Create an Atom feed for a private gallery

You can create an Atom (RSS) feed to an intranet location that contains extensions and add the feed to Extensions and Updates as a private gallery. For more information, see Private galleries.

Create an Atom feed

To create an Atom feed as a private gallery, you first gather your extensions (.vsix files) into a folder. You can organize them into subfolders if you want. You will also need the following resources:

  • An atom.xml file that makes the extensions available as a private gallery. For information about how to connect the atom.xml file to Extensions and Updates, see Private galleries.

  • A folder that contains any image files that were extracted from the extensions (for example, screen shots). The atom.xml file contains relative links to these images so that they are available in Extensions and Updates.

    For example, assume that you have gathered the following two extensions into a folder:

  • Template_Wizard_239.vsix, which is an empty VSIX project template.

  • SelectionHighlight.vsix, which is a tool to highlight all instances of a selected word.

    The contents of the atom.xml file would resemble the following example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title type="text" />
  <id>uuid:bcecded5-97c8-4d24-96f1-7d9e16652433;id=1</id>
  <updated>2011-04-14T21:25:48Z</updated>
  <entry>
    <id>SelectionHighlight..a14874d2-8199-4a60-af8a-11d6447813aa</id>
    <title type="text">Highlight all occurrences of selected word</title>
    <summary type="text">This extends the editor to highlight ....</summary>
    <published>2011-04-14T14:24:51-07:00</published>
    <updated>2011-04-14T14:24:22-07:00</updated>
    <author>
      <name>Microsoft</name>
    </author>
    <link rel="icon" href="VSIXImages/SelectionHighlight..a14874d2-8199-4a60-af8a-11d6447813aa_Icon_SelectionHighlightIcon.jpg" />
    <link rel="previewimage" href="VSIXImages/SelectionHighlight..a14874d2-8199-4a60-af8a-11d6447813aa_PreviewImage_SelectionHighlight.jpg" />
    <content type="application/octet-stream" src="SelectionHighlight.vsix" />
    <Vsix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vsx-syndication-schema/2010" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
      <Id>SelectionHighlight..a14874d2-8199-4a60-af8a-11d6447813aa</Id>
      <Version>1.31</Version>
      <References />
      <Rating xsi:nil="true" />
      <RatingCount xsi:nil="true" />
      <DownloadCount xsi:nil="true" />
    </Vsix>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <id>Template_Wizard_239.Microsoft.3b38a7e3-5cbc-4389-a92a-d82tyc2ed592</id>
    ...
  </entry>
</feed>

Notice that the two link tags refer to screen shots in the generated folder of images.