Team Services November Extensions Roundup

Joe Bourne

November 18th, 20160 0

This month, I’ve got two fun new extensions that have lots of potential; both of them are highly trending – taking some of the top spots for our most downloaded extensions over the last 30 days. I hope you enjoy these and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Activity Feed

See it in the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=davesmits.VSTSActivityFeed

I am a big fan of dashboard widgets and having a glanceable view of what’s going on in my projects. With Activity Feed, you get two great things: an activity feed experience for Team Services, and a publisher who is committed to making this extension better over time. Activity Feed lets you see the most recent changes from four core areas right now, with plans to add more:

Work Items
Commits
Pull Requests
Builds

The widget offers configurable sizes (as usual of widgets), and a second level of customization for determining what types of activity should be shown:

Work Item Types – show specific work item types from you project
Area Paths – limit to the area paths you care about
Repositories – keep the widget focused on the repositories that matter
Build Definitions – keep up to date with all of your builds, or highlight the important ones

Dave is the kind of publisher that is highly engaged with his community; he’s always on the lookout for feedback to improve the extension. He even posts his roadmap and other ideas he’s entertaining directly into his Marketplace page. Go check this one out!

Microsoft Teams Integration

See it in the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fortifyvsts.hpe-security-fortify-vsts

Microsoft Office recently launched its newest addition to the Office family. ‘Microsoft Teams’ is a group-chat platform for large or small teams and offers instant access to everything you may need in Office 365. The launch of Microsoft Teams is great news for Office 365 customers, and now we have the Team Services integration to go with it!This integration lets your team stay up to date with alerts from

Work items
Pull requests
Code commits
Builds
Releases

To set up this integration, you need to add Team Services as a connector to your team inside Microsoft Teams. Team Services is already baked in as an option, so if you’ve installed Microsoft Team, that’s all you’ll need. To bring events from Team Services into Microsoft Teams, click the ellipsis or ‘…’ on the top nav of your team channel. Select Connectors and then scroll through the list to find the Team Services icon and follow the steps to connect to your Team Services account.

After that, you’ll select your project, the event type, and corresponding details you care about. The full instructions for Getting Started are here. Have fun sharing information with your team faster than ever!