GitHub Desktop 3.0 Enhances Pull Request Integration -- Visual Studio Magazine

GitHub Desktop 3.0 Enhances Pull Request Integration

By David Ramel
04/27/2022

Microsoft-owned GitHub announced GitHub Desktop 3.0, noting that it provides better integration for developer pull requests (PRs).

GitHub Desktop, for the unfamiliar, is described as an open source Electron-based GitHub app, written in TypeScript and using React, designed to simplify the sometimes daunting Git DevOps experience of source code management, primarily targeting beginner users and collaborative teams.

"GitHub Desktop 3.0 brings better integration with your GitHub Pull Requests," the company said in an April 26 blog post announcing the update. "You can now receive real time notifications and review the status of your check runs for your pull request."

Checks provide line annotations and detailed messaging to indicate if a developer's commit meets conditions set for a target repository, helping to ensure code is ready for production. GitHub says, "The Check Runs API enables you to build GitHub Apps that run powerful checks against code changes in a repository. You can create apps that perform continuous integration, code linting, or code scanning services and provide detailed feedback on commits."

In the update, users can click on a badge displaying the relevant PR number to see associated checks and rerun failed ones, shown here in an animated GIF:

**[Click on image for larger, animated GIF view.]** GitHub Checks in Animated Action *(source: GitHub).*

The update also provides high-signal PR notifications designed to cut through the noise that can be generated by notifications of all kinds coming from various apps and sources.

"That's why GitHub Desktop 3.0 does not notify you for every single event in every repository you contribute to," the company said. "Instead, GitHub Desktop 3.0 will only show you notifications when something really important happens in the repository you're working on."

It provided an example scenario in which a developer working on a specific code branch submits a PR and then moves to work in a different branch. GitHub Desktop 3.0 will now generate a system notification for such scenarios, complete with a new dialog that provides details about the problem and making it easy to switch to the problematic branch to either fix thing or re-run those checks, which sometimes results in passed checks.

The update also notifies developers when their PRs are reviewed, letting them know about requested changes, comments or approvals, again providing for an easy switch to the branch in question.

The update's release notes indicate two other items, along with the new notification item:

**[Click on image for larger view.]** GitHub Desktop Release Notes *(source: GitHub).*

Going forward, the project's roadmap indicates that one area of work will be to provide support for arm64 Windows machines.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.