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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