This month we had not one, not two but even three feature release of Visual Studio Team Services!
I had to choose between so many new features to have my top 3 list this month, so it means that they are the very best.
Package Management & Release Management General Availability
Package Management now hosts NuGet and npm packages and helps you manage the lifecycle of your packages with new features like release views. It continues to offer best-in-class support for the latest NuGet updates and great integration with Team Build.
Packages enable you to share code across your organization: you can compose a large product, develop multiple products based on a common shared framework, or create and share reusable components and libraries. Package Management facilitates code sharing by hosting your packages, sharing them with the people you select, and making them easily accessible to Team Build and Release Management.
The Package Management extension is available in the marketplace
The Package Management extension is available in the marketplace
Release Management is also available in GA in VSTS and TFS 2017. Using Release Management, you can fully automate the delivery of your software all the way to production. It is an essential element of DevOps that helps your team continuously deliver software to your customers at a faster pace and with lower risk.
To use Release Management, first create release definitions and then configure environments and specify automation steps in each environment to deploy the software and run tests against it. You can set up automatic deployment to the environments as soon as the build is available to deliver value continuously to your customers. You can also configure approvals on each environment.
Search for a file or folder in commit history
Similar to the files tab, users can now search for a file or folder in a repository and see the history of commits for that file or folder. For any Git repository, go to the path control box on the History tab and start typing to initiate a history search experience for the file or folder you are looking for.
Similar to the files tab, users can now search for a file or folder in a repository and see the history of commits for that file or folder. For any Git repository, go to the path control box on the History tab and start typing to initiate a history search experience for the file or folder you are looking for.
Microsoft Teams integration
Microsoft Teams is a new chat-based workspace in Office365 that makes collaborating on software projects with Team Services a breeze. Team Services users can stay up to date with alerts for work items, pull requests, commits, and builds using the Connectors within Microsoft Teams. Starting November 9, users will also be able to bring their Kanban boards right into Microsoft Teams.