Functioning Private Visual Studio Gallery via Azure Functions

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.

Today's project from Daniel Cazzulino is one that I thought kind of neat and different.

If you're a Visual Studio user, you've been to the Visual Studio Gallery. You might have also wondered at one point how to create your own Gallery. But then you considered you'd have to spin up a VM somewhere, have to maintain it, etc.

What if you could create a "Serverless" Gallery? Say using the new cool that is Azure Functions?

That's exactly what Daniel's done and he shared the entire process and code with us!

Serverless custom Visual Studio gallery with Azure Functions

There are a few online services that offer custom VS galleries, but given that it’s just a plain Atom feed with some storage for the payloads, I figured it made for an excellent use case for Azure Functions.

The online Azure Functions code “editor” is extremely basic, more a textbox than an editor at the moment :).

So I’d much rather create an actual .NET project, with unit tests and create a nuget package that I consume on one-liner functions instead :)

AzureFunctions.VisualStudioGallery

This package makes it trivial to create a custom Visual Studio gallery feed using plain Azure Blob Storage to persist the feed as well as automatically update it from VSIX payloads pushed to the same storage container.

The service requires two functions: one for updating the feed blob, and another for returning the feed to the users.

Feed Updating Function...

Feed Retrieving Function...

With that, you can now head over to the MSDN documentation on how to add a private Gallery to Visual Studio and try it out!

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