Sitefinity VSIX: the Next Step for Sitefinity Thunder

Today, I’m excited to announce that a new Visual Studio extension for Sitefinity has been published on the marketplace. Based on feedback from the community, requests from our partners and clients, and passion from our team to make developer’s lives easier, Sitefinity VSIX has been launched as the future of Visual Studio development for Sitefinity. Not only is it compatible with VS2015 and VS2017, but the first version of the tool helps you to scaffold MVC packages, widgets and templates.

Keep in mind that the MVC approach is considered as the optimal way of coding in Sitefinity. We listened to your requests in the community forum and made the plugin open source. If you look at the code you will notice that it is a wrapper of another tool called Sitefinity CLI. With the dual approach every developer will be happy, whether you use the command line interface or love the UI representation.

What is Happening to Thunder?

Many of you may be wondering what is going on with Thunder. With the upcoming launch of Sitefinity 11.0, we will make Sitefinity VSIX the default tool. This means that from Sitefinity 11.0, we will have a new tool with extensibility, community support and VS2017 compatibility. For now, we will be in a transition period, and Thunder and VSIX will live in harmony. If your developers want to use Thunder this will be possible with versions prior to 11.

The VSIX tool, combined with following best practices, will eliminate the need for Thunder in versions 11 and onward. E.g. the Azure deployment should be done through the steps provided in our documentation or online videos. Another example is the code sync feature. Using builds will make your continuous delivery process more robust and error prone than it was using Thunder. This way you will able to execute your tests against each environment and avoid breaking the production instance.

We all have fond sentiments about the good old Thunder tool, but VSIX is the future and what we should focus on.

The Future is Bright

The Sitefinity VSIX extension has already had great adoption from day one. Please give it a try and look at the source code. I am sure that with this approach and our combined efforts we will be able to drastically improve your productivity.

As always, your feedback is essential to this process. Please leave a comment letting us know what you’d like to see next in Sitefinity VSIX or CLI.