Creating a private extension gallery for Visual Studio

[MUSIC].
>> Hey everyone, I'm
Leslie Richardson from
the Visual Studio
extensibility team.
In this video, I'm going to
show you how you can create
your very own private gallery
in Visual Studio 2022.
Why even create a private
gallery? What even is it?
If you've ever written
an extension that you
didn't want to release to
the world publicly either via
the VS marketplace or
some other location,
and you only want it to
share it with a select group
of people like maybe your
team or your company.
Then a private gallery
allows you to do just that.
It's essentially a privatized
version of the VS marketplace,
allowing select people to
install and uninstall
extensions that you specify.
Let's check it out. The first step
that you're going to need to do to
create your private gallery is,
create an empty folder.
Ideally, you want to place
this folder somewhere
that's going to be
easily accessible for the people
you intend to share
that gallery with.
I'm going to make mine local,
but feel free to place
your folder either in
a OneDrive or a SharePoint or
anything like that as well.
Let's call mine my private gallery.
The next thing we need to do is
actually populate that folder with
the Vsix files that correspond to
the extensions that you want
displayed inside the gallery.
Luckily I have a few on
standby. Add those in.
Now from here the crux
of the entire gallery is
based on this XML file
called an Atom feed file.
This is very similar to
an RSS feed that you might
see with podcast or websites
and stuff like that that
will keep a record of all of
my Vsix information that needs
to be displayed in that gallery.
Once you share out that file
path or that corresponding
URL with the people who you need
to have access to this gallery,
they can all get that same updated
information as you continue to
iterate on your gallery
or update any of
the extensions within
it and all that jazz.
There are a couple of
ways to create this file.
The first is manually,
which is not the most fun option,
but if you want to do that,
all power to you, or
you can also just have
that XML generated automatically
via a third-party tool.
For instance, Mads Kristensen
has a private gallery creator.
This is an executable that
you can just run within
your folder or if you prefer
the first-party options,
we recently added a new tool
called the Vsix Util tool,
which is short for the Vsix
command line utility tool.
That's what I'm going to demo today.
In order to use the Vsix Util tool,
first is you're going
to have to have
the build tools NuGet
package installed,
which is this one right here.
Then we're going to navigate to
where that NuGet got installed.
Mine by default showed up
under my user profile,
but your mileage may vary.
We are going to go from that package
to the latest version or
whatever you installed,
followed by tools VS-SDK.
You should see the
executable right there.
But we can't just run that
executable file from here.
Instead, we're going to
copy paste this path.
Then in any terminal of your
choice, you can use PowerShell,
I'm using Developer command prompt,
we're going to navigate
to that location.
From here we are going to
write the following command.
Let's do Vsix Util.
Then the keyword today
is createvsixfeed.
This is what's going to
generate that XML file.
Now I need to indicate the source.
Where's that XML getting
it's information from?
In this case, I want
the path for my private
gallery folder that I made.
Then indicate where I want
the XML file to end up.
I'd like to end up
in that same folder.
Then finally, let's name
the XML atomFeed_test.
There we go, it tells me that
the feed has been
created successfully.
It even gives me the path
of the XML which I'm
going to go ahead and copy
right now because we're
going to need it later.
If you're curious,
you can go back to
your folder where
you output the XML.
A bunch of icons have
been generated as well,
but we also have this XML file
that you can open up and take
a look at it if you need to.
As you can see, this
is storing all of
the related data for
each extension that is going to be
included in your private gallery.
This is the critical
bio about this file,
nobody else will be able to
see the private gallery.
But we're not done yet because
we still need to actually
get the gallery to show
up and Visual Studio.
In order to do that, we
need to go into Tools,
Options, then search for Extensions.
You'll notice that, I'll
just scroll up a little bit,
there is an additional extension
galleries block right here.
We're going to add
a gallery like so.
I'm going to call my gallery,
"My First Private Gallery."
From here you can either add
a URL link that corresponds to
that XML that you generated,
or in my case a file path,
and that's what I
just copied earlier.
We're going to apply that.
There it is. This may look like
you're done because
it showed up here,
but that is not true.
In order to test it out and make
sure that it actually works,
we can go into Extensions and
then the Extension Manager.
Just like you'd be able to browse in
the VS marketplace for
extensions that you want,
you can now do the exact same
thing in your own private gallery.
You can download, install,
uninstall extensions here,
but its exclusive, it's
the VIP experience for
a select group of people,
so this is really cool.
What's great about having this
RSS feed style XML file is,
once you, again, choose to
update any of these extensions,
all you'd need to do is run that
same createvsixfeed command
and update your V6s and everybody
will get access to
that same information.
That is how you create
your very own private gallery
in Visual Studio 2022.
The next time you have
an extension that
you don't want the
whole world to see,
be sure to check out making
a private gallery and only
sharing it with a
select group of people.
You can learn more by checking
out the related docs.
Until next time, happy coding.