Azure DevOps Blog

DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps

July 2016 - Azure DevOps Blog

SSH build task

July 30, 2016 Jul 30, 2016 07/30/16
Madhuri Gummalla
On the request of our Linux customers, we have shipped a new SSH build task that allows running commands or scripts on a remote server. This task is available on Visual Studio Team Services and will be available in the next release of Team Foundation Server for our on-premises customers. Using the task is simple. You specify your SSH ...

Gradle build task now also supports PMD analysis

July 29, 2016 Jul 29, 2016 07/29/16
Jean-Marc Prieur
Last month, we enabled support for PMD analysis in the Maven build task (see The Maven build task now supports PMD analysis out of the box). This is now the turn of Gradle. PMD Analysis with Gradle You can now request a PMD analysis in the Gradle build task using the new “Run PMD Analysis” checkbox which instructs Gradle to perform PMD ...

SSH support for Git repos is now available

July 26, 2016 Jul 26, 2016 07/26/16
Kayla Ngan (MSFT)
A few months ago, Jeremy mentioned that SSH support for Git repos was in private preview. I’m happy to announce that it is now available to everyone in both TFS and Team Services. You can now connect to any Team Services repo using an SSH key, which is particularly helpful if you develop on Linux or Mac. Learn more about SSH, or continue ...

Evolving the Visual Studio Test Platform – Part 1

July 25, 2016 Jul 25, 2016 07/25/16
Pratap Lakshman
Three releases (VS 2015 Update 3, Visual Studio "15" Preview 3, MSTest V2) featuring Test Platform components in as many months indicate a path best traced by starting from the present. The Test Platform Presently, Visual Studio has an open and extensible test platform with tests being written using various test frameworks and run using a ...

7 Ways to Look at the Values of Variables While Debugging in Visual Studio

July 15, 2016 Jul 15, 2016 07/15/16
Aaron Hallberg
When you are running your code and something is behaving unexpectedly, how do you find out what is going wrong? When I was in school the first way I learned how to debug a wonky application was by sticking “print()” statements all over the place, running my code, and looking back through the log of output seeing if I noticed that something...

July Hosted Build Pool Image Updates

July 13, 2016 Jul 13, 2016 07/13/16
Chris Patterson (MSFT)
Today we are rolling out a new image to the hosted build pool with the following updates:   For a full list of software see https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/agents/hosted-pool#software...

A new Team Services build task to queue Jenkins jobs

July 12, 2016 Jul 12, 2016 07/12/16
Jason Sholl
Team Services sprint 102 introduces a new build task, Jenkins Queue Job.  Now your Team Foundation Server (TFS) builds can integrate with Jenkins to queue and monitor Jenkins jobs.  The Jenkins Queue Job task is cross platform and does not require any additional build agent dependencies. Add the Queue Jenkins Job Build task to your build ...

Create Archives in Team Services Builds and Releases

July 12, 2016 Jul 12, 2016 07/12/16
Jason Sholl
Team Services sprint 102 introduces a new build task, Archive Files.  Use it to easily create archives during your Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Team Services continuous integration (CI) build process.  The Archive Files task is cross platform and uses native zip, tar, and 7-Zip on Mac and Linux.  For Windows, we bundled 7-Zip with the...

Try paid Team Services extensions for free!

July 12, 2016 Jul 12, 2016 07/12/16
Zack Avitan
You can now try Team Services paid extensions free for 30 days. No credit card required and no surprise charges after the trial ends. If the extension is a good fit for your team, pay for what you need and we'll take care of the rest. For example, the Test Manager extension offers a free 30-day trial so that all users with Basic access can...