Card Style Rules - VSO

Visual Studio Online recently added with some amazing set of features. Capability to apply styles based on rules to a card on Kanban board is one such feature.
The style for card can be set on Backlog or Task boards, by clicking settings.

In the popup window select the styles tab. Then you can setup style rules similar to below.

In the above rule is set to color the card in reddish if the Bug is Critical.
Board shows Rule in action.

If bug is set to different Severity.



Multiple rules can be added and rules can be enabled disabled.


This will add lot of value to daily scrums, and in other team meetings, since board now effectively showing

• Items require immediate attention like Critical bugs.
• Task or Stories not attended for some time.
• A User Story/PBI that is changed after work started on iteration.

and much more as you can imagine..
For TFS on premise, these will be available in future updates to TFS2015.

Finding “Create Release Definition”

As explained in the article “Deploy continuously to Azure” there should be a “Create Release Definition” when right click on a build created with VSO hosted build controller.

Unfortunately for me it was not there..

As explained in the article checked if the release management extensions for VS installed and it was there.



What could be wrong here? It occurred to me that there could be an update to the extension. OF course there is an update.



Once Installed and restarted Visual Studio the “Create Release Definition” is available.

VSO - Bugs on Backlog or on Task Board – Configuration Made Easy

Visual Studio Online is updated to include another awesome feature by just a matter of selecting an option for its users, that’s us. Bug work item now on Visual Studio Online can be used as the same level of PBI/User Story or Requirement work item (as a backlog item) or in the same level as Task Work Item by selecting an option in team settings. This means we can set it to each team differently as we want inside a team projects. Simply amazing stuff from MSFT. Hopefully these will include in TFS 2015.

Let me show you how to use this setting.

Bug on Backlog – same level of PBI/User Story or Requirement.



Bugs on Task Board - same level of Task

Quick Edit Code in VSO

Quick code editing in Visual Studio Online is a newly added feature with latest release. You can edit code check-in without opening Visual Studio. This is really useful to do a quick fix to your code just with a browser.
Let me show you how you could do this.
Explore a team project source code in VSO Web Portal and click on a file.

Click on edit will load the edit mode.

Add comments and check in (undo check out also possible)





Changeset can be viewed and file changes can be compared.
 
It is possible to add new files, upload new files and rename files as well.




Note: Code in above green box is manually added by me :).
You will find this feature is really useful to do quick fixes to code from wherever you are and whatever the device you use as long as you have a browser that can run VSO.
Currently this feature is not available for TFS on premise (2013.4), but will be available with a future update.

Awesome Improvements in Visual Studio Online

VS Online is added with few great improvements. My guess these will be available with TFS 2013.3 for on premises TFS. Still had no chance to have a look at 2013.3 RC :( .

Hiding work in progress on the backlog
Full Screen on the backlog and boards
Move to position on the backlog
REST APIs and service hook support for pull requests

Have a look at release note of VS online for more detalis