Driven by a long-term plan to offer a built-in Wiki experience for Team Services, Microsoft yesterday announced that is will be providing a Wiki experience in Visual Studio. The company has acquired the Marketplace extension, ‘Wiki’, from Agile Extensions, ultimately bringing a “vibrant extension ecosystem which is critical to having a best-in-class DevOps product.”
As part of the announcement, Microsoft is noting that once the Wiki experience is built into Visual Studio, they will deprecate the Marketplace listing. A Wiki experience in Visual Studio also will make for a more social experience, as the team explains in the blog post.
We have been exploring different ways to bring more ‘social’ experiences to Team Services and it became clear that a Wiki , which has been on the team’s backlog for quite some time, is going to be necessary to fully realize that vision….. This decision is driven by a long-term plan to offer a built-in Wiki experience for Team Services instead of requiring people to install an extension from the Marketplace. To achieve this we will leverage the existing extension as a starting point, and deprecate the Marketplace listing once we’re ready to release our built-in solution.
Wiki customers will not immediately be impacted by the Microsoft acquisition, as the extension will show up as being published by a different publisher, ‘Microsoft DevLabs’ instead of ‘Agile Extension’. Microsoft also decided to not build their own, and keep Wiki experiences because Agile Extensions had “made such a good start with their extension.” There are also more plans for Wiki down the road and Microsoft will consider user feedback moving forward.