Azure DevOps Server Changelog

What's new in Azure DevOps Server 2022 Patch 3

Apr 12, 2023

Addressed issue that required restarting tfsjobagent service and Azure DevOps Server application pool after updating SMTP-related setting in the Azure DevOps Server Management Console.
Copy Endpoint state to Service Endpoint edit panel instead of passing it by reference.
Previously, when editing service connections, the edits were persisted in the UI after selecting the cancel button. With this patch, we've fixed in Notification SDK for when a team has notification delivery set to Do not deliver. In this scenario, if the notification subscription is configured with the Team preference delivery option, team members won’t receive the notifications. There is no need to expand the identities under the team further to check the members’ preferences.

New in Azure DevOps Server 2022.0.1 RC (Apr 12, 2023)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2020.1.2 (May 24, 2022)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.1 Patch 5 (Sep 9, 2020)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC 1 (Aug 6, 2020)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.1 Patch 4 (Aug 6, 2020)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.1 Patch 3 (Aug 6, 2020)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.1 Patch 2 (Aug 6, 2020)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.1 Patch 1 (Aug 6, 2020)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.1 (Aug 6, 2020)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 Patch 3 (Sep 11, 2019)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 (May 22, 2019)

Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 is a roll up of bug fixes. It includes all fixes in the Azure DevOps Server 2019 patches previously released. You can directly install Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 or upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2019 or Team Foundation Server 2012 or newer.
This release includes fixes for the following bugs:
Azure Boards:
"The field criteria for this plan has an error." when configuring a Plan. Reported through Developer Community.
apiwitcontroller.executequery throws an exception when a query has the same column multiple times.
In the client object model using the vso.work_full oauth scope, WorkItemServer.DownloadFile() fails.
Copying an embedded image from a work item field to another work item field in a different project may create a broken image.
Azure Repos:
"TF401019: GitRepositoryNotFoundException".
Azure Pipelines:
The Test Analytics Tab has a star (*) that indicates preview, even though this feature is not in preview.
On the Releases tab, the action to manage security is now shown to all the users irrespective of whether they can change the permissions or not.
On the Releases landing pages, the start draft release action was creating a new release, but now it starts the draft release.
Azure Test Plans:
The 1 hour filter on the TestRuns and TestResults CompletedDate are too granular.
In the Test Case work item type, the type, "Test Case", should not be localized.
Test cases do not show up in MTM or a browser.
"Validating stage: You do not have permission to trigger releases on the associated release pipeline" error when running automated tests from a Test Plan. Reported through Developer Community.
Using the delete test case API, test cases can be deleted from other projects. Reported through Developer Community.
Clicking on a work item link in Test Runner opens the work item URL inside Test Runner instead of the default browser.
Test case status is not getting updated for users that sign out of Test Runner.
User name and email address do not show in the user dropdown in Test Runner.
Azure Artifacts:
Move Up and Move Down are not localized in Upstreams.
Analytics:
Analytics reports may show incomplete data because the model is marked as "ready" before it is actually complete.
The velocity, burndown and burnup widgets display different planned work for users on different time zones.
A hold may be placed on Analytics data ingestion while doing maintenance which can cause stale reports.
General:
Left navigation items get squeezed on IE when there is not enough space.
Administration:
Additional logging added to Collection upgrade to help debug issues.
When TfsConfig offlineDetach fails, the error message is not actionable.
TfsJobAgent service crashes.
The Search extension does not get installed after configuration is complete.
The Administration Console becomes unresponsive when the configuration DB is corrupted.
Service Hooks may not correctly process notifications.
Code Search indexing does not start after configuring Search.
There are unlocalized strings on search pages results.
This release includes the following update:
Support for Visual Studio 2019 (VS2019) in Visual Studio Test task
We've added support for Visual Studio 2019 to the Visual Studio Test task in pipelines. To run tests using the test platform for Visual Studio 2019, select the Latest or Visual Studio 2019 options from the Test platform version dropdown.

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019 Patch 2 (May 15, 2019)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 RC (May 1, 2019)

Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 is a roll up of bug fixes. It includes all fixes in the Azure DevOps Server 2019 patches previously released. You can directly install Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 or upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2019 or Team Foundation Server 2012 or newer.
This release includes fixes for the following bugs:
Azure Boards:
"The field criteria for this plan has an error." when configuring a Plan. Reported through Developer Community.
apiwitcontroller.executequery throws an exception when a query has the same column multiple times.
In the client object model using the vso.work_full oauth scope, WorkItemServer.DownloadFile() fails.
Copying an embedded image from a work item field to another work item field in a different project may create a broken image.
Azure Repos:
"TF401019: GitRepositoryNotFoundException".
Azure Pipelines:
The Test Analytics Tab has a star (*) that indicates preview, even though this feature is not in preview.
On the Releases tab, the action to manage security is now shown to all the users irrespective of whether they can change the permissions or not.
On the Releases landing pages, the start draft release action was creating a new release, but now it starts the draft release.
Azure Test Plans:
The 1 hour filter on the TestRuns and TestResults CompletedDate are too granular.
In the Test Case work item type, the type, "Test Case", should not be localized.
Test cases do not show up in MTM or a browser.
"Validating stage: You do not have permission to trigger releases on the associated release pipeline" error when running automated tests from a Test Plan. Reported through Developer Community.
Using the delete test case API, test cases can be deleted from other projects. Reported through Developer Community.
Clicking on a work item link in Test Runner opens the work item URL inside Test Runner instead of the default browser.
Test case status is not getting updated for users that sign out of Test Runner.
User name and email address do not show in the user dropdown in Test Runner.
Azure Artifacts:
Move Up and Move Down are not localized in Upstreams.
Analytics:
Analytics reports may show incomplete data because the model is marked as "ready" before it is actually complete.
The velocity, burndown and burnup widgets display different planned work for users on different time zones.
Administration:
Additional logging added to Collection upgrade to help debug issues.
When TfsConfig offlineDetach fails, the error message is not actionable.
TfsJobAgent service crashes.
The Search extension does not get installed after configuration is complete.
The Administration Console becomes unresponsive when the configuration DB is corrupted.
Service Hooks may not correctly process notifications.
Code Search indexing does not start after configuring Search.
There are unlocalized strings on search pages results.

New in Azure DevOps Server 2018 Update 2 (May 7, 2018)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2018 Update 2 RC 1 (Mar 28, 2018)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2018 16.122.26918.3 RC 2 (Sep 25, 2017)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2017 15.117.26714.0 Update 2 (Jul 27, 2017)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2017 15.112.26301.0 Update 1 (Mar 8, 2017)

New in Azure DevOps Server 15.105.25716.0 RC 2 (Sep 26, 2016)

AGILE IMPROVEMENTS:
New in TFS "15" RC2: Backlog extension points:
We have exposed a new extension point on the backlog. Extensions can target the pane on the right side, where mapping and work details are today.
New in TFS "15" RC2: Work item templates:
We added the ability to create rich work item templates directly into the native web experience. This capability was previously very limited in the web, and only available in this new form through a Visual Studio power tool. Teams can now create and manage a set of templates for quickly modifying common fields.
DASHBOARDS AND WIDGETS IMPROVEMENTS:
New in TFS "15" RC2: Permissible Dashboards:
Non-admin users can now create and manage team dashboards. Team admins can restrict non-admin permissions through the dashboard manager.
GIT IMPROVEMENTS:
New in TFS "15" RC2: New Pull Request experience:
The Pull Request experience has some major updates this release, bringing some really powerful diff capabilities, a new commenting experience, and an entirely refreshed UI.
New in TFS "15" RC2: Auto-complete pull requests waiting on policies:
Teams that are using branch policies to protect their branches will want to check out the auto-complete action. Many times, the author of a pull request will be ready to merge their PR, but they're waiting on a build to finish before they can click Complete. Other times, the build is passing, but there is one reviewer that hasn't given the final approval. In these cases, the auto-complete action lets the author set the PR to automatically complete as soon as the policies are all approved.
BUILD IMPROVEMENTS:
New in TFS "15" RC2: Redesigned Build queue tab:
We'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.
TEST IMPROVEMENTS:
New in TFS "15" RC2: Choose Data Collectors and Launch Exploratory Runner client from Test hub:
You can now choose your data collectors and launch the Exploratory Runner 2016 (client) in a performant way from Test hub, without having to configure them in Microsoft Test Manager client. Invoke 'Run with options' from the context menu for a Requirement based suite and choose Exploratory runner and the data collectors you need. The Exploratory runner will be launched similar to Microsoft Test Runner as described above
Note: This feature will be available with Microsoft Test Manager "15" client to be released with Visual Studio "15" Preview 5
New in TFS "15" RC2: Configure test outcomes for tests across different test suites:
We have now added the ability to configure the behavior of test outcomes for tests shared across different test suites under the same test plan. If this option is selected, and you set the outcome for a test (mark it as Pass/Fail/Blocked either from the Test hub, Web runner, Microsoft Test Runner, or from cards on Kanban board), that outcome will propagate to all the other tests present across different test suites under the same test plan, with the same configuration. Users can set the “Configure test outcomes” option for a particular test plan either from the Test hub test plan context menu or from the Kanban board test page in the common settings configuration dialog. This option is turned off by default and you will have to explicitly enable it to take effect.
ADMINISTRATION IMPROVEMENTS:
New in TFS "15" RC2: New Access Level:
With the new Visual Studio Enterprise group added to the Access Level admin portal in Team Foundation Servers, you can now quickly identify who has a Visual Studio Enterprise subscription. Once identified, these users will gain full access to all first party TFS extensions installed from the Visual Studio Marketplace at no additional charge.

New in Azure DevOps Server 15.103.25603.0 RC 1 (Aug 9, 2016)

SETTINGS:
Checkbox control:
Tags bulk editing. You can now add and remove tags from multiple work items using the bulk edit dialog.
Tab contribution point. We’ve added a new contribution point on the board and backlog pages to allow you to write extensions as a pivot tab next to Board/Backlog/Capacity tabs.
GIT IMPROVEMENTS:
Squash merge pull requests:
When completing a pull request, you now have the option to squash merge. This new option will produce a single commit containing the changes from the topic branch that will be applied to the target branch. The most notable difference between a regular merge and a squash merge is that the squash merge commit will only have one parent commit. This will mean a simpler history graph, as any intermediate commits made to the topic branch will not be reachable in the resulting commit graph
Comment tracking for pull requests:
Pull requests in VSTS have been improved to show comments left in files on the proper line, even if those files have been changed since the comments were added. Previously, comments were always shown on the line of the file where they were originally added, even if the file contents changed—in other words, a comment on line 10 would always be shown on line 10. With the latest improvements, the comments follow the code to show what the user expects—if a comment was added on line 10, and two new lines were subsequently added to the beginning of the file, the comment will be shown on line 12.
File type icons:
You will see new file icons matching the extension of the file in the explorer, pull requests, commit details, shlveset, changeset or any other view that shows a list of files.
Add a readme during repo creation:
The new Git repository creation has been improved by providing users the ability to add a ReadMe file. Adding a ReadMe to the repository not only helps others understand the purpose of the codebase, but also allows you to immediately clone the repository.
BUILD IMPROVEMENTS:
Build vNext support in Team Rooms:
It has been always possible to add notifications of XAML builds in the team room. With this sprint, users can also receive notifications from Build vNext completions.
TEST IMPROVEMENTS:
Order test suites in Test hub:
Test teams can now order the test suites as per their needs – prior to this capability, the suites were only ordered alphabetically. Now, using the drag/drop capability in Test hub, suites can be re-ordered among the peer suites or moved to another suite in the hierarchy. This addresses the following user voice item under manual testing/test case management.
Search for users as part of assigning testers:
As part of the rollout of new identity picker controls across the different hubs, in Test hub, we have also enabled the option to search for users when assigning testers to one or more tests. This is extremely useful in scenarios where the number of team members is large, but the context menu only shows a limited set of entries.
Pick a Build to test with:
You can now pick the “Build” you want to test with and then launch the Web runner, using ‘Run with options’ in Test hub. Any bug filed during the run will automatically be associated with the build selected. In addition, the test outcome is published against that specific build.
Launch Microsoft Test Runner client from Test hub with Data Collectors:
You can now choose your data collectors & build to associate with the test run, and launch the Microsoft Test Runner 2016 (client) in a performant way from Test hub, without having to configure them in Microsoft Test Manager client. The Microsoft Test Runner will be launched without opening the entire Microsoft Test Manager shell and will shut-down on completion of the test execution.
TEST PROGRESS FROM YOUR KANBAN CARDS:
Traverse to a Test Plan/Test suite from the card:
You can now easily traverse to the underlying test plan/test suite under which the tests are created, directly from a card on the Kanban board. Clicking on this link will take you to the Test hub, open the right test plan and then select the specific suite that controls those inline tests.
Test page in common settings configuration of Kanban board:
Using the new Tests page in common settings configuration dialog on Kanban board, you can now control the test plan under which the inline tests are created. Prior to this, any tests created on a card would automatically be added to a newly created test plan provided no test plans existed that matched the area & iteration paths of the card. Now, you can override this behavior by configuring an existing test plan of your choice – all the tests will then be added to the selected test plan going forward. Note that this functionality is only enabled if the Test annotation is turned on.
WEB RUNNER ENHANCEMENTS:
Image action log support in Web Runner (Chrome):
In the Web runner when using Chrome, in addition to screenshots & screen recordings, you can now capture on-demand image action log from your web apps. You specify the browser window on which to capture your actions – all actions on that window (any existing or new tabs you open in that window) or any new child browser windows you launch, will automatically be captured and correlated against the test steps being tested in the Web runner. These image action logs are then added to any bugs you file during the run and also attached to the current test result. This leverages the capability from the Chrome-based Exploratory testing extension.
EXPLORATORY TESTING - ENHANCEMENTS:
Exploratory testing extension: Capture web page load data:
We have added a new background capture capability to the exploratory testing extension – capturing of “web page load” data. Just like the “image action log” captured your actions performed on a web app being explored, in the form of images in the background, the “page load” functionality automatically captures details for a web page to complete the load operation. Instead of relying on subjective/perceived slowness of web page load, you can objectively quantify the slowness in the bug now. Once the bug is filed, in addition to the tile view, a detailed report is also attached to the bug, which can help the developer with their initial set of investigations
Exploratory testing sessions: View unexplored work items:
In addition to seeing the details of all the explored work items in the “recent exploratory sessions” view, filtered by all/my sessions for a given date range, we have now added the ability to also see a list of all work items that have NOT been explored, in the same view. You start by specifying a shared query for work items that you are interested in and the sessions page shows a list of all the work items from the query, with a breakdown of both explored and unexplored items in the summary section. In addition, using the “Unexplored Work Item” group by pivot, you can see the list of items that have not been explored yet. This is extremely useful to track down how many stories have not been explored or gone through a bug-bash yet.
AUTOMATED TESTING IMPROVEMENTS:
Console logs and test duration in Tests tab in Build/Release summary:
We have added two new features to the Tests tab in Build and Release summary pages. First, you’ll notice that console logs from test results are now available in the Test pivot. Console logs are published as test result attachments and can be previewed in the Tests tab. Second, it’s useful to identify test cases that take the most time to run. You can now find this information by sorting the Duration column in the Tests tab. In addition to the duration of individual tests, you can also look at aggregate duration of test containers or test runs by grouping by the respective pivots.
Test status with Release Environment summary:
It’s a recommended practice to use Release Environments to deploy applications and run tests against them. With this release, we have integrated test pass rate of Release Environments in the Environments section of the Release summary page. As shown in the screenshot, if an Environment has failed, you can quickly infer if the failure is because of failing tests by looking at the Tests column. You can click on the pass rate to navigate to the Tests tab and investigate the failing tests for that Environment
Automated Test History for Branches and Release Environments:
It’s a common scenario for an individual test to run on multiple branches, environments and configurations. When such a test fails, it is important to identify if the failure is contained to development branches like the master branch or if failures are also impacting release branches that deploy to production environments. You can now visualize the history of a test across various branches that it is testing by looking at the History tab in Result summary page. Similarly, you group by the Environment pivot to visualize the history of a test across different Release Environments in which its run.
Traceability with Continuous Testing:
Users can now track the quality of their Requirements right on their Dashboard. We already have a solution for Requirements quality for our Planned testing users and we are bringing it to our users who follow Continuous Testing. Users will be able to link automated tests directly to Requirements and then use Dashboard widgets to track the quality of Requirements you are interested in tracking, pulling the Quality data from Build or Release.
Remote testing – Distribute tests based on number of machines:
We have enabled tests from within an assembly to be distributed to remote machines using the Run Functional Tests task. In TFS 2015, you could distribute tests only at the assembly level. This can be enabled using the check box in the task as below.
Browse Code Coverage reports in the web:
A new Code Coverage tab has been enabled on the Build summary page. Users uploading Code Coverage data in Jacoco or Cobertura formats will be able to browse the HTML report generated by the tool in the Code Coverage tab.
AUTOMATED TESTING FOR SCVMM and VMWare:
Static analysis in Java build tasks (SonarQube and PMD analysis in Maven and Gradle tasks):
You can now trigger a SonarQube analysis in the Gradle build task by checking 'Run SonarQube Analysis', and providing the endpoint, the SonarQube project name, the project key and the version.
MARKETPLACE IMPROVEMENTS:
Project collection administrators can now browse to the Visual Studio Marketplace from a Team Foundation Server and install free extensions in a team project collection. The extensions are automatically downloaded from the Visual Studio Marketplace, uploaded to the Team Foundation Server, and installed in the selected team project collection.
ADMINISTRATION IMPROVEMENTS:
New Admin Experience with prefix based AD Search:
TFS "15" introduces a new experience to manage groups and group membership. You can search in active directory or local machine users/groups using prefix based search criteria on user/group name(s). For example, 'John D' as well as samaccountname (e.g. 'businessdomainjohbdnd') and see the contact card of a user/group.

New in Azure DevOps Server 15.101.25427.0 Preview (Jul 7, 2016)

CODE SEARCH:
Code Search provides fast, flexible and accurate search across all your code. As your codebase expands and is divided across multiple projects and repositories, finding what you need becomes increasingly difficult. To maximize cross-team collaboration and code sharing, Code Search can quickly and efficiently locate relevant information across all of your projects.
From discovering examples of an API's implementation, browsing its definition, to searching for error text, Code Search delivers a one-stop solution for all your code exploration and troubleshooting needs.
Code Search offers:
Search across one or more projects
Semantic Ranking
Rich filtering
Code collaboration
PACKAGE MANAGEMENT SERVICE:
Our new Package Management service allows you to seamlessly create and share NuGet feeds within your organization. Long gone are the days of hosting these packages in file shares or needing to install a separate product that requires different administration of users, permissions, availability, and compliance.
Use Package Management feeds to publish/manage the OSS packages you use, and to publish private packages that you want to share within the organization. CI integration is also provided through out of the box build tasks in order to facilitate consumption of these packages in your builds.
PERSONAL ACCESS TOKENS:
Personal access tokens have been a request from customers looking for a more secure option to alternate authentication credentials. With this week’s update you can now create personal access tokens that limit the lifetime, account, and scope of activities the token is authorized to access. You can see in the example below that I’ve created a token named “Code Read” that provides only read access to Code assets in my personal account, for 90 days. With this new capability you now have much finer grained control over access to assets inside your projects.
AGILE IMPROVEMENTS:
In TFS “15” Preview, we've added new features and functionality to work items and Kanban boards.
New work item form:
The new work item form has a new look and feel. It also adds some great new features:
A rich work item discussion experience.
Improved history experience.
Improved code and build integration.
Follow a work item:
You can now setup an alert for tracking changes to a single work item just by clicking on the new "Follow" button in the form. When you follow a work item, you'll be notified any time the work item changes – including field updates, links, attachments, and comments.
KANBAN BOARD LIVE UPDATES:
Have you been hitting F5 to figure out what's going on throughout the day with your Kanban board? Try the icon in the screenshot below.
When anyone in your team creates, updates, or deletes a work item on the board, you will receive live updates on your board immediately. Also, if the administrator makes board or team level updates such as adding a new column or enabling bugs on backlog, you will be notified to refresh the board to update your board layout. All you need to do now is, enable the tower icon on your Kanban board and start collaborating with your team.
CHECKLIST IMPROVEMENTS:
We’ve made a number of improvements to how Checklists work.
Checklists titles now appear as hyperlinks. You can click on the title to open the work item form.
Checklists now also support context menus that allow you to open, edit, or delete checklist items.
EPIC AND FEATURE BOARD DRILL-DOWN:
You now have the ability to drill down on your Epic and Feature boards. The checklist format lets you easily mark work as completed, and provides a handy bird’s eye view of the completed versus outstanding work.
TURNING BOARD ANNOTATIONS ON/OFF:
We are giving you more control of the additional information that shows on the cards on your boards. You can now select annotations that you want to view on your Kanban cards. Simply unselect an annotation and it will disappear from the cards on your Kanban board. The first two annotations to show up here are child work items (tasks in this example) and the Test annotation.
CLEAR FORMATTING COMMAND:
We’ve added a new command to all rich text controls on work items that lets you clear all formatting from selected text. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been burned in the past by copying and pasting formatted text into this field that you can’t undo (or clear). Now you can simply highlight any text, select the Clear Formatting toolbar button (or press CTRL+Spacebar), and you'll see the text return to its default format.
FILTERING IN KANBAN BOARD:
Personalize your Kanban boards by setting filters on users, iterations, work item types, and tags. These filters will persist so that you can view your personalized board, even when you connect from multiple devices.
DEFAULT ITERATION PATH FOR NEW WORK ITEMS:
When you create a new work item from the Queries tab or from the New Work Item dashboard widget, the iteration path of that work item is always set to the current iteration. This is not what all teams want, because it will mean that bugs could show up on the task board immediately. With this improvement, teams can choose the default iteration path (a specific one or the current iteration) that should be used for new work items. Navigate to the administration area for your team to choose a default iteration.
CHECKBOX CONTROL:
You can now add a checkbox control to your work items. This new field type (Boolean) has all the properties of normal fields and can be added to any type in your process. When displayed on cards or in a query result, the value is shown as True/False.
DASHBOARDS AND WIDGETS IMPROVEMENTS:
The new TFS “15” Preview has made improvements on multiple widgets, such as the Query Tile and Pull Request widgets.
Redesigned Widget Catalog:
We’ve redesigned our widget catalog to accommodate the growing set of widgets and deliver a better overall experience. The new design includes an improved search experience and has been restyled to match the design of our widget configuration panels.
Widget Updates:
The Query Tile widget now supports up to 10 conditional rules and has selectable colors. This is extremely handy when you want to use these tiles as KPIs to identify health and/or action that may be needed.
The Pull Request widget now supports multiple sizes, allowing users to control the height of the widget. We’re working on making most of the widgets we ship resizable, so look for more here. The New Work Item widget now allows you to select the default work item type, instead of forcing you to select the most common type you’re creating over and over from the drop-down list. The team members widget has been updated to make it easier to add somebody to your team.
Dashboards REST APIs:
You can now use REST APIs to programmatically add, delete, and get information on a dashboard. The APIs also let you add, remove, update, replace, and get information on a widget or a list of widgets on a dashboard. The documentation is available on Visual Studio online docs.
GIT IMPROVEMENTS:
Some major changes have been made in Git for the TFS “15” Preview. Included are a redesign of the Branches page and a new option to “squash merge”.
Redesigned Branches page:
The Branches page has been completely redesigned. It has a "mine" pivot that shows the branches you created, pushed to, or favorited. Each branch shows its build and pull requests status, as well as other commands like Delete. If there is a slash in a branch name, like "features/jeremy/fix-bug", it's shown as a tree, so it's easy to browse through a large list of branches. If you know the name of your branch, you can search to find the one you want quickly.
Squash merge pull requests:
When completing a pull request, you now have the option to squash merge. This new option will produce a single commit containing the changes from the topic branch that will be applied to the target branch. The most notable difference between a regular merge and a squash merge is that the squash merge commit will only have one parent commit. This will mean a simpler history graph, as any intermediate commits made to the topic branch will not be reachable in the resulting commit graph.
Commit traceability:
Build status (success or failure) is now clearly visible in the Code Explorer and Commit Details views. More details are just a click away, so you’ll always know if the changes in the commit passed the build or not. You can also customize which builds post status in the repository options for the build definition. Additionally, the latest changes to the Commit Details view provide deeper insights about your changes. If you’re using pull requests to merge your changes, you’ll see the link to the pull request that introduced the changes into the master branch (or in the case of a merge commit, the PR that created it). When your changes have reached master, the branch link will appear to confirm that the changes have been included.
Add and Remove Reviewers in Pull Requests:
It's now easier to add and remove reviewers from your pull requests. To add a reviewer or group to your pull request, simply enter their name into the search box in the Reviewers section. To remove a reviewer, hover over their tile in the Reviewers section and click the X to remove them.
View Git LFS files in the web:
If you’re already working with large files in Git (audio, video, datasets, etc.), then you know that Git Large File Storage (LFS) replaces these files with pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents in a remote server, like Team Services. This deployment now makes it possible to view the full contents of these large files by simply clicking the file in the repo of your Team Services account.
Improved build and pull request traceability:
The traceability between builds and pull requests has improved, making it easy to navigate from a PR to a build and back. In the build details view for a build triggered by a pull request, the source will now show a link to the pull request that queued the build. In the Build Definitions view, any build triggered by a pull request will provide a link to the pull request in the "Triggered By" column. Finally, the Build Explorer view will list pull requests in the source column.
Create and send links to specific sections of code:
Share code references easily with code links. Just select text in a file and click the Link icon. It will copy a link to the selected code. When someone views that link, the code you highlighted will have a gold background. It even works for partial line selections.
BUILD IMPROVEMENTS:
In this release, we’ve increased the size of the logs, added Java build templates, and improvements to our Xamarin support to name a few changes.
Enable build result extensions to specify order and column:
Build result section extensions can now specify which column and the order in which they appear. The result view has two columns, and all extensions will be in the first column by default. Note: All third-party extensions will appear after the build result sections we include.
Build to Line number:
Now you can jump from a build error to the line of code that caused it.
Build log view supports much larger logs:
The previous log view only supported logs up to 10,000 lines. The new viewer is based on the Monaco editor used in VS Code and will support logs up to 150,000 lines.
Java Build templates:
We’ve made it even easier for Java developers to get started with build by adding build templates for Ant, Maven and Gradle.
Xamarin Build Tasks:
The Xamarin.Android step now supports Mac and Linux.
The Xamarin.iOS step now supports signing and packaging.
Xamarin Test Cloud results can be displayed on the build summary page.
A new Xamarin component restore step.
The NuGet Installer step now supports Mac OS.
Docker integration for build and release management:
Take advantage of the VS Team Services cloud-based build capabilities to build your Docker images and upload them to the Docker Hub as part of your continuous integration flow. Then, deploy those images to a number of Docker hosts as part of Release Management. The Marketplace extension adds all the service endpoint types and tasks necessary for you to work with Docker from VS Team Services.
SonarQube results in pull request view:
If the build run to merge a pull request contains SonarQube MSBuild tasks, you will now see new code analysis issues as discussion comments in the pull request. This experience works for any language for which a plug-in is installed on the SonarQube server. For more information, see the SonarQube Code Analysis issues integration into Pull Requests blog post.
Configure status API reporting for a build definition:
You can now choose which build definitions report their status back to the Git status API. This is particularly useful if you have many definitions that build a given repository or branch, but only have one that represents the real health
TEST IMPROVEMENTS:
Updated test result storage schema
Test configuration management in Test Hub
Assigning configurations to test plans, test suites, and test cases
Test progress from your Kanban cards
Add test step attachments during manual testing
View test plan/test suite columns in Test Results pane
Ordering of Tests in Test Hub & on cards
Screenshot, Screen recording, and system info support in Web runner (using Chrome browser)
Bugs filed as children – Web runner/Exploratory testing extension
REST APIs for Test Plan / Test suite Clone
Exploratory testing - enhancements:
Launch exploratory extension from the work item
Image action log support
Create test cases based on Image action log data
Capture screen recordings
Exploratory testing session insights
Support for localized OnPrem TFS Server (2015 RTM and above)
Test results trend for build
ADMINISTRATION IMRPOVEMENTS:
Email improvements:
We’ve significantly improved the formatting and usability of emails sent by Team Services. You may have noticed some of this already, but we’re completely overhauling the format of emails sent by the service. Emails now include a consistent header, a clear call to action, and improved formatting to make sure the information in the mail is easier to consume and understand. Additionally, all these emails are being designed to ensure they render well on mobile devices.
Team Project rename permission:
The permission controlling which users can rename a team project has changed. Previously, users with Edit project-level information permission for a team project could rename it. Now users can be granted or denied the ability to rename a team project through the new Rename team project permission.
Admin settings Work hub:
We've introduced a new "Work" hub in the Admin settings page that combines general settings, Iterations, and Areas in a single tab. With this change, users will see clear differences between project-level settings and team settings. For team settings, users will only see areas and iterations that are relevant to their team. At a project level, the settings page will enable admins to manage areas and iterations for the entire project. Additionally, for project area paths, a new column called "Teams" has been added to make it convenient for admins to tell quickly and easily which teams have selected a specific area path.
Process configuration REST APIs:
This public API allows users to get the process configuration of a given project. The process configuration contains the following settings:
TypeFields: abstractions of customizable fields that are used in the agile tooling. For example, the type of the "Story points" field is "Effort".
Backlog definitions: define what work item types are on each of the backlogs. This is a frequently requested API from customers building extensions. With this data, an extension can know how to leverage process-specific fields to enable common scenarios in the agile tools (such as changing the activity or effort of a work item, knowing what work items are included at a given backlog level, or determining whether teams are identified by area path or a custom field).

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 14.102.25423.0 Update 3 (Jun 28, 2016)

SSH SUPPORT FOR GIT REPOS:
With TFS 2015 Update 3, you can now connect to any Team Foundation Server Git repo using an SSH key. This is very helpful if you develop on Linux or Mac. Just upload your personal SSH key and you're ready to go.
DASHBOARD WIDGET SDK:
In Update 3, not only can you use the out-of-the box dashboard widgets, you can also create your own widgets by using the SDK. For more information, see the Add a dashboard widget page on VisualStudio.com.
TESTING - NEW FEATURES AND BUG FIXES:
Testing - New Features - Support for Azure, SCVMM and VMWare:
You can now dynamically set up test machines in the cloud with Azure, or on-premises using SCVMM or VMWare and use these machines to run tests in a distributed manner. You can use one of the machine provisioning tasks - Azure, SCVMM or VMWare followed by the Run Functional Tests task to run tests. For more information, please see the Install and configure test agents page.
Testing - Bug Fixes:
Bugs reported through Connect:
Test settings file is ignored when "Run in Parallel" is selected.
TEMP folder is not cleaned after Test Agent Deployment is completed.
Source filter string is required even with Test Selection set to Test Plan. User gets error "Cannot bind argument to parameter 'SourceFilter' because it is an empty string" if string is empty.
Email/print test artifacts feature hangs and throws JavaScript TypeError.
Web test runner window no longer wraps text.
Other bug fixes:
"DistributedTests: Exception occurred while parsing buildId" is thrown in Release.
Remote Test Execution gets aborted abruptly with error - Access to the path is denied.
Test results cannot be uploaded from Ant, Maven or Gradle tasks in Release.
VsTest task fails if full path of 2 DLLs are given separated by semicolon.
No Test results are shown in Release when results are grouped by 'Test Suite' and Environment selected is 'All.'
Visual Studio Test task will not upload test results if results folder is configured in runsettings file.
Feedback request hyperlink is incorrect in email request.
Query based test suites do not properly reflect the tests when assigned all the test cases in this test suite to be run by multiple testers.
Exception Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TestManagement.Server.InvalidStructurePathException: The structure path CEBIS FWK is not valid.
Error in test hub after upgrading of TFS to 2015.1.
MTM 2015 | 2013 - TFS 2015.2 | Analyze test runs -results , Plan tabs comes up as empty for specific users.
MTM Screen capture file upload retries after the failure with file not found error.
AGILE BUG FIXES:
Bugs reported through Connect:
Setting styles in the sprint board cards may cause an error if the locale is set to French.
Setting styles in the sprint board cards may cause an error if the locale is set to German.
Unable to create a query when there is a clause with an Area Path with non-standard characters, such as an underscore or single quote.
The links label control does not show hyperlinks in web access.
Creating new team projects causes a TF30177 "Cannot insert duplicate key row in object 'dbo.Constants" error.
The Add Widget dialog respects the browser language over the language selected in "My Profile."
In the Build Chart widget, the most recent bar in the chart shows green, even if the build fails.
The Stakeholder banner is missing so users are not aware they are logged in as a stakeholder and do not have access to all features.
Readme files are not always displayed on the Team Project welcome page.
When setting a part of a time in work item tracking, the month and day values may get switched.
Other bug fixes:
A Work Item Tracking Web Page control referencing an identity field as Param with through an error when the value is empty.
Error when changing the name of the Query Result widget.
The Remaining Hours input is not big enough on the card.
Backlog doesn't load when the user doesn't have permissions to a parent work item.
Navigating to the WORK hub after changing team projects results in a TF400483 error.
The Dashboard Manager icon has no visual cue on focus.
The Add Dashboard icon in Dashboard Manager has no clear visual cue on focus.
The add and delete Dashboard buttons in Dashboard Manager do not work on pressing ENTER.
In the Query Tile and Work Item Chart widgets, when tabbing through the configuration blade, the input will get stuck on the Query Selector with an error that no query is selected.
When upgrading from Team Foundation 2013 Update 1 or earlier, the contents of the project homepage will not be migrated.
When licensed as a Stakeholder, you can't navigate between dashboards.
In the markdown widget, if the markdown references an image in source control, it won't display.
If a third party widget is in an error state, the entire dashboard fails to load.
If a third party widget is in an error state, adding new widgets get added as blank.
If a third part widget is in an error state and then removed from the dashboard, the error banner is not cleared.
When dashboard widgets are added and conflict with one another, such as in different browser sessions at the same time, the error is not descriptive.
Avatars don't load in the Pull Request widget.
In the Build Chart widget, the last completed status icon is incorrect when compared to the build chart.
When in Edit Mode of a dashboard, the error banner is covered up with the dashboard background.
In the Visual Studio Links widget, the "Open in Visual Studio" image is plain purple.
When making changes in the configure widget blade, there is no prompt about discarding changes when cancelling out.
If a widget has an error, the user can still save configuration changes.
When previewing a widget in the dashboard, it is zoomed in and blurry.
Tabbing in the Dashboard edit mode tabs through the widget instead of the delete and configure icons.
When in the Dashboard edit mode, ESC should exit out of edit mode.
When creating a new Work Item Chart widget in Firefox, the chart types are of varying sizes.
In the Work Item Chart widget, the chart options aren't displayed until a query is selected.
In the Sprint Overview widget, setting the iteration dates does not refresh the widget.
In the Sprint Burndown widget, tabbing to the graph and hitting Enter does not open the lightbox.
In the Conditional Query Tile, the input field for a rule allows a five digit number but only displays four digits.
BUILD BUG FIXES:
Bugs reported through Connect:
Unable to filter builds by tags on Firefox.
When setting the permissions of a user on a build, there is an error when saving.
If a build is scheduled to run in the late evening, it runs on the previous day.
Build fails with "TF14044: Access Denied: User Project Collection Build Service needs the AdminWorkspaces global permission(s).".
The time formatting from My Profile is not used in the Build hub.
Build fails with "curl was not found in the path" error when running a curl task in Build.
Gated build gives an error of "Shelveset not found."
There are formatting problems when creating a new build definition in Chrome.
When a XAML Build has a large number of warnings, it shows an error of "An undefined error occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Status code 0.".
When resizing the Reason column in the Build page, the entire icon array is shown.
In the Repository tab of a build definition, changing the Depth or Ignore Externals settings gets set back to the default.
Build fails with "Invalid solution configuration and platform.".
When including an npm install task, builds fail with an error that it cannot find the npm install.
Error of "Invalid source label format" when editing a build definition that labels a Git repository with a build number.
Continuous Integration does not always trigger when using an external Git repository.
On upgraded project collections, gated checkins fail due it using the build account instead of service account.
Other bug fixes:
getBuildBadge vso-node-api fails if using a PAT without the "All Scopes" permission.
If a build definition name contains square brackets, the revision number is not calculated correctly.
When splitting a Team Project Collection, there are duplicate build service identities.
When entering a shelveset name when queuing a new build, you get a misleading error of "There are issues with the request or definition that will prevent the build from running: The value specified for SourceVersion is not a valid version spec.".
Extensions with cross platform build tasks do not work.
Build fails to connect to Subversion when using SSL port 8443.
When using an SVN repository for a build which doesn't have mappings, the Source Version is not set.
Cannot queue a Team Foundation Version Control build from a source label.
VERSION CONTROL BUG FIXES:
Bugs reported through Connect:
When using Git LFS, there may be problems with functions such as cloning the repo.
There are hourly Git pull request event log errors of "TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension.".
Other bug fixes:
Adding a Latest Version link type to a work item does not work.
The Team Foundation Version Control warehouse adapter fails after upgrading from Team Foundation Server 2010.
There is a limit of 25 commits when linking to work items during pull request creation.
If a repository has multiple build definitions configured, the Build Explorer may show one definition's name but link to the last build on another.
In Pull Requests, the identity picker is cut off on the right side.
Team Foundation Version Control files show that there is an encoding change even if there was no change.
On a Git push over SSH, there is an error "TF401030: The Git pack header is invalid.".
ADMINISTRATION BUG FIXES:
Bugs reported through Connect:
When splitting a team project collection, after cloning the collection and deleting a team project in the first collection, the other collection may not show the project that was deleted in the other collection. The direct URL will work, but the user cannot browse to the team project.
Other bug fixes:
When upgrading, the readiness check may fail with errors that Port 8080 is unavailable and "TF401147: The previously configured ports for the Application Tier Web Service site are currently in use.".
In the Admin Console, the Proxy Server URL is blank.
When configuring TFS, the port and vdir may incorrectly fall back to the default mappings.
The Admin Console may crash when loading the Collections tab.
EXTENSIBILITY BUG FIXES:
Bugs reported through Connect:
"TF400367: The request could not be performed due to a host type mismatch" error when omitting the collection in the URL when using the TFS SDKs.
Deleting a branch triggers a build when using Jenkins service hooks.
When clicking Manage Events in a team room, there is an error "Invalid Navigation Level".
When working with Alerts, fields may have unexpected allowed values.
Emails are not always received for alerts.
Alerts for team projects with spaces in the name include invalid links.
There is no link to All Alerts in the Alerts administration page.
In the Chinese version of TFS, there is no Slack option in service hooks.
RELEASE MANAGEMENT:
We've fixed some of the reported issues in the web-based version of Release Management. Here are some of the key issues that were fixed:
Undefined error is shown while browsing the Release hub, when network is flaky.
Downloading server drop artifact creates additional file under Build artifacts directory.
Duplicate service endpoints are created from endpoint creation dialog.
Nuget Installer task fails with Release Management.
Auto-refresh: Pending approvals yellow bar is not displayed after starting deployment on an environment.
Email option in approvals is not enabled if there are multiple approvers for an environment.
We've also fixed a few reported bugs in the WPF version of Release Management:
When there is an api-version mismatch, releasemanagementbuild.exe should show proper error message instead of 403 error.
Intermittent network failures when copying files to Deployer.

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 14.98.25401.0 Update 3 RC (Jun 8, 2016)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 14.95.25229.0 Update 2.1 (May 6, 2016)

FIXED BUGS:
Agile Tools:
On product backlog, if the mapping view is off and the work item Add Panel (quick create) isn't open, you will receive an error when you bulk edit work items by selecting Edit selected work items(s)… in the context menu. You can dismiss the error and try again, and the operation will succeed. The error message resembles the following: 'Cannot read property ‘-105’ of undefined'
In Internet Explorer, you are unable to use the button to maximize a long text field or use the save button after you edit the text in a work item. You receive the following error message: 'Script5007: Unable to get property 'document' of undefined or null reference.'
When you use the Client Object Model (or any of the tools that use Client Object model. For example, Visual Studio or your custom tool), you are unable to save large attachments to work items, even though the same attachments work fine with web-access forms.
When you use hyperlinks in work item templates, they don't appear in web access. The hyperlinks work correctly in Visual Studio.
In Safari and Chrome under some circumstances, if you go to the backlog and right-click on a work item and try to assign or move to an iteration, the menu doesn't appear.
Build:
In Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages model, Build does not work.
During Test Results publishing, XAML builds may result in failures due to the COMException in BeginDataStoreInit() function. This is resolved by resetting the TFS cache on the build server.
If you have a build definition that has a gated check-in trigger, and you create a draft of that same definition and then try to trigger a build by making a check-in, you receive the following error message: ' Your check-in validation could not be queued for build definition. Details: An item with the same key has already been added.'
If you create a Maven build task, and you use SonarQube together with Maven, you see your credential in the build. This issue occurs only if you turn on debug and have a password that includes a backslash () or a double quotation mark (").
After you upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2, You may see performance degradation because of QueryBuildInformation.
Extensions with cross platform Build tasks do not work.
Administration:
The Backup tool has failures if the tlog backup is longer than 100 minutes.
You cannot upgrade if IIS_USRS does not have the right "Impersonate a client after authentication". During Readiness Checks in the Upgrade Wizard, you receive the following error message: ' VS402818:The built-in security group IIS_IUSRS does not have the required user right 'Impersonate a client after authentication'. Grant this user right to the IIS_IUSRS group and then re-run the readiness check.'
In the activity log, the parameters are blank for some failed commands.
"Trial" has been removed from the name of the download from VisualStudio.com.
Web experiences do not work correctly if a TFS server is configured to be accessible through both HTTP and HTTPS.
Version Control:
An event log error may be logged every time when a user leave a code comment on changesets or shelvesets.
Team Foundation Version Control displays a GUID in the usernames in code review emails.
If there are multiple build definitions configured for the repository, the status badge might show the wrong build definition name for the build
When you create a pull request, the associated work items list only includes the first 25 commits instead of inspecting all the commits in the pull request.
When you add a link from a work item to a version control item at latest, the link is broken and appears as "vstfs:///VersionControl/LatestItemVersion/undefined"
In Team Foundation Version Control, if you branch across projects or move a branch to another project, your branch may lose its parent relationship.
Test Tools:
When you upgrade Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 RC to Update 2 RTW, you cannot see the option to use Test Plans in the "Run Functional Tests" task.
Extensions:
Extensions that work in Visual Studio Team Services and deliver content (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and so on.) from their own service or domain may not work in on-premises Team Foundation Server. You may receive the following error message: 'resource from origin has been blocked from loading by cross-origin Resource Sharing policy'
Release Management:
The email option in the release management approvals are not enabled if there is more than one approver in an environment.
Security in release environments are too strict. Denying access to one environment may restrict it in others.
Alerts:
You may not consistently receive code review alerts.
If your team project has a space, your notifications may have invalid links.

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 14.95.25122.0 Update 2 (Mar 31, 2016)

Team project creation and deletion experience improvements
We're giving you the option to create and delete Team projects from the web experience and through the REST APIs. These improvements help to bring more parity between Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server for project management operations. Users who have permission to create team projects can do so from the collection administration view or the navigation drop-down list. See creating a team project for more details. Similarly, users who have permission to delete a team project can do so from the collection administration view.
Release Management: new features and improvements:
New version of web-based Release Management. Release Management is now integrated into TFS. You can access Release Management features directly from the RELEASE hub in TFS web access without having to install a separate server or client. This new version of Release Management is simpler to use than the earlier version and is based on the same infrastructure and experience as the new Build system in TFS.
Simplify your application deployment to on-premises servers, SCVMM- or VMware-managed virtual machines, or to Azure.
Control your deployments by setting up release definitions that trigger deployments to environments in sequence or in parallel. Track how far your work items, commits, builds, and releases have been deployed.
You can create bugs for failed tests. Debug information, like error message and stack trace, will be auto-populated in the bug.
A new extension for integration with VMWare. Connect to a VMWare vCenter server from Visual Studio Team Services or from TFS and create, delete, and apply snapshots on virtual machines that are managed in vCenter. For virtual machines that are managed in VMWare, dynamically provision or restore them to a clean snapshot, then create build and release definitions to deploy. Get this new extension from the Marketplace.
A new extension for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Connect to a SCVMM server and create, delete, and apply snapshots on virtual machines that are managed in SCVMM administration console. Now you can replicate one of the key features from TFS Lab Management: create build and release definitions to deploy to virtual machines that are managed in SCVMM after you've restored them to a clean snapshot.
A deployments section in build summary. This new section shows a list of environments where a build has been deployed through Release Management. You can also create a new release from this section.
Set target environments when you create and deploy a release. We've added the ability to override automatic deployment. When you want to turn off automatic deployment to specific environments, go to the Automated deployments section in the Create New Release dialog box. A note on security: The flexibility to edit the deployment flow graph across environments is still restricted to release definition authors only.
Create new releases on a schedule. We've added the ability to set up a schedule for creating new releases. The latest version of successful build artifacts is picked up at the scheduled time. Once the release is created, automatic deployment to environments is determined by the deployment conditions configured on those environments. To configure a scheduled trigger for creating new releases, go to the Triggers tab in the release definition.
Test results available in the Release summary:
To view test quality and analyze test results, the Tests tab in the Release summary will show you test status of each environment in which tests have run. The status includes count of passed and failed tests, pass percentage, and test duration for a particular environment or for the entire release, across all environments. You can drill down into the error message, stack trace, and test attachments to look for failed tests - without leaving the Release summary page.
Reordering cards on boards:
Optimize boards for the way your team works. You can now specify how cards will be reordered when you change columns: reorder with no restrictions or strictly follow the backlog order.
Deleting work items:
You now have the ability to delete work items, complete with a recycle bin experience! This capability replaces the Removed state. We’ve implemented delete as a unique permission, so you have fine-grained control over who has access to this capability
Global shortcut keys:
Introducing keyboard shortcuts for the Code and Work hubs! Navigate without ever taking your hands off the keyboard.
Dashboards edit mode:
We’ve added a new mode called edit mode to all dashboards. Widgets won't move unless you select edit mode, reducing the chances of "accidentally" moving a widget. While you're in edit mode, you can remove, rearrange, and configure widgets, as well as add new widgets
Auto-refresh dashboards:
We've added an option to auto-refresh a specific dashboard every 5 minutes. This is a great way to put the dashboard on your TV monitor or hallway screen and keep it updated
Build widgets in the dashboard catalog:
A new option to add a build history chart from the dashboard catalog lets you configure the build definition directly from the dashboard. Read the dashboards futures blog to learn how we’re improving the discoverability and ease in bringing different charts to your dashboard
Work item query charts in the dashboard catalog:
You can now add charts for work item queries to the dashboard from the widget catalog. These charts are configurable. You can choose a query, a chart type, and visualization options while staying in the dashboard context. Chart types include pie, bar, column, stacked bar, line, area, and stacked area. You can also display data in a pivot table. And, you can still add charts from the Charts tab in the Work hub and configure them just like you've always done
@mentions and #ID:
Now you can use the @ symbol to mention people in pull request discussions and in comments, including commit changeset and shelveset comments.
When you mention a person in a comment, they receive an email alert that includes the comment and a link to the commit, changeset, or shelveset. People mentions are clickable and display your identity card, with additional details. If you mention individuals who do not have permission to the commit, changeset, or shelveset, you'll receive an email indicating that the @mention has failed.
In addition, you can now use the # symbol to mention work items in pull request discussions and in comments, including commit changeset comments and shelveset comments.
These work items are clickable and open a new tab, where you'll see the work item experience that you're already familiar with.
Pull request widget:
Team admins can now add the pull request widget from the dashboards catalog. For a specific repository, the pull request widget lets users see pull requests that are assigned to the team, assigned to me, and created by me. Users can quickly navigate to an individual pull request or they can view the summary of pull requests in the repository.
Markdown widget lets you choose an existing file in a code repository to display:
You can now choose to display any markdown file in your existing repository. You can also add the file to any dashboard in your team project directly from the Code Explorer.
Common identity picker:
We're rolling out an improved experience to search and discover users and groups in version control, release management, and @mention areas. Users can now do prefix-based searches on attributes like Display Name (such as ‘john doe’) and SAM-Account-Name (such as ‘jdoe’).
Gated check-in for Team Foundation Version Control:
TFVC projects can now have branch policies to require a successful build before any code can be submitted into a branch.
Version control web:
The CODE hub has several new features and numerous usability and style improvements. The Code Explorer now shows the status of the latest build for the selected branch, and has all new, modern icons to improve readability on high resolution displays.
The Pull Requests hub has improved views to highlight the pull requests you've created and those assigned to you and your team. Traceability between pull requests, work items, and commits has been improved by new linking experiences.
Team Foundation Server extensions:
Extensions enable integrated experiences that extend and enhance the Team Foundation Server web experience, either by adding new capabilities or integrating with existing services.
On-premises extensions can be uploaded to Team Foundation Server and installed on specific team project collections.
Keyboard shortcuts for Kanban board:
You can now click a work item on the Kanban board and use keyboard shortcut keys for common tasks. Here's a sample of what you can do:
create new work items
move work items within or across columns and swimlanes
expand and collapse work items
Improved linking between code and work items:
In addition to commit linking, we've added new linking capabilities. You can link work items to Git branches and pull requests and also create branch links directly from backlog items or the Kanban board. When you create a pull request, any work items linked to the source branch or the commits will automatically be linked to the new pull request. The pull request details view has also been updated to include a Related Work Items section. The Related Work Items section lists all of the work items that are linked to a given pull request and provides a simple experience for adding links to more work items.
Build-related features and improvements:
Build administration. Administrators for build queues can now control who is able to create build and release definitions that use a given queue. This allows a team to have its own build resources within a given account or project collection.
Historical statistics. Historical statistics for build and release agents are available from the queue and pool view. This can give build administrators a better understanding of how much usage there is for a given build resource.
Build interface improvements. We've simplified the interface for creating new build definition. You can set key information about your sources and queue after selecting a template.
Extend build results view. The build result (sometimes called build summary) view can be extended with custom information and views by using the extension framework. You can also extend the view by publishing a simple markdown file using this command: ##vso[task.addattachment type=Distributedtask.Core.Summary;name=myattachmentname;]c:\myattachment.md
Publish tasks as extensions. Using the gallery, build and release tasks can be published as part of an extension.
Testing: new features and improvements:
Planned testing in Build vNext
If you've invested in planned testing using test plans and test suites, you can trigger automated runs in Build vNext by using the Run Functional Tests task. Results are displayed in the Tests tab on the Build Summary page, as well as in the Test Hub. We've added a new Group By option on the Tests tab. Grouping by Test Suite gives you a quick view of all suites that were run and their quality.
Test results in build
There’s help for you to analyze test results in the Build summary page:
An aggregate summary of test results across all test runs in the build.
Tests failing for the first time in the bug are flagged as New failures to help you identify regressions. For tests that continue to fail across multiple builds, you can see how stale the failures have become and navigate to the build in which a failure was introduced.
Trend charts that show the count of failed tests and test duration for the last 10 builds. You can add these charts to the dashboard.
Code coverage reporting has been enhanced to show a pictorial view with build-to-build deltas.
Test status is now available the build completion email notification.
Task improvements:
Visual Studio Test using Test Agent task has been renamed to Run Functional Test.
The Visual Studio test task and the Run Functional Test tasks are faster, more intuitive, and user-friendly.
We’ve added support for xUnit, NUnit, Junit and the .trx file format to the Publish Test Results task.
A new task, Publish Code Coverage, uploads data from Jacoco and Cobertura code coverage tools.
In addition, a lot of work has been done to enable our Java users to publish results and code coverage information to TFS. Read about it in the section, "Test in Java."
Manual testing improvements:
Filter test plans. Set a work item query based filter for test plans.
Show test from child suites. See all tests that are present in the current suite and their child suites, with one click.
Delete test plans. One of the top UserVoice items for test is available in this release. Now you can delete plans directly from the Test Hub.
Exploratory testing (XT) on the web
Learn about exploratory testing on the web and get started by installing the Chrome browser plug-in from the Marketplace. Features include:
Capture screenshots and notes. Simplified capture of notes and screenshots with inline annotation capability.
Create bugs and tasks. Capture the issues found during the exploratory testing as either Bugs or Tasks. The notes, annotated screenshots, videos, image action logs, team area and iteration paths, and system and browser information are captured for you automatically.
Search and update existing bugs. As you create a bug, the extension will automatically search and list existing bugs based on the Title match. You have the option to update an existing bug with the new information so you can avoid duplicate bugs.
Explore work items. Do exploratory testing for a specific work item. This lets you associate the selected work item with your ongoing testing session and view the acceptance criteria and description from within the extension. It also creates end-to-end traceability between bugs or tasks that you file and the selected work item. You can explore the work item either directly from a work item or from within the extension:
Directly from a work item. Launch exploratory testing session for a specific work item directly from within the product. We’ve added entry points on all cards, grids, and in the Test hub.
Within the extension. Search for a work item from within the XT session and then associate it with the ongoing session.
Data collection - image action log. Now you have the option to add the steps that lead to the bug automatically with just one click. Select the Include image action log option to capture the mouse, keyboard, and touch actions and add the corresponding text and images directly into the bug or task.
Create test cases based on image action log. Simultaneous test design and test execution is the basis of true exploratory testing. Create test cases during your exploratory testing session and the test steps, with images, are automatically filled in for you. You can edit the text that's captured, add the expected result, exclude rows that aren't relevant, and save the text for upcoming test passes and runs.
Support for screen recording. You can now capture your findings for all those problematic issues by using on-demand screen recording, which will be automatically attached to the task or bug that you file. Support for audio is coming next.
Connect to devices. Test your application on devices by using browser-based emulators or device cloud providers like Perfecto.
Standalone mode. Now you can jot down notes, take screenshots (and annotate them if you want to), and create bugs without connecting to Visual Studio Team Services or to TFS. Share your findings with your team in a report that includes details of all the bugs you created, screenshots, and your notes.
Test in Java:
Support for JUnit. You can upload JUnit results to TFS from Ant, Gradle, and Maven tasks.
Support for JUnit in Publish Test Results task. Run tests using a different command line tool and upload results to TFS.
Code Coverage support. Choose between Jacoco and Cobertura as Code Coverage tools for your Java project. The build file is modified on the fly to use the correct tool and the results are uploaded to TFS.
Publish Code Coverage task supports Jacoco and Cobertura. If your build file is already set to collect code coverage information, or if you're using a different Code Coverage tool (such as Istanbul) that supports outputting results in Jacoco or Cobertura format, you can use the Publish Code Coverage task to upload code coverage data to TFS.

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 Update 2 RC 1 (Feb 11, 2016)

Team project creation and deletion experience improvements
We're giving you the option to create and delete Team projects from the web experience and through the REST APIs. These improvements help to bring more parity between Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server for project management operations. Users who have permission to create team projects can do so from the collection administration view or the navigation drop-down list. Similarly, users who have permission to delete a team project can do so from the collection administration view.
New version of web-based Release Management:
Release Management is now integrated into TFS. You can access Release Management features directly from the RELEASE hub in TFS web access without having to install a separate server or client. This new version of Release Management is simpler to use than the earlier version and is based on the same infrastructure and experience as the new Build system in TFS. Simplify your application deployment to on-premises servers, SCVMM or VMware managed virtual machines, or to Azure. Control your deployments by setting up release definitions that trigger deployments to environments in sequence or in parallel. Track how far your work items, commits, builds, and releases have been deployed.
Reordering cards on boards:
Optimize boards for the way your team works. You can now specify how cards will be reordered when you change columns: reorder with no restrictions or strictly follow the backlog order.
Deleting work items:
You now have the ability to delete work items, complete with a recycle bin experience! This capability replaces the Removed state. We’ve implemented delete as a unique permission, so you have fine-grained control over who has access to this capability.
Global shortcut keys:
Introducing keyboard shortcuts for the Code and Work hubs! Navigate without ever taking your hands off the keyboard.
Dashboards edit mode:
We’ve added a new mode called edit mode to all dashboards. Widgets won't move unless you select edit mode, reducing the chances of "accidentally" moving a widget. While you're in edit mode, you can remove, rearrange, and configure widgets, as well as add new widgets.
Auto-refresh dashboards:
We've added an option to auto-refresh a specific dashboard every 5 minutes. This is a great way to put the dashboard on your TV monitor or hallway screen and keep it updated.
Build widgets in the dashboard catalog:
A new option to add a build history chart from the dashboard catalog lets you configure the build definition directly from the dashboard. Read the dashboards futures blog to learn how we’re improving the discoverability and ease in bringing different charts to your dashboard.
Work item query charts in the dashboard catalog:
You can now add charts for work item queries to the dashboard from the widget catalog. These charts are configurable. You can choose a query, a chart type, and visualization options while staying in the dashboard context. Chart types include pie, bar, column, stacked bar, line, area, and stacked area. You can also display data in a pivot table. And, you can still add charts from the Charts tab in the Work hub and configure them just like you've always done.
mentions and #ID:
Now you can use the @ symbol to mention people in pull request discussions and in comments, including commit changeset and shelveset comments.
When you mention a person in a comment, they receive an email alert that includes the comment and a link to the commit, changeset, or shelveset. People mentions are clickable and display your identity card, with additional details. If you mention individuals who do not have permission to the commit, changeset, or shelveset, you'll receive an email indicating that the @mention has failed.
In addition, you can now use the # symbol to mention work items in pull request discussions and in comments, including commit changeset comments and shelveset comments.
These work items are clickable and open a new tab, where you'll see the work item experience that you're already familiar with.
Pull request widget:
Team admins can now add the pull request widget from the dashboards catalog. For a specific repository, the pull request widget lets users see pull requests that are assigned to the team, assigned to me, and created by me. Users can quickly navigate to an individual pull request or they can view the summary of pull requests in the repository.
Markdown widget lets you choose an existing file in a code repository to display:
You can now choose to display any markdown file in your existing repository. You can also add the file to any dashboard in your team project directly from the Code Explorer.
Common identity picker:
We're rolling out an improved experience to search and discover users and groups in version control, release management, and @mention areas. Users can now do prefix-based searches on attributes like Display Name (such as ‘john doe’) and SAM-Account-Name (such as ‘jdoe’).
Gated check-in for Team Foundation Version Control:
TFVC projects can now have branch policies to require a successful build before any code can be submitted into a branch.
Version control web:
The CODE hub has several new features and numerous usability and style improvements. The Code Explorer now shows the status of the latest build for the selected branch, and has all new, modern icons to improve readability on high resolution displays.
The Pull Requests hub has improved views to highlight the pull requests you've created and those assigned to you and your team. Traceability between pull requests, work items, and commits has been improved by new linking experiences.
Support for Team Foundation Server extensions:
Extensions enable integrated experiences that extend and enhance the Team Foundation Server web experience, either by adding new capabilities or integrating with existing services.
On-premises extensions can be uploaded to Team Foundation Server and installed on specific team project collections.
Keyboard shortcuts for Kanban board:
You can now click a work item on the Kanban board and use keyboard shortcut keys for common tasks. Here's a sample of what you can do:
create new work items
move work items within or across columns and swimlanes
expand and collapse work items
Build-related features and improvements:
Build administration. Administrators for build queues can now control who is able to create build and release definitions that use a given queue. This allows a team to have its own build resources within a given account or project collection.
Historical statistics. Historical statistics for build and release agents are available from the queue and pool view. This can give build administrators a better understanding of how much usage there is for a given build resource.
Build interface improvements. We've simplified the interface for creating new build definition. You can set key information about your sources and queue after selecting a template.
Extend build results view. The build result (sometimes called build summary) view can be extended with custom information and views by using the extension framework. You can also extend the view by publishing a simple markdown file using this command: ##vso[task.addattachment type=Distributedtask.Core.Summary;name=myattachmentname;]c:\myattachment.md
Publish tasks as extensions. Using the gallery, build and release tasks can be published as part of an extension.
Testing: new features and improvements:
Test results in build:
There’s help for you to analyze test results in the Build summary page:
An aggregate summary of test results across all test runs in the build.
Tests failing for the first time in the bug are flagged as New failures to help you identify regressions. For tests that continue to fail across multiple builds, you can see how stale the failures have become and navigate to the build in which a failure was introduced.
Trend charts that show the count of failed tests and test duration for the last 10 builds. You can add these charts to the dashboard.
Test status is now available the build completion email notification.
Manual testing improvements:
Filter test plans. Set a work item query based filter for test plans.
Show test from child suites. See all tests that are present in the current suite and their child suites, with one click.
Delete test plans. One of the top UserVoice items for test is available in this release. Now you can delete plans directly from the Test Hub.
Exploratory testing (XT) on the web:
Learn about exploratory testing on the web and get started by installing the Chrome browser plug-in from the Marketplace. Features include:
Simplified screenshot and note captures. Capture notes and screenshots. Annotate screenshots inline.
Submit bugs. File bugs from your exploratory testing session. The notes, annotated screenshots, team area and iteration paths, and system and browser information are automatically captured for you.
Search and update existing bugs. As you create a bug, the extension will automatically search and list existing bugs based on the Title match. You have the option to update an existing bug with the new information so you can avoid duplicate bugs.
Create tasks. Create tasks in addition to bugs. You can now capture the issues found during the exploratory testing either as Bugs or as Tasks.
Explore work items. Search for a work item from within the XT session and then associate it with the session. You can then refer to the acceptance criteria/description during your exploratory testing. You get the benefit of end–to–end traceability between any bugs or tasks you file during your exploratory session and the selected work item.

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 14.0.24720.0 Update 1 (Dec 1, 2015)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 14.0.22823.10 RC (Apr 30, 2015)

New in Azure DevOps Server 2015 14.0.22609.0 CTP (Feb 24, 2015)

BASIC LICENSE EXPANDED:
The following features are now available to all Visual Studio Online users with a "Basic" license:
Web-based test execution
Agile portfolio management
Work item chart authoring
Team Rooms
What this means: All teams of five or fewer members with a "Basic" license have access to these features in Visual Studio Online for free, while larger teams can access this functionality at a much lower price point.
ASSIGN MULTIPLE TESTERS AND INVITE THEM FOR TESTING:
If you have a scenario in which you must invite multiple sign-off owners to run the same set of test cases, you can now assign multiple testers to a test suite. Doing so will pick each test case in the test suite and create a test for each tester who you add to the test suite. You can also send an email inviting them to run tests. When a tester clicks the “View tests” link in the email, a test plan opens that includes a filtered list of tests assigned to that tester.
REST APIS:
This is the first release that brings REST APIs to on-premises TFS. JSON REST APIs enable a lightweight way to work with Team Foundation Server from virtually any device, platform, or technology stack, including Windows, Android, iOS, Node.js, and others. You can create and query work items, queue a build, get recent team room messages, access source code, and accomplish almost any team or code management task
SERVICE HOOKS:
You can use service hooks to let your app or service get notified instantly when an event happens in Team Foundation Server. With service hooks, your app or service can avoid continuously polling to check for changes, such as completed builds, commits/check-ins, or work item changes. Now you can create powerful integration scenarios where Team Foundation Server can inform another service of a change, thereby enabling the use of both services together. You can find services hooks as a new hub in project administration.
How service hooks work: A service hook subscription controls what action to perform on a target, external service when a specific type of event happens. Similarly to an e-mail alert subscription, a service hook subscription is associated with the user who created it. When an event occurs and a service hook attempts to match a configured subscription to an event, a permission check is performed to ensure the user who created the subscription has permission to access to the resource associated with the event. For example, a user (likely a project administrator) creates a service hook subscription that is triggered on all “work item created” events. When a new work item is created under an area path that this user does not have access to, the permission check will prevent the subscription from matching and therefore avoid any external notification from being sent via this subscription.
However, because service hooks make it easy to integrate with external services (like Trello or Campfire), you should make sure that the data that the creator of a subscription has access to is not made available to other users who might not have the same level of access. For example, a subscription that is defined to send all “code push” events to a Campfire room could result in information being improperly disclosed to users who do not have access to the repository associated with the event (but would be able to see the information because they have access to the Campfire room).
SPRINT BACKLOG AND TASK BOARD UPDATES:
In this release, we've made the following updates:
Un-parented tasks. The tasks in the sprint that do not have a parent story will now show up on the sprint backlog and task board, under an "Un-parented" category. The un-parented row is highlighted with a grey-colored bar. You can move tasks from an un-parented row to any user story, and vice versa. (Note: Drag & drop of an un-parented row is not allowed; it will always appear on the top of sprint backlog as well as the task board.)
Completed stories. Completed stories will be collapsed automatically when the task board is opened. All stories on the sprint backlog will be collapsed by default. Stories that are collapsed but have pending work will show a warning on the task board. Collapsed rows on the task board will also show the summary of pending work for that user story. And, PBIs on task board will now appear as cards just as tasks do.
TEXT FILTERING ON BACKLOGS & QUERIES:
Now you can quickly filter backlogs and query results by using the new filter textbox we've placed on the toolbar. Simply type in text from the items you’re looking for and the backlog/result is immediately filtered to show only those items with matching text. This feature is really handy when you’re scanning a long backlog or query result for a specific item (or set of items). Note that the matching is done on data in the displayed columns—including tags.
RE-ORDERED IN A FILTERED BACKLOG:
The context menu now provides an option to move an item to the top or to a specific position, even when a filter is applied on the backlog.
EDIT ON THE KANBAN BOARD:
New with this release: You can edit the "Assigned to" and "Effort" fields on Kanban board cards right on the card without opening the work item form, first.
IDENTITY CONTROL AND AVATARS:
This new control includes a user’s full name, avatar, and email address.
We've designed this control to be very intuitive to use. When you put focus on the control, it starts by giving you an MRU (most recently used) list of people to whom you’ve most recently assigned work items. If the person you’re after isn’t in the list, just click Search and the list will populate with matching results from the users in your account. And, not only are we providing a new identity control, but we've also refactored many of the places where we display a user's name so that it now includes their avatar. You'll see avatars on cards on your work items, boards, and more.
HISTORY CONTROLS:
We have optimized the history control to make discussions easier to read. Specifically, we’ve reduced the vertical space required so that you can get to the discussions you want to see more quickly, and we’ve done this without reducing functionality.
VIEW HISTORY ON A FOLDER:
Now, you can right click on any folder in Solution Explorer, the Changes page, or the Commit Details page, and get the history of changes to files within that folder.
IMPROVED MERGE PERFORMANCE:
We have improved merge performance, which is especially apparent on large repos.
QUERY PROGRESSIVE DISCLOSURE:
Now, large query lists are not opened every time the query pane is shown. Only the first two levels are loaded, and then you can load the remaining levels on demand.