Error while publishing vsts extension through Azure pipeline

Question

I am getting below error while publishing vsts task using "Publish Visual Studio Extension" task in Azure pipeline:

VSSDK: error VsixPub0006 : The publish manifest from 'D:\a\143\s\myproject\vss-extension.json' contains some invalid entries: Encountered an unsupported category: Azure Pipelines..

I have added categories in manifest file see below, But I observed the error is because of the category

 "categories": [
    "Azure Pipelines",
    "Azure Repos",
    "Azure Boards"
  ],    

I can publish the task manually in the MarketPlace. But while trying to publish the task using "Publish Visual Studio Extension" task, I got above error. If I remove category section in manifest file, then vsix file cannot be created. Please suggest why the task is failing and how can we publish vstsextension.

Answer 1

Those categories are for Azure DevOps extensions and for those you'll need to use the Publish Azure DevOps Extension task, not the Publish Visual Studio Extension task.

          - task: PublishAzureDevOpsExtension@3
            name: 'publishDev'
            inputs:
              connectTo: 'VsTeam'
              connectedServiceName: 'Jesse Houwing'
              fileType: 'vsix'
              vsixFile: '$(Pipeline.Workspace)/vsix/vsts-developer-tools-build-tasks.vsix'
              publisherId: 'jessehouwing'
              extensionId: 'vsts-developer-tools-build-tasks'
              extensionTag: '-dev'
              updateTasksVersion: false
              extensionVisibility: 'privatepreview'
              shareWith: 'jessehouwing-dev'
              noWaitValidation: true

See:

• https://github.com/microsoft/azure-devops-extension-tasks/blob/main/azure-pipelines.yml#L105-L118

If you are publishig to an 'old' TFS instance, you may need to use an older version of tfx and use the old category names.

  "categories": [
-   "Build and release"
+   "Azure Pipelines"
  ],

See:

• https://github.com/microsoft/azure-devops-extension-tasks/commit/b31e36659693872e21a4fdf700ee578e52e917f6#diff-81f89915829f6a1a40da4191994bd65d445564779e6bea3e87dafc0ad7abb6e2L33-R33