Link wiki pages and work items, write math formulas in Wiki, Keyboard shortcuts and more…

Sandeep Chadda (MSFT)

Happy new year to all Wiki lovers. We are learning a lot with each passing day and in this blog I will share our learning and value that we delivered in the past few sprints. Few of these features are coming up in this sprint (Jan end).

Link work items and Wiki pages

In October, we had enabled the referencing work items to a wiki page, now you can link a work item to a wiki and vice versa. You can link work items to wiki to create epic pages, release notes, and planning content that will help you track the work items associated with a wiki page and validate what % of your epic page is complete.

Link work items with wiki

Linked work items then show up on the wiki page

I found this feature really useful when I had to skim through sprint emails or release  notes to see what features got shipped in a sprint. Please share how you intend to use this feature in your wiki pages?

Wiki supports mathematical formulas

If your application deals with mathematical formulas and equations, you can now put them in Wiki using the LaTeX format. You can use VSTSWiki to bring Gamma,Delta,Theta,Lambda and Pi to life.

Rich markdown rendering in code repo markdown

We were creating all this richness in the Wiki edit experience and it was just fair to ensure all of VSTS shares these rich experiences. Therefore, now you can now create these rich markdown files in your git repositories as well. The markdown rendering of the MD files in code repositories now supports HTML tags, Block quotes, Emojis, image resizing, and mathematical formulas. Going forward we will ensure there is parity in markdown rendering in Wiki and MD files in code.

Keyboard lovers can write their pages faster in Wiki

Did you know?

Today, in this section I want to talk about certain investments that did not make into our release notes. We have been investing continuously to reduce all Wiki errors and I talk about 3 such scenarios here.

Attach larger files in Wiki

We had initially set the file attachment size to 5MB. We got loads of feedback and client side errors when wiki attachments size was set low. When we analyzed the data, we found that setting the limit to the magical number of 19MB would reduce the total # of errors significantly.  So we increased the limit from 5MB to 19MB and now the error count has reduced significantly.

Errors when attachment size was set at 5MB

Wiki now supports more file extensions

When we shipped Wiki in July, we supported only 14 file extensions.

Initial set of 14 extensions supported in Wiki

• Images: PNG (.png), GIF (.gif), JPEG (both .jpeg and .jpg)
• Documents: Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx and .csv), and Powerpoint (.pptx), text files (.txt), and PDFs (.pdf)
• Compressed files: ZIP (.zip) and GZIP (.gz)
• Video files: MOV (.mov), MP4 (.mp4)

We soon realized that these file extensions were not enough. .HTML, .VSDX, .SQl, and .XML were the most frequently attached extension types. Now Wiki supports these 32 additional extensions.

“.CS”,”.CSV”, “.DOC”, “.DOCX”, “.GIF”,”.GZ”, “.HTM”, “.HTML”, “.ICO”,”.JPEG”, “.JPG”, “.JSON”, “.LYR”,”.MD”, “.MOV”, “.MPP”,”.MSG”, “.PDF”, “.PNG”, “.PPT”,”.PPTX”, “.PS1”, “.RAR”, “.RDP”,”.SQL”, “.TXT”, “.VSD”, “.VSDX”,”.XLS”, “.XLSX”, “.XML”, “.ZIP”

.SVG and .EXE continue to show a high count but we have not enabled these yet due to security concerns.

Updating wiki pages offline does not throw a warning anymore

Users who had updated the wiki offline around 3 months back may have seen this warning symbol.

It used to happen when a page is pushed to the master branch of the wiki but either the ORDER file is not updated or it has a page name not supported by VSTS Wiki. refer: this document to get more details. When we checked the usage patterns, we found that there were very few offline updates in the first few months of wiki launch. But soon the # of offline updates spiked and have been rising ever since and we decided to revisit this error and reduce it to zero. And so we did!! We relaxed the requirement to update the .ORDER file when a new file is added and now wiki auto-updates the order when you move the page.

I thought of sharing some of these investments we have been making to ensure we offer a smooth experience while working with VSTS wiki.

Coming up next

Some of the upcoming investments include:

1. Fix broken links on page move or page rename (54 votes)
2. Publishing documentation from code repository as wiki (21 votes)
3. Wiki page titles will support -,/,#,,? etc. using UTF-8 encoded strings (3 votes)

Report Issues

If you have a feature request or want to report a bug:

1. Report a Wiki bug on developer community
2. New feature request for Wiki 
3. Issue in migration tool

Sandeep Chadda (MSFT)

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