Microsoft acquires Agile’s Wiki extension for Visual Studio Team Services

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Agile Extensions‘ Wiki extension for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), the cloud service formerly known as Visual Studio Online. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The extension is now published in Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace by Microsoft DevLabs, which offers 30 other extensions.

The Wiki extension lets developers easily add Markdown-friendly wikis to projects. Like any other Visual Studio extension, it’s optional, but Microsoft is thinking more broadly about how to evolve VSTS in this area, as wiki functionality a la Wikipedia is something Microsoft has been wanting to add for a long time.

“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,” Microsoft VSTS program manager Joe Bourne wrote in a blog post. “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.”

Once the built-in tool is available, Microsoft intends to provide a way to migrate existing content into it, Bourne wrote. Users have indicated to Microsoft that a built-in tool ought to include a way to easily create a welcome page, and a way to specify authors’ names, he wrote.

Microsoft has no plan to make it possible for people to use the Wiki extension with Team Foundation Server (TFS), the on-premises version of Team Services, Bourne told people who commented on his post. Instead, he wrote, the idea is to bring the new built-in wiki tool to TFS and VSTS.

Agile Extensions is a small company based in Germany, founded last year by Michael Seidel.