Matthew Mitrik

One of our DevOps “habits” is to Shift Left and move quality upstream.  Including additional validations earlier in the DevOps pipeline means identifying potential issues before they become a problem.  For teams using pull requests, catching issues while the PR is active is ideal –

Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) users looking for a lightweight version control experience integrated into Windows File Explorer will be happy to see the latest release of the TFVC Windows Shell Extension. This tool provides convenient access to many TFVC commands right in the explorer context menu,

In our first release of the new year, we’ve included a lot of great pull request features.  Let’s take a lap around them to see how they can help improve your workflow.
My Pull Requests
One of the big features in the latest release is the new,

Pull requests have been widely accepted as a best practice for teams using Git to peer-review code changes. Peer reviews are a great practice for discussing how to improve code and for spreading knowledge about a codebase amongst team members. Contrary to popular belief,

Branch policies are a great way to keep your code quality high, but strict build gates can sometimes introduce too much friction into the developer inner-loop.  To developers working with pull request build policies, this will sound familiar:  You have a PR that’s been approved and is ready to merge –

Are you the type of developer that loves to keep your repos neat and tidy?  Are you a fan of interactive rebase and fixing up your commits until they’re just right?  Do you wish you had an alternative to –no-ff merges when completing your pull request?  

If you’re a developer working on a team that uses Git, you’re probably using some form of topic branching to isolate your work.  If you’re using any of the Agile tools in Visual Studio Team Services, you probably also have a bug,

If you have a project you’ve been working on, but haven’t yet had a chance to put it in source control, then spend a few minutes of your leap day this year and host it for free in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). 

Code Review with pull request is a central part of every git developer’s inner loop.  Over the past few months, we’ve added a number of improvements to the pull request web experience for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), all focused on improving productivity while using pull requests.