Hello,

I’m a Program Manager on the Visual Studio team investigating how we can best address this UserVoice suggestion. We’d love to get your feedback if our proposed resolution to this suggestion meets your needs and concerns.

From the most recent comments, it seems that there are two main issues that are top of mind.
1. Support for SlowCheetah moving forward
2. Integration with VS/MSBuild

In regards to the first item, the Visual Studio team has taken ownership of SlowCheetah and will be maintaining and updating it moving forward.

As for the second item, we believe that further integration with the product may not be necessary. SlowCheetah has been integrated with MSBuild by adding NuGet support for transformations. Projects that depend on SlowCheetah will restore NuGet packages and apply transformations after build. We need to balance adding new features to Visual Studio with performance and simplicity. The SlowCheetah extension allows users to add and preview transforms but isn’t required to execute a transform. Given a relatively low usage of these features and the flexibility in shipping we get by staying out of the Visual Studio release cycle, we believe it’s better for the Visual Studio developer community that SlowCheetah stays as an extension that is fully supported by Microsoft.

We’d plan to resolve this UserVoice suggestion as complete but want to ensure we’re addressing your concerns fully.

Thank you for your feedback,
Allison Buchholtz-Au

Thank you all for your continued feedback.

In response to some recent feedback, we are happy to share that the SlowCheetah extension is officially supported by Microsoft and the Visual Studio team. Part of the reasoning behind moving it under the Microsoft repository on GitHub was to be able to maintain the extension moving forward. We understand many of you would love to see this integrated in the product. This idea is still under consideration and we will share the decision as soon as we can. We thank you for your patience.

Thanks for the typo catch! We did intend to say the NuGet and VSIX name had been changed to Microsoft.VisualStudio.SlowCheetah.

We are excited to announce SlowCheetah 3.0, which now supports JSON transforms. As well, this extension is released under Microsoft so the nugget and vsix name has been changed to Microsoft.VisualStudio.SlowCheetah. The gallery extension supports VS 2015 and VS 2017.

Update 2/14/2017 – I am happy to announce that we have updated the SlowCheetah extension to work with Visual Studio 2017 and 2015. You can install the extension from the VS marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=WillBuikMSFT.SlowCheetah-XMLTransforms

We are also in the process of adding support for additional project and file types. For the latest development news for the extension, check out the GitHub repo: https://github.com/sayedihashimi/slow-cheetah

Please let us know if you run into any issues by reporting them at the issue tracker on SlowCheetah’s GitHub page.

Note: if you installed the preview extension for Visual Studio 2015, please be sure to remove it before installing the new one to avoid conflicts.

Update 7/30/2015 – A preview release of SlowCheetah for Visual Studio 2015 is available on the VS Gallery – https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/05bb50e3-c971-4613-9379-acae2cfe6f9e. Please let us know on our GitHub if you run into any issues – https://github.com/sayedihashimi/slow-cheetah. We will try to fix them as soon as possible. The preview only supports VS 2015, but we will be expanding that soon.

Hello. This suggestion has gained a great deal of momentum so we would like to share our plans to address configuration driven XML transforms in Visual Studio. We understand that this is potentially blocking many teams and projects from moving forward to Visual Studio 2015. While we will not be implementing this functionality in Visual Studio 2015 itself, we do plan to update the SlowCheetah extension to fully support Visual Studio 2015. Our long term plan, however, is to integrate this functionality into a future version of Visual Studio.

We will update the community when SlowCheetah has been updated with support for Visual Studio 2015.

Will Buik,
Visual Studio – VS IDE Project and Build Team

Hello. This suggestion has gained a great deal of momentum so we would like to share our plans to address configuration driven XML transforms in Visual Studio. We understand that this is potentially blocking many teams and projects from moving forward to Visual Studio 2015. While we will not be implementing this functionality in Visual Studio 2015 itself, we do plan to update the SlowCheetah extension to fully support Visual Studio 2015. Our long term plan, however, is to integrate this functionality into a future version of Visual Studio.

We will update the community when SlowCheetah has been updated with support for Visual Studio 2015.

Will Buik,
Visual Studio – VS IDE Project and Build Team