Visibilty of private extensions on Visual Studio Marketplace

Question

I have created some extensions which we will only use internally in our company. Therefore I have set the Extensions to private.

I assumed that this way the users added to the publisher as "reader" could see the lis of extensions when they use the link to the publisher (i.e. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/CompanyXY)

I've noticed that this is not the case and if I want to make the extensions available to our developers I need to provide them the direct link to the extension (i.e. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CompanyXY.ExtensionXY).

Isn't there a way that I can make the whole list of private extensions available to the authorized users?

Any hint is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Visibilty of private extensions on Visual Studio Marketplace

You should create a private gallery for VS extension and then put any private extensions on that gallery for internal developers to use. In this way, we can get a list of private extensions directly.

Visual Studio Marketplace is a public vs extension market. Although private packages can be added, there is no way to add private path to store private nuget packages for internal developers accessing. You have to search the private extensions based on your permission one by one and then install them. On that website, it does not support creating private pipeline which stores all your private extensions based on your requirements.

As a suggestion, you can create a private gallery as Sergey said. This is equivalent to creating a private pipeline for specific personnel to access, which stores any vs extensions you want to provide to internal developers.

1) create a shared folder that can access to your internal developers.

2) put any private vsix files into the folder

3) download PrivateGalleryCreator.exe and then copy PrivateGalleryCreator.exe into the folder.

4) click to run the PrivateGalleryCreator.exe on the folder to generate the feed.xml file.

5) enter Tools-->Options->Environment-->Extensions. Click Add, rename the new gallary and copy the full path of the feed.xml into URL.

Remember to click Apply to enable the URL. And let any of your internal developers add the file path from the private shared folder into their VS IDE to enable the gallery.

You can see a list of your private extensions and you can install any of them under it.

What if some developers have already installed the extension via Marketplace? So they probably need to uninstal and install it again from the private gallery.

If you want to enable the private gallery, you should first uninstall the installed private extensions on your VS IDE, remove them on the VS marketplace, instead, put them on the private gallery's folder and install them in that.

==================================

Private extensions under VS marketplace:

Regardless of whether private or public extensions are stored in a large container, the extensions can be seen according to the corresponding permissions. You need to manually query and install them one by one. You can never get a whole private package list.

Private gallery:

It is equivalent to creating a private container, storing all private extensions, and directly accessing the container to get a list of whole private extensions.

Answer 2

You can use a private gallery for extensions instead of the Marketplace: Private galleries.