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 - the code hasn't been merged yet, so it's easy to respond to feedbac...

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, and the latest release adds support for Te...

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, personalized account page, which includes a new "My Pull Requests" view.  The experience is just like th...

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, code reviews are not particularly good at finding bugs even if that's what dev...

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 - but right before you're ready to click Complete...

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?  In the March 3rd release of Visual Studio Team Services, a new option was added to the PR merge...

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, task, or user story that's tracking your development work.  Until recently, the best way to keep these items related was...

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).  VSTS is a great place to host all of your projects for free, and creating a repo to host your code is easier than ever.  Let's take a...

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.  Let's take a look at what's new. Personalized Pull Request ...