If you have been looking forward to the last set of Visual Studio Online Features to become available to Team Foundation Server your wait is OVER! You can find many of your favorite Visual Studio Online features in the first Technology Preview for Update 4 (CTP1); to download it please see: Download Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 CTP1 (also available on MSDN subscriber downloads).
To see all the fixes please see the KB: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=2994375
Team Foundation Server Features
- Trend charts and aggregate data now available from work item queries
- Three new chart types: Stacked Area, Area, and Line are now available when creating (new) trend charts
- Move to position on the backlog
- "Full-screen mode" for all the pages under the Backlogs hub.
- Search for an Area path and iterations in Web Access.
- Review and Merge code with Pull Requests in your code in Git repositories.
Visual C++ Features
- C++ Visual Studio Performance Improvements
- Determine GPU performance bottlenecks in C++ Windows applications
Trend charts + aggregation with new chart types: Stacked Area, Area, and Line
We’ve also enabled a new feature to create trend charts and do aggregation on work item queries. When you create a new work item chart, you’ll see three new chart types: Stacked Area, Area, and Line. These charts allow you to create trends across a one-week, two-week, or four-week time range. In addition, you can now sum a field value across work items returned in the query instead of just doing counts. Just like other charts, these new chart types can be pinned to your home pages to create rich team and project dashboards.
Review and Merge code with Pull Requests
Pull Requests have been one of the top customer requests for Git projects since we enabled Git on Visual Studio Online. With today’s CTP, developers can now use Pull Requests to help review and merge their code. Pull Requests enable developers working in topic branches to get feedback on their changes from other developers prior to submitting the code into the mainline. Any developer participating in the review can see the code changes, leave comments in the code, and give a “thumbs up” approval if they’re satisfied with those changes. For many teams, Pull Requests are a critical component of the developer workflow in Git, and we’re excited to finally bring that experience to Visual Studio Online.
You can learn more about Pull Requests on the Visual Studio ALM blog.
Full Screen on the backlog and boards
We’ve heard from many of you that the ability to hide all the chrome in the UI and have full-screen views of the backlog and boards is helpful, especially in scenarios where you’re running a daily standup or viewing large backlogs. Today’s CTP includes a toggle to enter “full screen mode” for all the pages under the Backlogs hub. Enjoy the screen real estate!
Move to position on the backlog
To make navigation easier in your backlog this CTP offers a handy new context menu that lets you move an item on your backlog directly to the top or to a specific position on the backlog. This is especially nice when dealing with longer backlogs where drag-and-drop isn’t as convenient. Click the small arrow on a selected item in your backlog, or right-click with your mouse to access the new functionality. Along with this change, we removed from the work item forms the actual number that’s used for backlog ordering.
Search for an Area path in Web Access.
At Microsoft we typically assign work to teams by their area path and as you would imagine we have a LOT of area paths- so finding a team/their area path can often be cumbersome. To make this easier in a new work item when you start typing in characters into the area path drop down for Web Access only those area paths will be displayed. Realizing teams also use iterations in this way we also enabled this same functionality for iterations. For instance typing in the text “test” for the area path (or iteration) for a new bug will display those area paths (or iteration) with the text “Test” in them.
C++ Visual Studio Performance Improvements
Visual Studio now scans or rescans a solution and then updates the database much more quickly for large C++ solutions. Therefore, browsing should be much more responsive, and you should experience fewer situations in which you are blocked when you perform browsing operations (for example, Go To Definition) on large solutions.
Determine GPU performance bottlenecks in C++ Windows applications
For Visual C++ developers Visual Studio Update 4 CTP 1 enables you to collect and analyze GPU usage data for Windows applications by using the Performance and Diagnostics hub. This tool can help you determine whether CPU or GPU is the performance bottleneck of the application. You can also inspect timing data of each individual GPU event if supported graphics cards are present and the latest drivers are installed.
Known Issues:
As indicated in the title and above this build is a CTP with stands for Consumer Technology PREVIEW.
So there could unknown issues and you should NOT install it on a production server. Even if we did discover all the issues the setup will block upgrading this CTP installation of Team Foundation Server to future versions.
Known Issue List:
- When you set up reporting without SharePoint integration, the Network Service account is not set for the TfsWarehouseAdministrator role of the Analysis Database.
- When an Area path is re-parented, you may see empty revisions in work items.
- You may experience notification failures if one initially fails.
- If you have Visual Studio Test Professional 2013 installed, when you start Visual Studio Shell (Team Explorer) after you apply Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 CTP 1, you receive the following error message:
The 'Visual Studio Component Model Host Package' package did not load correctly.
To work around this issue, dismiss the error dialog box by clicking No, and then continue using Visual Studio Shell (Team Explorer). This error dialog box is harmless, and dismissing it will not affect functionality.
- Blend does not work after you install Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 CTP 1 over Visual Studio 2013 RTM.
To work around this issue, install Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 before you install Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 CTP 1.
Feedback
If you do find a new issue of missing feature PLEASE let us know!
To file a bug please use: http://Connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio
To file a suggestion for a new feature please use: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com
While I wasn’t a big a fan of send a smile in Visual Studio (too often there wasn’t enough context action the feedback) our data mining has gotten much better and that too is a great way of telling us what you think!
