes using controls really easy. See VSS.init and its options IExtensionInitializationOptions for more details. Here is the list of controls we documented so far:
  • Grid (samples)
  • MenuBar (samples)
  • TreeView (samples)
  • Combo (samples)
  • Modal dialog (samples)
  • Splitter (samples)
  • Wait control (samples)
• Client Services: These are the services provided to extension developers on the client to get some operations done by the host. This might be important for some scenarios since the extensions are sandboxed. The services we provide are:
  • Extension data service (samples)
  • Host dialog service (samples)
  • Host navigation service (samples)
  • Work item form navigation service

This is a pretty big list and we are adding more each sprint. Please let us know if you see any issue or what you want to see in docs and samples here.
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Want to see some read-world Extensions? Anisha Pindoria recently put together a great list of VSTS Extensions from the ALM Rangers and Community...

Visual Studio Team Services Extensions from the Rangers

With the Extensions feature going live this week as per the announcement during Connect, the VS ALM Rangers have been busy creating extensions. We have a total of 11 extensions that made it into the Visual Studio Team Services Marketplace when it launched, of which 4 are published under Microsoft DevLabs and the rest as community extensions. Here’s a little bit about them…

A list of DevLabs extensions:

Folder Management
Create new folders from the code explorer within the Team Web Access.
Team: Wouter de Kort & Abel Wang

Print Cards
Print cards from your backlog for use on a physical scrum board.
Team: Gordon Beeming (@GordonBeeming) & Robert MacLean (@rmaclean)

Test Case Explorer
An extension to explore test cases.
Team: Mattias Sköld & Mathias Olausson (@molausson + blog)

Work Item Visualization
Visualize relationships between work items from within the work item form.
Team: Taavi Koosaar (@melborp + blog + GitHub + email: [email protected])


A list of Community extensions:


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