New Build 2016 Partner Extensions in the Visual Studio Team Services Marketplace

Today at Build 2016, we featured two new extensions from our Partners that are now live in the Visual Studio Team Services Marketplace. It’s been fantastic to see the growth of the extensions since we introduced the Marketplace at Connect(); // 2015 a few months ago. If you didn’t catch the live session today, we’ll have the recording available tomorrow on Channel 9. In the meantime, here are a few details of these new extensions.

LaunchDarkly

Microsoft has been talking about how they leverage feature flags for powering their internal flighting systems for a few years now. LaunchDarkly has partnered with Microsoft to give the power of this sophisticated system to all development teams. The LaunchDarkly extension for Visual Studio Team Services allows developers to release confidently with less risk. Tie LaunchDarkly feature flag rollouts to work items to get complete control over who sees what, and when. By managing feature flags in the context of the release pipeline, you can unlock the true power of DevOps.

LaunchDarkly acts as a feature flag control center, where teams can easily integrate feature flags into their short and long-term development cycles. With complete control over features, you can release them to specific users, collect feedback, and enable easy rollback. LaunchDarkly provides feature flag SDKs for all major stacks, including mobile, supports front and back end flags, and works across multiple dev & production environments.

Thanks @edith_h for announcing the new @LaunchDarkly VSTS extension at #Build2016 today! https://t.co/peoembk0Oq pic.twitter.com/4NsiOAbRFZ

— Ed Blankenship (@edblankenship) March 30, 2016

Redgate Readyroll

Deploying and managing the database lifecycle of schema changes is just as important as managing the lifecycle and deploying your back-end and front-end services. Microsoft has had SQL Server Developer Tools as an option for managing your schema objects in version control, generating schema change scripts, and more. Redgate has also introduced a new extension for Visual Studio Team Services that supports the database teams who prefer the migration-based approach with ReadyRoll.

The new ReadyRoll extension for Visual Studio Team Services builds on top of the native Visual Studio extension and integrates with the new build and release management systems to give you information about the new schema changes included in the build/release, allows you to run tests and included them in the common test results store, and then quickly see the database migration changes that are happening for each environment in your release pipeline all within Visual Studio Team Services.

Great extension from @Redgate for managing the db lifecycle w/ ReadyRoll in VSTS! #Build2016 https://t.co/ymmppuoqhp pic.twitter.com/Yzc0Z12Ym2

— Ed Blankenship (@edblankenship) March 30, 2016

If you have any questions about either of the new extensions, both Redgate and LaunchDarkly have a booth at Build 2016 so you can stop by and chat with their engineers!