Visual Studio 2015 and CodeLens

What a release it has been for CodeLens!!!

After it was launched in Visual Studio 2013 to rave reviews, we continued to enhance it and delivered a bunch of features in the VS 2015 wave.

Here is a highlights reel.

Version control support

Git – CodeLens gets its indicator information from your local repo, so it doesn’t matter where your remote is. It could be Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio Online, Github, Gitorius, you name it.

TFVC – Both on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Online (VSO).

We have feature parity across these two version control systems. Here are few of the features we built across both in the VS 2015 wave.

File-level indicators
Team Activity view
Timeline indicator [debuting in VS 2015 RTM, which combines the last author and the when it was last changed]

TFS and VSO

Even though we share the same code base for on-premises TFS and VSO, it was a fantastic journey for us as we took CodeLens into Visual Studio Online through various release phases – Limited CTP, Public Preview & General Availability. Every CodeLens feature in on-premises TFS is now available in VSO; for example, we built an indexing job for file-level indicators. This is now available in VSO and in on-premises TFS 2015.

In fact, in some cases such as the retention period for the indicator data, your experience is slightly less constrained in VSO. The retention period is unlimited for Visual Studio Online, whereas it defaults to 12 months for on-premises TFS.

CodeLens is available in three Visual Studio Online instances (US, Europe & Australia) now, and we will keep pace as VSO expands to different regions.