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Visual Studio Online Updates Identity Controls
New identity controls are among the sprint 74 updates being made to the service. Plus, Brian Harry explains the outage from last week.
While most of us in the U.S. have been taking a break, there seems to be no rest with the Visual Studio Online team, who have been busy polishing up some features of the service. Just this week, the team announced the sprint 74 updates to the service that are aimed primarily at the Web experience.
As Microsoft's Brian Harry blogs, "There's nothing huge here," as the group made most of the bigger announcements around the product earlier in November during the Connect() event. If there's anything of signifcance, he points to a new identity control that Microsoft Program Manager Aaron Bjork blogs about that's a bit more sophisticated than the simple drop-down. "The new control includes a user's full name, avatar, and email address," writes Bjork.
Bjork also highlights more refined pull request features, including one in which Active comments are highlighted among a list in an Explorer view for better viewing, and more options for Approved/Rejected voting. Also included are some taskboard changes and improvements in the Kanban boards.
Harry writes that the changes in the Web experience will be reflected in the Visual Studio IDE at some point, but didn't specify a timeline for those improvements.
On a side note, Harry also blogs about an outage that took down the service in the early hours of November 24 for about seven hours. The service, he explained, "was caused by an update made to SQL Azure" that was easy to track but that took the team some solid work to mitigate, but then ran into another issue that involved lock contention on a table. Harry describes the problem in detail here, for those who are interested in a nice SQL Azure tip to boot.
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