Updated: Announcing Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1

Gloridel Morales

Update: We received feedback in this blog and the Developer Community about an issue after upgrading from Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1.1 to Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1. Today we are re-releasing Azure DevOps Server RC1 to fix this issue.

Previously, after upgrading from Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1.1 to Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1 you were not able to view files in the Repos, Pipelines and Wiki of the Web UI. The error message indicated “an unexpected error has occurred within this region of the page. You can try reloading this component or refreshing the entire page.”

We identified a problem with a Feature Flag that comes with a different value when Azure DevOps Server is upgraded from Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1.1 to Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1. The Feature Flag was created for Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1.1, and defaulted to On for that release. The intent of the Feature Flag was to address the memory issues in servers with low RAM by dropping all debug files. The fix with default to On for the Feature Flag was not ported to Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1 release. In addition, we did not test the upgrade scenario with the default to On for Feature Flag in Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1. We will add this and similar scenarios to our pre-release test coverage to avoid similar issues in the future. The fix is now available in Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1 Patch 1 release.

If you have upgraded to the previous version of Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1, we recommend that you upgrade to this new release. You can use the links provided below to upgrade from Team Foundation Server 2015 or newer, Azure DevOps Server 2019 and Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1. We thank you for trying this release and reporting issue, and we apologize for the impact this may have caused.


We are very excited to announce Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC1. We’ve added a ton of new features which you can read about in our release notes. You’ll find a deeper dive into these great highlights, along with screenshots, samples and technical info to get you started.

Here are a few of the highlights:

This is a go-live release, meaning you can install it on production servers. We expect to have another RC release before our final release.

Here are some key links:

We’d love for you to install this release candidate and provide any feedback at Developer Community.

31 comments

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  • Andre Wanlin 0

    THANK YOU! I’m Canadian and this is the best pre-Canada Day gift ever! I’m going to spend the day installing this on our Test Environment tomorrow!

    Those Release Notes are pretty long, lots of amazing new features.

    Thanks again!

  • Dom Carlyle 0

    Will these features be in the cloud hosted version of Azure DevOps or for the on premises version?

    • Everton Macedo 0

      Hey @Dom, all these features have been available at Services for at least 6 months already

  • Adam Goodwin 0

    This sounds really good, and is earlier than I expected, so thank you. But about this:

    “This is a go-live release, meaning you can install it on production servers”

    What exactly does this mean? I would love to deploy and use this today, but the “RC1” tag in the title makes me a bit wary. Is there really so much confidence in this release candidate that we can just use it as if it wasn’t a release candidate? If so, will we then be able to seamlessly upgrade to the full Azure DevOps Server 2020 release when that comes out?

    • Gloridel MoralesMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Adam, you can install on your production servers and will have seamlessly upgrade once we release RTW. Keep in mind that will plan on releasing RC2 later this summer.

      • Adam Goodwin 0

        Alright, thanks Gloridel. We’ll see how it goes…

      • Adam Goodwin 0

        Hi again,

        It hasn’t gone great to be honest, we encountered the following issue as did at least some others:

        https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/1098066/azure-devops-server-2020-rc1-an-unexpected-error-h.html

        So with RC1 we can’t view or edit source files in the Azure DevOps website anymore.

        We can work around this, but if there are any critical bugs hidden somewhere else in RC1 that won’t be great to find out if we’ve been working for a few days and need to roll the databases back to their pre-upgrade state.

  • Tore Østergaard Jensen (TORE) 0

    Really looking forward to this release!

    Would it make sense to do a cleanup of Feature Timeline?:
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/features-timeline

    There are features as old as 2015 that has ‘Future’ in the Server column. I have a feeling that some of them has already made it to the server product, an maybe some of them will never get there.

    • Gloridel MoralesMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Tore, we are currently working on cleaning up the Feature Timeline. Thanks for the feedback.

  • Sergio García 0

    Is it possible to make an in-place upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2019 or do we need to provision a new server and move everything there?

    • Justin ChungMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Sergio, you can do an in-place upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2019 to Azure DevOps Server 2020.

      • Wil Wilder Apaza Bustamante 0

        this comment has been deleted.

    • Tore Østergaard Jensen (TORE) 0

      That depends on you Windows Server version and possibly also your SQL Server version (if single server setup).

      We are on Windows Server 2012 R2 so we will have to setup a new server.

  • Scott McNally 0

    Installed the product today, everything seems great except for editing a yaml pipeline. Only an error displays for that.

    An unexpected error has occurred within this region of the page.
    You can try reloading this component or refreshing the entire page.
    Refresh page
    Reload component
    Error: monaco is not defined
    Stack
    in o
    in f
    in i
    in h
    in div
    in div

    ReferenceError: monaco is not defined
    at serviceFactory.defineEditorTheme (ms.vss-features.monaco-editor.es6.EOSmRMqENx026Ee0.min.js:1)
    at o.getEditorTheme (ms.vss-features.monaco-editor.es6.EOSmRMqENx026Ee0.min.js:1)
    at o.getEditorOptions (ms.vss-features.monaco-editor.es6.EOSmRMqENx026Ee0.min.js:1)
    at o.componentDidMount (ms.vss-features.monaco-editor.es6.EOSmRMqENx026Ee0.min.js:1)
    at Jn (ms.vss-web.core-content.es6.nCtjs_VzHiWCElJ3.min.js:1)
    at ms.vss-web.core-content.es6.nCtjs_VzHiWCElJ3.min.js:1
    at unstable_runWithPriority (ms.vss-web.core-content.es6.nCtjs_VzHiWCElJ3.min.js:1)
    at bt (ms.vss-web.core-content.es6.nCtjs_VzHiWCElJ3.min.js:1)
    at Cr (ms.vss-web.core-content.es6.nCtjs_VzHiWCElJ3.min.js:1)
    at mr (ms.vss-web.core-content.es6.nCtjs_VzHiWCElJ3.min.js:1)

    • Gloridel MoralesMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Scott, thank you for installing. Please provide your feedback at Developer Community so we can have the right team help you with this.

  • Jorge Belenguer 0

    We were encouraged by this, and tried… but it is not ready so don’t bother. Do not install in production servers as the article says.

    We found the same issue as everyone else: files cannot be viewed/edited in the new version. This means no YAML pipeline creation/edition and no repository file inspection. Pretty big to me, not sure how that can escape QA.

    I don’t get how this can be considered RC in the first place, but also how it can be considered a “go-live” release. I hope this is corrected before anyone makes a big mistake.

    • Gloridel MoralesMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Jorge, thank you for installing and providing your feedback. Did you submit your feedback in the Developer Community? This will help the correct team get your message and address the issue.

        • Ed GlasMicrosoft employee 0

          Hi @Jorge Belenguer, thank you for reporting this issue. This is a ship stopper class of issue, so once we are able to root cause it we will issue a fix on RC1.

          Note that as part of the release process we upgraded many live internal servers and did not see this issue, so it is definitely not happening on all servers. In this release we revamped the file explorer code to make it faster and cleaner. The new explorer has been live on the service for several months and we did not encounter this issue, so it is something specific to the server. We will figure it out and get a fix out in a new RC1 release.

          Ed.

  • Kenneth Hutchins 0

    Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping to upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2019.1 to 2020-RC-1 to resolve the memory consumption issue where Memory holds at 90-95%. But seems like there are issues with this release.

    I will try to upgrade my test environment to 2020-RC-1 to see if it resolves our issue but how bad are these issues being reported?

    Currently we use DevOps for the Repo/boards for version control and work collaboration.

  • Danstur 0

    “This is a go-live release, meaning you can install it on production servers”
    Well I mean nobody can stop me installing whatever version I want on our servers, the question is whether it’s a good idea.

    So what does “go-live release” entail on Microsoft’s part? What is Microsoft’s commitment with regard to support, particularly with critical issues such as
    https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/1098066/azure-devops-server-2020-rc1-an-unexpected-error-h.html ?

  • Aaron HallbergMicrosoft employee 0

    Thanks to everyone who reported the issues with viewing code files, discussed in https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/1098066/azure-devops-server-2020-rc1-an-unexpected-error-h.html. A mitigation has now been posted in that problem report, and we are working on getting a fix out in an updated RC1 build. It should be noted that we believe the issue only impacts servers upgraded from Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1.1, which is why new installations and upgrades from other versions didn’t experience the same problems. To those who did encounter the issue – our sincere apologies for the impact it had, and we will strive to learn from this incident and improve our processes for future releases.

    @Kenneth Hutchins – Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1 had a bug that caused high memory consumption, and it sounds like you may be running into that. We released a fix in Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1.1 (discussed here: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/705677/azure-devops-server-2019-high-memory-usage-after-i.html; available here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/server/release-notes/azuredevops2019u1) that you should certainly install to see if it resolves your issue. That same fix will be included in Azure DevOps Server 2020.

    @Danstur – “Go Live” means that the release is fully supported in production. That means a direct upgrade path will be provided to RTW, that customer support will engage with customers encountering issues, up to and including escalating to the product team’s on-call rotation, etc.

    Thanks again to all who have tried out the release and provided feedback. And apologies again to everyone who ran into the issue viewing code files.

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