There’s a lot I want to say about this release…<\/p>\n
Like all of our Release Candidates, this is a “go-live” release, meaning that it has been tested and is ready to be used in a production environment.\u00a0 At the same time, it’s not done and there’s a much higher chance you’ll hit a bug than with a more final release.\u00a0 However, we’ve been using it in production and it’s reasonably stable.\u00a0 On our current trajectory, we’ll ship an RC2 in a month or so and then a final release at some point after that.\u00a0 Precise timing depends somewhat on the feedback we get along the way.\u00a0 This RC *is* localized, though you will find some English strings.\u00a0 We will have complete localization by the time we release.<\/p>\n
This is a “major” release of TFS.\u00a0 The primary thing that means in these days of continuous delivery is there are breaking changes and system requirements updates.\u00a0 Our customer promise for our Updates is that they are the same as RTM, just better.\u00a0 However, our, roughly annual “major releases” are our opportunity to make bigger changes that might be more disruptive.\u00a0 Here’s a link that includes the latest TFS system requirements <\/a>and another that focuses on the requirements changes between TFS 2017 and TFS 2018<\/a>.<\/p>\n Keeping in mind that the last major feature release was TFS 2017 Update 2 (released only just over a month ago), this TFS 2018 release candidate has a bunch of VERY nice improvements.\u00a0 You can read the release notes for details but let me summarize the highlights…<\/p>\n We’ve done a major update of our release management UI.\u00a0 The highlight for me is the new visual release definition editor that allow you to visualize and configure your code release pipeline.\u00a0 We’ve also improved the task editing experience, adding templates for common app patterns, etc.\n Our release management solution now supports deployment agents on the targets that greatly simplify the deployment of multi VM applications.\u00a0 It greatly simplifies the authentication issues associated with deployment.\u00a0 It also includes the ability to do rolling deployments so your app can stay available during upgrade.\n We now have a Wiki built into the product.\u00a0 You can write pages with a mix of markdown and HTML.\u00a0 You can organize pages into a table of contents.\u00a0 It’s a simple and fantastic way to share project information with your team and with visitors.\n We’ve added support for Maven packages to our package management solution – so now you can use TFS to manage your Nuget, NPM and Maven packages.\n This release contains innumerable improvements for pull requests.\u00a0 We continue to iterate rapidly to make them better and better – making code easier to review, notifications better, policies and validations better and much more.\u00a0 The release notes have lots of details.\n We’ve included the first generation of Git Forks.\u00a0 It allows users without write permission to a repository to fork it, iterate on the fork independently and, ultimately, submit a pull request to have their changes included in the original.\u00a0 For now, all forks of a repo need to be in the same Team Project Collection as the original.\u00a0 We will relax that requirement in a future update.\n This release brings our first installment in making the TFS experience good on mobile devices – mobile work items.\u00a0 You can view a work item, launched from an email or any other location. in a nice phone form factor optimized experience.\u00a0 You can also get simple lists like work assigned to me or that I’m following and view work items from there.\u00a0 Over time, we’ll expand our mobile experience to other parts of the product too.\n My summary, of course only captures a few of the highlights.\u00a0 You can check out the release notes <\/a>for more.\u00a0 This RC1 release is mostly feature complete.\u00a0 There was only 1 sprint of feature work that missed RC1 and will first show up in RC2.\u00a0 Probably the biggest news in that set will be support for GVFS<\/a> to enable enterprises with even very large, complex, intertwined codebases to adopt Git if they choose.<\/p>\nA new Release Definition Editor<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/RDEditor2.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMulti-machine deployments with Deployment Groups<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/DeploymentGroups.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWiki<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/Wiki.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMaven Packages<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/Maven.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPull Request improvements<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/prnotification.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nGit Forks<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/GitFork.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMobile work items<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/mobilewi.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMuch, much more<\/h3>\n