News
Visual Studio Team Services Sprints 110, 111 Roll Out Slower Than Molasses in Winter
A winter chill will hinder progress somewhat on the next VSTS sprints, which includes two previews for new UX features.
- By Michael Domingo
- 01/06/2017
When the Visual Studio team trotted out Visual Studio Team Services Sprint 109 early last month, they said that the next ones would be well on their way some time after the new year. It's now the second week of January, and features of the next two sprints will be rolled out, only a bit slower than typical, and the cold weather is partly to blame.
"As I write this, we are waiting for a major snow storm to hit North Carolina and we are expecting a pretty interrupted work schedule into early next week," writes Microsoft's Brian Harry, in a blog post. "As such most people probably won’t have access to these changes until mid next week (~Jan 11th)."
Expect lots of changes throughout, as the VS team has been back at work after the long holiday. Harry cites lots of progress in the UX features, and says that these sprints will provide dual ways of using them.
"This release introduces 2 previews -- one for the account experience, and one for some notification changes," he writes. Harry notes that this approach to previews will be employed in sprints to follow, wherein developers can opt in to use some of the new features, and data from the use of the new features is collected for further analysis.
According to the release notes that Harry points to in his blog, a major change right at startup is the Projects page, showing Projects, Favorites, Work, and Pull Requests on the main page. In the current sprint it's an opt-in feature, so developers will have to hover their avatar image and click "Preview features," then toggle on the New Account Landing Page option. The notes specify that this view will become the default at some later sprint.
The rest of the slow-rolling sprint is packed with personalization features: create an identity around your projects; attach comments and images to pull requests; highlight pull requests that contain updates; branch policy enforcement for pull request merges; manage notifications for team members; and lots more. Check out the release notes for specific details.
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.