Visual Studio

A ‘Hello World’ for VSO Extensions

So if you haven’t heard yet VSO Extensions are now in a private preview where you can sign up to get into the preview on extensions integration site. These extensions in the shortest sentence a supported way of doing customizations to VSO that will replace any of the “hacky” extensions that you may be playing around with at the moment like Tiago Pascal’s Task Board Enhancer or maybe you have even created your own following similar steps to what I show in my TFS 2013 Customization book.

This post aims to give you a super quick guide on how to get started, you will need to go through the integrations site to really get into detail. It has most of what you will find in most posts but gives you a little something extra that most posts wouldn’t have like tips on free stuff Smile

File, New Project

The easiest way to get a basic something in VSO is to just create a new project.

Create/Configure Project

We are going to create a new Type Script project

Fig1_5090

You should have something like below now

Fig2_5090

Configure SSL in IIS Express

When you have the VSO Time Ticker project selected head over to the properties window

Fig3_5090

Change SSL Enabled to True

Fig4_5090

Take note of the SSL Url that is now available to you.

Add a extensions.json

Let’s add a extensions.json manifest file that will be used to inform VSO what our projects actually about

Fig5_5090

and drop in the content below, replace the baseUriproperty to include the port you have been assigned for SSL for the project.

{
  "namespace": "VSO-Time-Ticker",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "name": "Time Ticker",
  "description": "A simple extension for Visual Studio Online of a Time Ticker",
  "provider": {
    "name": "Gordon Beeming"
  },
  "baseUri": "https://localhost:44300/",
  "icon": "https://localhost:44300/images/some-icon.png",
  "contributions": {
    "vss.web#hubs": [
      {
        "id": "time",
        "name": "Time",
        "groupId": "home",
        "order": 22,
        "uri": "index.html",
        "usesSdk": true,
        "fullPage": false
      }
    ]
  }
}

Get the SDK

Navigate to GitHub to the samples project and grab the VSS.SDK.js file. Save a copy of that to a scripts folder inside a sdk folder and add it to your project.

Fig6_5090

Include our App js files

While we here let’s build the project, show hidden folders and add the app.js and app.js.map files to the project

Fig7_5090Fig8_5090

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are using source control you should also at this point undo those files being added source control and then also add them to be excluded otherwise you may get a weird error when it comes time to build your project on a build server (TypeScript : Emit Error: Write to file failed…).
Fig9_5090Fig10_5090

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The reason we want these as part of the solution is so that when we do web deploy later they are deployed as well.

Add our app icon

Make a images folder and add a image called some-icon.png to it
Fig11_5090

Move App js file

Move your App.ts, App.js and App.js.map into a scripts folder. If you have source you might need to re undo and ignore those extra files.

Fig12_5090

Setup index.html

This is a rather simple step, replace the reference to app.js with one to sdk/Scripts/VSS.SDK.js so it will look something like

Fig13_5090

Add the following script just inside your body tag

<script type="text/javascript">
// Initialize the VSS sdk
    VSS.init({
        setupModuleLoader: true,
        moduleLoaderConfig: {
            paths: {
                "Scripts": "scripts"
            }
        }
    });
    // Wait for the SDK to be initialized
    VSS.ready(function () {
        require(["Scripts/app"], function (app) { });
    });
</script>

So at this stage your full index.html page will look like

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>TypeScript HTML App</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="app.css" type="text/css" />
    <script src="sdk/Scripts/VSS.SDK.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        // Initialize the VSS sdk
        VSS.init({
            setupModuleLoader: true,
            moduleLoaderConfig: {
                paths: {
                    "Scripts": "scripts"
                }
            }
        });
        // Wait for the SDK to be initialized
        VSS.ready(function () {
            require(["Scripts/app"], function (app) { });
        });
    </script>
    <h1>TypeScript HTML App</h1>
    <div id="content"></div>
</body>
</html>

Update App.ts

In your App.ts file remove the window.onload function and replace it with it’s body so your App.ts file will look like below

class Greeter {
    element: HTMLElement;
    span: HTMLElement;
    timerToken: number;
    constructor(element: HTMLElement) {
        this.element = element;
        this.element.innerHTML += "The time is: ";
        this.span = document.createElement('span');
        this.element.appendChild(this.span);
        this.span.innerText = new Date().toUTCString();
    }
    start() {
        this.timerToken = setInterval(() => this.span.innerHTML = new Date().toUTCString(), 500);
    }
    stop() {
        clearTimeout(this.timerToken);
    }
}
var el = document.getElementById('content');
var greeter = new Greeter(el);
greeter.start();

Run App

Running your app with ctrl + F5 you will get a blank app that does nothing

Fig14_5090

Changed the url to point to the SSL version of your site just to make sure everything is working

Fig15_5090

Our App is now complete

Install your extension

If you have signed up for the private preview you should see a tab in the admin section of your account called Extensions like so

Fig16_5090

Click Install, and then Browse

Fig17_5090
browse for your extension.json file
Fig18_5090
Click Open and then OK

Fig19_5090

Your extension is now installed

Fig20_5090

View it on VSO

Go to a team project home page and you should now see a Time hub, click on it

Fig21_5090

Once you land here you will the time

Fig22_5090

That’s 1 extension in the bag but having this run on your local machine is probable not want you would want because nobody else can see it.

Publishing you app

You could buy an SSL certification but that costs a lot and most people don’t have that kind of money laying around for fun apps and extensions so we’ll turn to Azure. We will now right click on our project and click publish

Fig23_5090

If you setup an Azure site already you can import the publish settings but I haven’t so I’m going to click on Microsoft Azure Web Apps

Fig24_5090

and then click on New (again if you have a site already you can select it in this list)

Fig25_5090

Select a name and click Create

Fig26_5090

it will now take a small bit to setup your azure resource

Fig27_5090

and then auto magically configure everything you need, click Publish

Fig28_5090

After the publish is finish your site will launch

Fig29_5090

Something that you will notice is that this is http but and not https as we said earlier we require. So let’s see what happens if we add a s in there

Fig30_5090

Everything still works Open-mouthed.

Last bit of manifest changes

Now that we have a publicly accessible website running on https (for FREE) we can take that url and replace what we currently have in our manifest so it will now look like this

{
  "namespace": "VSO-Time-Ticker",
  "version": "0.0.2",
  "name": "Time Ticker",
  "description": "A simple extension for Visual Studio Online of a Time Ticker",
  "provider": {
    "name": "Gordon Beeming"
  },
  "baseUri": "https://vso-hello-world.azurewebsites.net/",
  "icon": "https://vso-hello-world.azurewebsites.net/images/some-icon.png",
  "contributions": {
    "vss.web#hubs": [
      {
        "id": "time",
        "name": "Time",
        "groupId": "home",
        "order": 22,
        "uri": "index.html",
        "usesSdk": true,
        "fullPage": false
      }
    ]
  }
}

Re-install your extension
Fig31_5090

and refresh your extension in VSO

Fig32_5090

You will notice now that it obviously still works, if you close Visual Studio and it still works you know it working and I suppose you can check fiddler for where it’s reading the files from.

Links

For more info on VSO Extensions visit http://aka.ms/vsoextensions.

A pretty neat getting started post is also on that site at https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/integrate/extensions/get-started/visual-studio.

Microsoft has a project out on GitHub as well that is quite advanced in the API’s that it uses and can be found at https://github.com/Microsoft/vso-team-calendar.

If you want a light overview over everything then you can get their VSO Extension Samples out on GitHub as well using the link https://github.com/Microsoft/vso-extension-samples.

Complete Sample code for this post is also out on Github at https://github.com/Gordon-Beeming/VSO-Time-Ticker

Reference: A ‘Hello World’ for VSO Extensions from our NCG partner Gordon Beeming at the binary-stuff.com blog.

Gordon Beeming

Gordon is a Software Developer in Durban, South Africa working for Derivco. He is also a Visual Studio ALM Ranger and ALM MVP. Hew writes about anything that he feels might be useful to anyone in the community.

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