Self-assembled InAs elongated nanostructures were fabricated by continuous processing steps, starting from self-assembling of quantum dots, thin capping over the quantum dots to induce an anisotropic strain field, and to anneal the quantum dots in the molecular-beam-epitaxy machine. In-situ RHEED observations at each processing step were studied and confirmed by ex-situ AFM images of the surface morphology. The elongated nanostructures were demonstrated tobe templates for chains of uniform quantum dots.