(Hey! We’ve moved the home of Crawl Walk Sprint. This post can be found at its new home here: here)

Azure DevOps has an incredibly deep set of functionality to allow you to build extensions for your team. You can add and modify elements in the UI as well as build back-end tasks. While the majority of features your team needs on a day-to-day basis are built in, extensions allow you to modify Azure DevOps to meet your needs. In this blog post, we’re going to highlight some tips and tricks to accelerate development of your own extension.

What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?

Most modern IDEs have built-in debugging tools that you can use to inspect code, insert breakpoints, manipulate values, etc. The problem is that when you’re writing extensions to Azure DevOps, they need to run in the context of Azure DevOps. The official Azure DevOps extension documentation includes a guide on how to debug, but the approach it describes is to redeploy the extension to the marketplace each time you make a change and then use the browser’s built-in debugging tools. That process requires you to switch context to the browser’s dev tools every time you need to debug. Ideally, you would want to work directly inside your IDE or editor and debug immediately without having to publish to the marketplace. …