Web Essentials nightly builds

Many Web Essentials users have requested a more formal process around nightly builds, that should result in a better delivery and update mechanism. To make it really easy to always run the latest and greatest, I’ve now created a custom feed for the Extensions and Updates dialog in Visual Studio 2012.

Here’s how it works:

Go to Tools > Options and open the the tab located under Environment –> Extensions and Updates.

Click the Add button and type “Web Essentials Nightly” in the Name field and “http://vswebessentials.com/nightly/feed.ashx” in the URL field. Now click the Apply button and you’re all set. Now click the OK button to exit the Options dialog.

Now the custom feed shows up in the Extensions dialog. Go to Tools > Extensions and Updates… to verify that the new feed is working. You should have a new sub category under the Online tab called “Web Essentials Nightly”.

The Nightly build shares the same extension ID as the official released versions of Web Essentials, so the newest one will always override the one installed – regardless if it’s the nightly build or the official version. And updates will work normally.

In other words, it should be perfectly safe to use this custom feed without any changes to how the update mechanism works from the user’s point of view. Only difference is that with this new feed, you can get the updates much faster than before.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.