Visual Studio Gallery Shows Open Source Extension Love

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Today there are thousands of very useful open source extensions in the VS gallery with their code hosted on GitHub. These open source extensions provide a chance for other developers to learn and collaborate, and for the extension authors to get feedback on their extensions. However, the only way for extension developers to share their own repo is to put a link in the long description of their extension. Needless to say, this made it really hard to discover the sources for an extension – and so we fixed it! Now, as an extension author, you can easily provide the GitHub URL of your extension. We will pull information such as the number of open issues and pull requests, and display it on the gallery page for your extension (see below picture as an example). As an extension consumer, this change will make it easy for you to find the source repo information, provide feedback, and collaborate on open source extensions.

Link Removed

Here’s how you can display your source repo information on VS Gallery.

1. 
   Sign in to the Visual Studio Gallery
   
   
2. 
   Open your extension edit page (the same process you use when uploading an extension).
   
   
3. 
   On the Edit page, add your source repo URL under “Provide Url to source code repository” check box and click save.
   

Right now, about 150 of our extension authors have already taken advantage of this feature and added links to their GitHub repos to their Gallery pages. Go Extenders!

Coming Soon in the Visual Studio Gallery


This is the first step towards improving the experience for open source extension in the Visual Studio Gallery. Here is a peek into other improvements we have in mind:

• 
  Pull extension description from ReadMe.md. ....
  
  
• 
  More extension statistical data. .....
  
  
• 
  Show badges on your repo. ....
  
  
• 
  Get rewards from your extension. ....
  
  
• 
  Extension upload API. ...
  

... [Read the entire post]
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Write Your Own Tools for Visual Studio


Visual Studio is a fully extensible development platform. In addition to all of the powerful tools that it provides, you can also use tools written by the community as well as create your own tools. Visual Studio Extensions empower you to extend almost every part of Visual Studio:

• Add menu items and toolbars items that activate functionality you build
• Create tool windows that offer entirely new functionality
• Provide IntelliSense for emerging programming languages
• Offer light bulbs that help developers write better code
• Integrate new project types into Visual Studio