November 20th, 2023

Create a Pull Request with Summary Difference View Available in GA

Jessie Houghton
Program Manager

You can now create a pull request in the 17.8 release of Visual Studio. With over 280 votes and 60 comments in Developer Community, integrating create a pull request has been a highly suggested feature with community involvement to make it happen. We’ve improved on the pull request preview feature released in 17.7 preview 2. You can now leverage the summary difference view, write your description with the Markdown, and add your reviewers.

Adding Create a Pull Request to the IDE

Pull requests are an essential tool in GitHub, Azure DevOps, and other Git hosting providers for code review. These reviews help catch issues in new features and allow teammates to share their experience with different regions of the codebase – improving the health of the codebase overall.

Since pull requests are vital for development, creating them should be easy. Visual Studio helps you stay focused by letting you create a pull request from the IDE, without switching to the browser or another tool.

You can access the new feature by following the link in the notification banner to “Create a Pull Request” after you’ve pushed any changes to your remote branch. Alternatively, you can create a pull request from any remote branch by navigating via the top-level menu Git > GitHub or Azure DevOps > New Pull Request. Or right click a branch in the Git Repository Window.

Create pr infobar

Note: To make sure you can try out the feature, ensure it’s enabled in Tools > Options > Preview Features > Pull Request.

Summary Difference View

The new summary difference view allows you to review your code changes before submitting them. You can focus on the changed lines between your branch with the target branch. This makes it easy to review large files or files with many unchanged lines.

Summary difference view option

Use Summary Option Everywhere

You can also leverage the summary difference view in all the comparison views. For example, you can focus on only the changed lines when [comparing files from solution explorer](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/new-in-visual-studio-compare-files-with-solution-explorer/) or when reviewing changes from the Git Changes window. It also works with inline mode or side by side mode.

Markdown support

You can now use markdown syntax to format your pull request description from Visual Studio. This gives you a simple way to add style and structure to your text, such as headings, lists, and checkboxes. Try it by typing the markdown symbols in the Description box and preview by clicking on the Preview tab.

Create pr markdown preview

Reviewers

You can now add reviewers to your pull request from Visual Studio. You can search for reviewers by name on Azure DevOps, or username on GitHub, and select one or more reviewers from the list.

Engage with Us!

We hope you enjoy using the new features and find them useful for your code review workflow. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on how to improve the create a pull request feature or the pull request integrations in Visual Studio overall.

 

 

Author

Jessie Houghton
Program Manager

Jessie is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio version control team, focusing on Git tooling and GitHub integration in the IDE.

10 comments

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

  • Start Export

    hi im glad to be here
    happy thanksgivinng
    god bless
    best wishes

  • Michael Hauer

    Is this also support for Azure DevOps Server?

      • Will

        @jehoughton
        It’s still a Preview Feature even in v17.8.2. You have to enable it before you want to try it. I think this SHOULD be mentioned in the post.

      • Michael Hauer

        Ok, even enabling the preview feature didnt bring the “Create a PR” link in our on premise setup

      • Jessie HoughtonMicrosoft employee Author

        Hi @Michael Hauer, Can you help us out fixing this issue by using the Send Feedback > Report a Problem buttons in the upper right corner of Visual Studio? It’ll take you to https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/VisualStudio where we can engage with you to solve the problem. Can you create a pull request from the top level Git menu > Azure DevOps > New Pull Request?

      • Michael Hauer

        Its still a Preview Features that I had to enable in the Visual Studio Options (17.8.0 and 17.8.1)

  • Andreas Saurwein

    With updating to 17.8 release I dont get the “Create a pull request” link anymore at all. This 17.8 is really bugged out in all areas.

    • Jessie HoughtonMicrosoft employee Author

      Hi Andreas, Can you help us out fixing this issue by using the Send Feedback > Report a Problem buttons in the upper right corner of Visual Studio? It’ll take you to https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/VisualStudio where we can engage with you to solve the problem. Additionally, to use the create a pull request option, you need to have pushed your recent commits to a remote repo.

  • Kirsan

    Submodules support? 🤔