Microsoft open sources Web Template Studio, a VS Code extension to easily create full-stack web apps

At Build 2019, Microsoft showcased Web Template Studio (WebTS), a cross-platform Visual Studio Code extension, which is built by a team of Microsoft Garage interns. Yesterday, the tech giant open sourced the extension under the MIT license and announced its availability on VS Marketplace. The Visual Studio Code extension is currently only available in preview form.

Explaining the vision behind developing this extension, Kelly Ng, one of the Software engineering intern who helped build it said, “A lot of times in a hackathon, you spend the whole hackathon just setting all of that up before you can start programming. With our tool, you can hook everything up in just 5 or 6 minutes.”

What is Microsoft Web Template Studio?

Written in TypeScript and React, Microsoft WebTS allows developers to easily create new web applications with the help of its “dev-friendly wizard”. It is built along the same lines of a Visual Studio extension, Windows Template Studio, which simplifies and accelerates the creation of Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps.

With this extension, you can generate boilerplate code for a full-stack web application by selecting your choice of front-end frameworks, back-end frameworks, pages, and cloud services. Right now, WebTS only supports React.js for frontend and Node.js for backend. In the future, the team plans to add more frameworks like Angular and Vue.

The extension comes with various app page templates including blank page, common layouts, and pages that implement common patterns like grid or list. You just need to choose from these pages to add a common UI into your web app.

Once you are done doing all that, you just need to specify which Azure cloud services you want to use for your project. Currently, the extension supports Azure Cosmos DB for storage and Azure Functions for compute.

If you want to use the extension, just head over to Visual Studio Marketplace’s Web Template Studio page and click install. The project is still in its initial stages and the team plans to support more frameworks and services as it grows with the help of the community. In case you want to contribute, check out its GitHub repository.

You can read the full announcement at Microsoft Blog.

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