Back in February, I announced our plan to release a fairly full featured Wiki for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS).  I also announced that we were purchasing the Wiki extension that was then in the marketplace.  Since then, we’ve left the Wiki extension in the marketplace pretty much alone and worked to bring in the code and get it ready as a first class VSTS feature.  Today, we launched the first preview of our new Wiki feature.  You can read details in the official Wiki announcement.  The “old” extension in the marketplace is now deprecated.  The announcement I referenced has instructions on migrating from the extension to the new built-in wiki experience.

The preview is on by default for all accounts.  You will see it in all of your projects.  The account administrator can disable the preview using the “Preview features” menu under their user profile if they don’t want it.

Here’s an example Wiki page someone wrote in our project that introduces the new Wiki feature to people in our team.

This is an initial preview.  It’s very functional and we are using it ourselves but there’s lots of work left to go to complete it.  Some examples of work in progress include:

1. A search experience- you can only filter titles right now.  We will have a full text search experience.
2. Support for MediaWiki format for making importing an existing Wiki easy.
3. Rich links to work items and other artifacts.
4. And much more…

There’s no separate installation or licensing required.  It’s super easy to get started.  Just navigate to the Wiki hub, click “Create Wiki” and get started creating your first Wiki page.  Create lots of pages, arrange them into a table of contents and have fun.  Here’s a brief reference on the markdown constructs we support.

I’m expecting this new Wiki feature to show up in on-prem TFS in our next major release.  Stay tuned for previews to get the first peek at it in TFS.

Brian