Some exciting new features are coming to the Git experience over the next few months. In January, I wrote about upcoming features and many of them are available now, but a few have taken longer than we anticipated. This post isn’t a comprehensive list of the Git enhancements we’re making, but it outlines the direction we’re headed.

DONE: Pull Request Improvements

We have a lot of great improvements coming to pull requests. The next one will improve the comment experience. When you leave comments and then add or delete code above that comment, the comments will be on the correct line. This makes it much easier to see if your feedback has been incorporated when new commits are pushed.

DONE: SSH Support for Git repos

This is in a private preview right now. It will come to everyone over the next few months. Once it’s broadly available, anyone can connect to a Team Services Git repo using an SSH key. This is very helpful if you develop on Linux or Mac. Just upload your public SSH key and you’re ready to go.

DONE: GitFlow – New Branches Experience

I mentioned the new branches experience in the January Git Futures post and we’re getting close to a public release. The new experience is a dramatic improvement. It’s easier to find a branch, see status, and act on it.

Some of the new features are:

• “My branches” pivot to see all the branches you created
• “All branches” pivot with hierarchy. If you use GitFlow and organize your branches with a / (slash) we’ll treat that as a folder so it’s easy to work in a repo with lots of branches
• Pull requests status
• Easy access to common actions like delete (with undo!), rename, set policies, lock, view history, create branch, etc.

Visual Studio “15” Git Integration

The core Git functionality will continue to improve for Visual Studio “15”. In the next preview, Visual Studio will properly respect the setting to disable all source control providers. For the preview after that, we’re simplifying the experience to clone a repo from Team Services and adding more Git commands.

In addition to these changes, we’ll continue to invest in our web experience to make it easier to use and faster. I hope you’re excited about these changes. Please leave your thoughts in the comments, uservoice, and using the smiley face in the top right of your Team Services account.

Thanks, Jeremy Epling