This week we started our sprint 125 deployment.  You can read the release notes for details.

I won’t comment too much on the new capabilities this sprint.  There’s a bunch of nice stuff but not a lot that is earth shaking.  Our focus for the last sprint or two has been on some things we are going to unveil at our Connect(); conference in about 2 weeks (Nov 15 – 17).  There’s a small in-person component to the conference but a much larger virtual component available to anyone.  I hope you will join us and learn about all the new developer focused stuff Microsoft has been working on recently.  I’ll be giving a DevOps talk.

The one theme you will find in this sprint’s payload is a bunch of work on UI clean up/consistency/ease of use.  This includes things like the work item column/sort experience that now matches the new styles we’re moving towards, or the “filter experiences” we’ve added/updated to be consistent with our new UX metaphors, or  round avatars – who does square avatars any more?, or the refresh of the create release experience that provides a visual to help you better understand how the release you are creating is going to flow across your infrastructure, etc.  All of these are just small parts of an overall UI refresh we are in the middle of and will continue to iterate on every sprint for the next several.  As our UI has grown, inconsistencies have multiplied.  Nice user experience has suffered in the name of expediency to deliver new capabilities.  We’re trying to address that and converge back to a happy, consistent experience.  Looking forward to continuing to make progress on this.  Feedback on anything is always welcome but feedback on UX, right now, is particularly helpful.

Thank you, Brian