Here we are for a new episode of my personal "top 3 new VSTS features" series. Let's talk about September.
Deployment manual intervention
You can now pause execution during deployment to an environment. Including a Manual Intervention task enables you to pause a deployment, perform manual steps, and then resume further automated steps. You can also reject the deployment and prevent further steps from executing after a manual intervention.
You should note that a manual intervention task splits the overall execution into three phases.
- The first phase runs on an agent, and after it is done, the agent is released.
- The manual intervention phase does not require any agent.
- After it is completed, any tasks following the manual intervention task are run in the third phase, possibly on a different agent. The artifacts are downloaded during both the agent phases, since different agents may be used for both of them. You should not assume that the state from the first phase is available during subsequent phases.
Import Git repositories
We can now import a Git repository from GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, or other locations, into Visual Studio Team Services. You can import into either a new or an existing empty repository.
To import into a new repository, from the repository selector drop-down, click Import repository.
If the source repository is a publicly available repository, then simply provide the clone URL of the source repository and you are good to go.
However, if the source repository is a private repository and can be accessed using basic authentication (username-password, personal access token, etc.), then check the “Requires authorization” check-box to provide the corresponding credentials.
Instead, to import into an existing empty repository, on the Files page, click the Import repository button and provide the clone URL. You will need to provide credentials if the source repository is private and requires authentication.
Build queue tab
They've implemented a new design for the Queued builds page that shows a longer list of queued and running builds, and in a more intuitive fashion. Looks good...
