New Boards Hub, Sprint 211 Update
Dan Hellem
Sprint 211 was a busy one. We were able to complete a lot of bugs and yet introduce some new exciting features. We also enabled a “Try the New Boards Hub” banner and popup to the legacy boards experience on select organizations. This helped us get another round of feedback and bugs to address.
Notable bugs fixed
| Issue | Description |
|---|---|
| Remote link types cause re-authentication | When a work item has a link to a remote work item type, a re-authentication popup is triggered, and an error is shown for those remote links. |
| Users locale settings on not respected | When a user changes their locale settings (date pattern, time pattern, and time zone), those settings are not being applied. |
| Missing “Add existing item to parent” | For work items that have existing related links, the “Add existing item to parent” option was missing from the Related Work control. |
| Rename query in favorites | When a user renames a query from My Favorites, the old name still shows in the next rename dialog. |
| Favorite board issues | Odd behavior when favoriting a team Kanban board. |
| Parent Id with Copy as HTML | Copy as HTML from a backlog or query with Parent column is included. When pasting the HTML, the parent is showing the Id instead of the parent’s name and link. |
| Add Link only shows 100 projects | Add a link to a build only loads the top 100 projects in the project list. |
| Sprint burndown chart scrolling issue | Unnecessary scroll bar being used on the sprint burndown options control. |
| Backlog panel extensibility point | Issues with the backlog panel extensibility contribution type ms.vss-work-web.backlog-panel. |
| Arrow key with Board | Various issues when attempting to use the arrow keys on the Kanban board. |
| Moving between tabs triggers save button | In some cases, when a user opens a work item and moves to a different tab on that work item, it triggers the form Save button. |
| Task board editing remaining work on bugs | Bugs on the task board do not allow editing of the remaining work field on the card. |
| WEF fields for columns options | WEF fields should not be available when selecting columns on backlogs or queries. |
Note: Although these items are fixed, they may not be released to all organizations yet. Rollout can take a few days to a couple weeks.
Option to maintain hierarchy with filters
When filtering on the backlog, your hierarchy gets flattened out in the results and you see just one long list of items. This is a painful experience for folks who want to filter and continue to see the hierarchy. In this sprint, we are releasing a new option for you to maintain the hierarchy when filtering on the backlog. When the filter is applied, we start at the bottom of the hierarchy and work our way back up. If there is match, the work item is highlighted (bold) and you can then see the parent chain above.
Copy Work Item Attachment URL
We have added the ability to copy the URL for a work item attachment so that it can be cut and pasted in the description and discussions. When you click on the link, it will download the attachment.
What is next?
Back to fixing bugs based on the feedback from the “Try the New Boards Hub” banner. Once we get those bugs addressed, we will turn on that banner for more organizations to get more feedback.
There are a couple more features in progress so keep an eye on the features timeline for more information.
We appreciate and need your feedback to ensure the New Boards Hub is successful. Feel free to email me with any issues you find.
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6 comments
Can you confirm the bug related to the UI having an issue with change tracking on work items is going to be fixed (or is fixed)? This is really killing productivity.
The bug, in case you didn’t see it from the last blog post, is that if you open a parent work item and then navigate to a child work item and make any changes then the parent work item is “out of date”. When you close the child work item UI and return to the parent work item you cannot make any changes without it saying that something has already changed on the item. The only recourse is to refresh the page. I don’t even think the refresh work item link on the right side correctly works in this case. I have lost countless time when making changes to a parent work item just for it to tell me it cannot save and there is no workaround that I’m aware of.
We have fixed 2 bugs related to that “out of date” message. We have not tested these specific steps yet though. I will take a look next week and try and reproduce on our most recent release to see if it still happening. If so, we will get it fixed.
Will the Azure DevOps server migrate to .net 6/7 so we can try it inside docker container ?
Great to see the return of a roadmap for Azure DevOps and gradually working through some new features 🙂
One feature that is still sorely lacking in comparison to classic release pipelines is work item linking. The old Deployments section in the top right wasn’t perfect but was still a good feature. Currently the process of navigating from pipeline to work item is cumbersome and doesn’t work in all scenarios. For example the feature on Classic Releases where you could see a diff between the old and new release and get a work item list was excellent. We really need some parity in features here but at the moment there doesn’t seem to be anything on the road map regarding these features (apologies if I have missed something!).
My suggestion would be perhaps focussing more on creating a new area for releases that is separate from the pipeline runs. This is somewhat similar to what I believe the intention behind the Pipeline -> Environments section but it still doesnt really achieve quite the same thing. A mechanism for overview of releases to production environments with a clear outline of what work items went out and when would be really great. I have had a few ideas of how this might work but its difficult to express in detail here. Happy to chat more if this helps.
I really like Azure DevOps and still think it has the potential to continue being the gold standard for Work Item,CI/CD and Repos for larger organisations and I’m really pleased to see this recieving some focus from Microsoft once more.
We do have plans to include support YAML pipelines in the work item deployments control. We don’t have an ETA yet, but we hope to get something on the roadmap in the next few months.
Hi Dan, thats good to hear. Any thoughts on my other suggestions? I do feel that there are better ways to do this.