Azure DevOps Blog
DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps
Latest posts
Branch and pull requests improvements for Visual Studio
In Visual Studio 2015 Update 1, we enhanced the Git experience based on your feedback. As I mentioned in the most recent Git Futures post, there's a lot more on the way. Branches No matter what you're doing in VS, you usually want to know what repo you're in, the current branch, and have an easy way to switch branches. Now, all of that is in the VS status bar. You can also use it to create a branch, view branch history, and manage branches. It's also fast to search across local and remote branches, including path segments. In our repo we have all topic branches under users//topic-name. When I type my email a...
Servicing Update Available for Visual Studio Update 1
In Visual Studio 2015 we are piloting a recurring and cumulative servicing update that provides fixes to high-impact bugs between our regular updates. In the second servicing update recently made available, we fixed an issue in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 that can cause Visual Studio to crash sometime after editing C# or Visual Basic files while debugging. You can get this fix now by downloading the servicing update for Visual Studio 2015. All of the fixes that are provided in this update will be rolled into future updates as well.
Troubleshooting launch issues with xaml based apps using Coded UI Test
This blog assumes that you have a prior understand of functional testing with Coded UI Test on Windows Store. If not, please go through the introduction blog for Windows Store Apps. Here I would cover troubleshooting issues with the XamlWindow.Launch() API that has been explained in detail here. To summarize from the later blog the user would get the automationID of the application under test by launching the coded ui test builder and querying the properties of the pinned tile. This automationID would then be provided in the XamlWindow.Launch() API to launch the app. We heard back from customers that, this does n...
Pull Request Improvements in Visual Studio Team Services
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 Hub The pull request hub is the starting point for both creating PRs and finding PRs that need reviewed. To make it easier for developers to find the PRs that need their input, we've reorganized the hub to put the most important PRs in focus. The first two sections a...
Visual Studio Marketplace hits a major milestone – 1 million page views and 250K unique users!
At Connect() we announced the *Public Preview *of Visual Studio Marketplace – the one place to discover and acquire extensions, integrations and subscriptions for the Visual Studio family of products. On Jan 10th, in just about 52 days, we hit a major milestone – 1 million page views and 250K unique users !!   This has been made possible with active support of our partners and extension publishers that have contributed some very useful extensions to the marketplace.  With 54% returning users and 20% users coming from Non-windows Platform (Mac, Linux, Android, iOS), we’re also glad to be providing the kind of val...
Identities and Work Item Tracking in TFS 2015
In Team Foundation Server 2015 we introduced identity fields which made significant changes to how the Work Item Tracking (WIT) system handles identity values. These changes help modernize the underlying system and provide support for upcoming features . However, the changes result in API and data format differences that TFS users (especially those writing third-party tools with ClientOM or REST) need to be aware of.  History Historically, the WIT system didn’t handle identities well. Before TFS 2015, all fields that dealt with identities treated identities as just plain strings that represented a user’s disp...
VSTS Process Customization futures (January 2016)
NOTE: An updated roadmap as of June 2016 is now available. Last month, we released our first major milestone for process customization - the ability to add a field and modify layout, checkout my blog post on the topic if you haven't seen it yet. As I shared in July, this was just the first scenario of our overall plan: With the new year upon us, we wanted to lay out a rough timeline of when we expect to deliver the rest of these scenarios. NOTE: The timeline is subject to change and all the designs below are early mocks to land concepts - we have lots more UX and design work to do before completing t...
Dashboards Futures (January 2016)
In October, we released the new dashboards feature in VS Team Services and TFS 2015 Update 1. Dashboards are a customizable canvas that replaces your existing Team Overview page and enable you to visualize status and monitor progress across your project.  We’ve heard a lot of great feedback that has shaped our direction and there is still so much we’d like to do. We’re glad that many of you have been enjoying the new features! This isn’t a comprehensive list of the dashboards and widgets improvements we’re making, but it’ll give you an idea on where we’re going in H1. Many of the UX mocks I’m showing you are...
Java Experience Futures (January 2016)
Over the next several months, our Visual Studio Team Foundation (VSTS) Java teams are focusing on new essential developer workflows for our IntelliJ plugin and a simplification of our authentication checks and getting-started improvements for our Eclipse plugin, Team Explorer Everywhere (TEE).The list below is only an indication of direction with more improvements planned and under development.We encourage you to utilize Team Services User Voice to provide your feedback on the Java Tools improvements you’d like to see and to provide input on our future direction.VSTS Plugin for IntelliJWhile our curren...