This week we are deploying our sprint 123 work.  Check out the release notes.  There are a few things I want to highlight…

New queries hub – We are on a journey to rework how some key elements of our navigation/data model work.  We are changing the role of “Team” and favorites in the navigation because we found that it wasn’t working for people as well as we had originally thought.  The new queries hub reflects many of those changes (that you will see show up across many hubs) where there is a directory page and a favorites page.

Particularly, in the new queries hub, this gives you much more room to see the query results and work item preview.  The query page has breadcrumbs that make it very easy to get to your favorites or to navigate back to the directory pages.

I hope you like it.  We are definitely looking for feedback.

Wiki live preview – Our “new” Wiki solution is still evolving very rapidly.  This sprint we introduced a solution for one of the most common feature requests that we’ve gotten – live preview as you type.  That’s not WYSYWYG but it’s a step and we are still considering whether or not WYSYWYG is something we want to do.

Multi-phase builds – We’ve introduced the notion of “build phases”.  At the base concept, a phase acquires an agent, runs some tasks and then releases the agent.  When we only had one “phase” you could only have one agent type – Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.  Now you can have multiple phases in a build and that means you can use different kinds of agents in the same build orchestration – maybe you need to build a .NET web service and an iOS device app, for example.

Burn down and burn up widgets – We’ve addressed another long standing request for more flexible burn down – particularly to measure in terms of story points or hours or some other measurement.  We’ve introduced some new very configurable dashboard widgets that enable you to create the visualizations that you like.

Of course there’s tons of other good stuff too but I wanted to highlight a few of the things that really stick out to me.

Brian