Hosting your own, internal, Visual Studio Extension Gallery? Want too? Jakob&#39;s Inmeta Visual Studio Extension Gallery v2 is now available

Monday, January 06, 2014

Hosting your own, internal, Visual Studio Extension Gallery? Want too? Jakob's Inmeta Visual Studio Extension Gallery v2 is now available

Jakob Ehn - Inmeta Visual Studio Extension Gallery – version 2.0

This year at the second MVP summit I presented a new solution for hosting a private extension gallery. Since then I have finished up the code and put it up on the CodePlex site so you can use it as you want to.

In this blog post I will walk through the background and how you deploy and use the solution.

Note: The sourcecode is available at http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com/ as a new 2.0 release. I have branched the original source code so that it is still available.

Background

Little more than a year ago, I blogged about how to host your own private gallery for hosting Visual Studio extensions. The solution that I put up on CodePlex (http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com/) was a ASP.NET web service that scans a folder or share and generates the corresponding Atom Feed XML that Visual Studio expects when browsing extensions, using the Extension Manager. See the blog post for details on how this works.

Although this solution works fine (we are using it internally at Inmeta) there are some things that have been nagging me:

There is no easy way to upload or update extensions.

Since the file system is the data storage, the service rescanned the whole structure on every request, which could become a bottleneck when the number of clients and/or extensions increase

I miss some of the features that are available in the “real” Visual Studio Gallery, such as showing the number of downloads and the average rating of each extension

The last bullet is what made start looking at how this works in Visual Studio. As you know

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Solution
The new version of the Inmeta Gallery is a ASP.NET web application that consists of three parts:

A WCF service implementing the IVsIdeService interface

An ASP.NET web application where you can upload and rate visual studio extensions

A SQL database for storing the extensions.

This makes it easy to deploy, it is just one web application that contains both the service that VS communicates with and the web application where you can browse and upload the extensions.

The web application is simple, it shows the 10 most downloaded extensions together with the same information that you see in Visual Studio, and you can search extension by name or description.

Here is a screenshot:

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