Binary promotion of Visual Studio Team Service Extension

When creating a Visual Studio Team Services extension (such as a collection of build tasks), it makes sense to publish it as a private extension first. You can do this by overwriting the extensionid from the commandline, but there is no direct commandline switch to override the visibility of an extension. I used to patch the extension manifest, but today finally uncovered the correct way of doing it.

It turns out that the TFS cross platform commandline (tfx) has a --override option which you can pass a piece of json to which will override any json in the extension.

So if your standard publish command looks like this:

tfx extension publish --extension-id vsts-tfvc-tasks --publisher jessehouwing --vsix package.vsix

Then the command to publish the private test version would look like this:

tfx extension publish --extension-id vsts-tfvc-tasks-TEST --publisher jessehouwing --override "{""gallerySpecs"": [ ""Private"", ""Preview""], ""public"": false }" --share-with jessehouwing

Instead of passing the json on the commandline, you can also specify an --overridesFile.

Or, on the safer side, make the extension-manifest you commit to your source control repository always do a private preview release, and then use the --override option to merge the real publish settings.

Note: ensure you escape every double quote in the JSON by doubling it up.

Now I can setup a Visual Studio Release Management template to publish the tasks, test against my personal account and then promote that vsix unmodified to the marketplace. But that's for the another blog.