Announcing General Availability of the New Build Editor

Adity Agarwal

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of a new build definition editor in Visual Studio Team Services. The new editor is also available in Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 2.

We started this exercise of refreshing the entire build editor a few months back. Besides the need to modernize our user experience, we addressed various customer pain-points in the new editor. The new editor features a more intuitive getting started experience through introduction of new features such as process parameters. Common actions such as finding and adding tasks, using templates, or setting configuration options are easier in the new experience.

What’s New in the new build editor?

    • Get started with the template of your choice. You can search for one of the out-of-the-box or customized templates and choose ‘Apply’, or simply choose ‘empty template’ to get started.

search-template

    • Working with tasks is now a breeze. You can now search for tasks and add them to a specified location (indicated by the blue line) by using the ‘Add’ button or you can directly drag and drop them to your desired location. You can also reorder tasks in the build definition by using drag and drop or clone them using Ctrl + drag and drop.

search-tasks

    • Getting started made easy with ‘Process parameters’. When you start with one of the out-of-the-box templates, the most important fields across all tasks in the template are already (pre-defined) bubbled up to a single view called “Process”. Provide the values for these process parameters to immediately get started. process-parameters-1 Alternatively, you can bubble up all the important fields across tasks in any of your build definitions to the “Process view” as process parameters. You can also link multiple fields across tasks to create one parameter, thus avoiding entering the same value at multiple places. Process parameters help you quickly make changes to all the important fields and create a build without needing to click through each of the tasks or filling the same value multiple times.

process-parameters-2

    • Improved task input forms. Tasks inputs now have a legible and clutter free UX

refreshed-ux

For a complete walk-through of creating your first build definition using the new editor, see CI/CD for newbies. For various examples on how to build your applications using VSTS and TFS, see Build your app.

Got feedback?

How can we make the new Build editor better for you? Here is how you can get in touch with us

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