Visual Studio Team Services - NEW JANUARY RELEASE: Dashboard widget SDK (WE NEED YOUR FEEDBACK) + 25 New Improvements!

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For the January release, Visual Studio Team Services features a plethora of 25 improvements!

For starters, let's get into the details of the new Dashboard Widget SDK!

Public preview of the dashboard widget SDK

It’s here! When we launched dashboards, we mentioned that our widgets are written as extensions, which would also allow you to write and share your own widgets in time. Today, we’re releasing a public preview of our widget SDK. You can get started at Add a dashboard widget.

As a reminder, widgets are implemented as a contribution point in the extension framework. You’ll need some knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a good idea to build a widget. If you run into issues or have feedback, feel free reach out to us at vsointegration@microsoft<dot>com.

  

Thank you in advance for your feedback!

Now, let's take a look at the list of all the new January features:

  1. Public preview of the dashboard widget SDK
  2. Create branch and links to related artifacts
  3. Build widgets in the catalog
  4. Markdown widget with file from repository
  5. Auto-refresh dashboards
  6. Richer visualizations in the build summary page - Code coverage
  7. Richer visualizations in the build summary page - Quality trend chart and test duration trend chart
  8. View passed test results and file bugs in build summary page
  9. Test summary in build status notification email
  10. Support for editing tags in the bulk edit dialog
  11. Deleting a custom field
  12. Keyboard shortcuts
  13. Test plan improvements - Filter test plans
  14. Test plan improvements - Tests from child suites
  15. Exploratory testing improvements - Search on teams within projects
  16. Exploratory testing improvements - Explore work item
  17. Exploratory testing improvements - Create tasks  
  18. Release orchestration improvements - Better control over order of environments in a release
  19. Release orchestration improvements - Better control over how multiple pending releases get deployed
  20. Release orchestration improvements - Better control over time of deployment into an environment
  21. Release orchestration improvements - Better control over approvals
  22. Retention policies for releases
  23. UI extensibility for release management
  24. Search scope selector
  25. Search across Git and TFVC projects

  

Wow! That's quite a release for VSTS! A lot of the improvements above are actually small buckets with multiple updates in them!

 

Find the details for each of those features for the January release of Visual Studio Team Services:

https://www.visualstudio.com/news/2016-jan-25-vso

     

Wherever you go... BOOM! That's where you are.

   - Ninja Ed