Create your own Visual Studio extension gallery

sometimes you want to suggest extensions
to your colleagues and they could be
extensions that are publicly available
but you want to create a little list for
them so they have something that to
choose from that you know or a good
extensions that will help them and all
the times you might have extensions for
registered that you have built
internally in your company that you want
to share with everyone but you don't
want to upload them to the marketplace
which is a place where everyone in the
world can then use them you want to keep
them internally to your company so let's
take a look at how private galleries can
solve both of those problems relatively
easily and what we really want to do is
we want to get in here into the
extension manager dialog and if you look
here under the online tap you can see
that there's the visual studio
marketplace all right so that's the
global one we want to get our own custom
one in here next to it so first of all I
need to get a bunch of extensions that I
want to have part of my sort of private
marketplace or gallery and I have that
here I have a bunch of extensions that
I've put into a folder and in order for
me to share this I might have put that
folder on a on a network share so
everyone in the company or my team has
access to it I also put an X II file in
here called private gallery creator and
I got that from github so if you go to
get up the private gallery creator repo
there's a link below here in the
description you can go to releases and
just download the exe file directly from
here now
what that allows me to do is simply just
double click and that will start the
console app and it will produce a feed
an XML atom feed based on these
extensions and if there are if some of
these extensions are particularly big or
flex it could take a little bit of a
time and others are super fast so it's
now done and we can see that we now have
an XML file we also have a hidden folder
here with icons in it so it extracted
the icons out
so this feed is consumable by visual
studio let's take a look at how we do
that so I go to extensions up here and
here at the bottom of dialog I'm just
gonna click change your settings for
extensions and then I'm going to add an
additional extension gallery I'm gonna
call it my gallery and the URL is the
feed this file right here so I'm going
to hold down shift and right click and
that's gonna give me an option here
called copy s path and then I'm gonna go
back into visual studio paste that in
and remove the quotation marks that is
automatically being inserted here like
that hit apply and okay so now when I go
into my extension manager dialog you can
see that there's now a my gallery right
here and that lists all the extensions
that I have in that feed that I have on
my network share where everyone can
access them if these extensions that I
have in my custom feed also exists on
the marketplace then Auto update will
happen automatically regardless of which
of the feeds the visual studio
marketplace feed or the my gallery feed
whichever one has the newest version
visual studio will update the extension
from there so you don't actually have to
maintain the local gallery with always
with the latest versions if they're also
on the marketplace then the users will
automatically get the updates so that's
how you do that and there's a lot more
if you go into that github repo you can
read a lot more about how this works
what are the different options you can
call the
the EXCI with to have it automatically
create the you know a new feed whenever
a new v6 file is updated on disk and all
these different parameters you can use
to customize and ultimately get the
exact behavior that you want for your
custom feed I hope that was helpful
thanks for watching