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Increase productivity & reduce latency

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With this update, we are including enhancements to pull request actionability, pipeline security & compliance, and npm API performance.

Check out the Features list below for details.

Features

General:

Azure Boards

Azure Repos

Azure Pipelines

Azure Artifacts

General

Support for Team Admins to create subscriptions for messaging apps in Slack and Teams

In addition to project administrators, Team admins can now create subscription for Azure Boards, Repos and pipeline directly from Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Multi tenant support for Azure Boards, Repos and Pipelines app in Microsoft Teams

Azure Boards, Repos and Pipelines messaging app now supports connecting to a different tenant in Microsoft Teams. So your Azure DevOps and Microsoft Teams don't have to be in same Azure AD anymore. Use Sign in with different email link if your Microsoft Teams and Azure Pipelines are in different tenants.

Multi tenant support for Azure Boards, Repos and Pipelines app in Microsoft Teams.

Azure Boards

Sync GitHub Issues to Azure DevOps Work Items

In this sprint we created and published a new GitHub action that will save your GitHub Issues into Azure Boards work items. This lets you put your code repos into GitHub while continuing to use Azure Boards to manage your work. The action is still in a preview state and we would love your feedback as we work to iron out the edge cases. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

issuesGif

Azure Repos

Improved PR actionability

When you have many pull requests to review, understanding where you should take action first can be difficult. To improve pull request actionability, you can now create multiple custom queries on the pull request list page with several new options to filter by such as draft state. These queries will create separate and collapsible sections on your pull request page in addition to "Created by me" and "Assigned to me". You can also decline to review a pull request that you were added to via the Vote menu or the context menu on the pull request list page. In the custom sections, you will now see separate tabs for pull requests that you have provided a review on or declined to review. These custom queries will work across repositories on the "My pull requests" tab of the organization home page. If you want to come back to a pull request, you can flag it and they will show up at the top of your list. Lastly, pull requests that have been set to auto-complete will be marked with a pill that says 'Auto-complete' in the list.

We have added more filters to the pull request details page so you review them faster:

  • Comment status: Active (default), All, Pending, Resolved, As designed, Won't fix, and Closed.
  • Commented by: Filter to comments left by a specific person.
  • File types: Show all files (default), and Show only the files that have been commented on.

Show all files.

Filter to comments left by a specific person.

Azure Pipelines

Additional control of your deployments

Azure Pipelines has supported deployments controlled with manual approvals for some time now. With the latest enhancements, you now have additional control over your deployments. In addition to approvals, resource owners can now add automated checks to verify security and quality policies. These checks can be used to trigger operations and then wait for them to complete. Using the additional checks, you can now define health criteria based on multiple sources and be assured that all deployments targeting your resources are safe, regardless of the YAML pipeline performing the deployment. Evaluation of each check can be repeated periodically based on the specified Retry Interval for the check. The following additional checks are now available:

  • Invoke any REST API and perform validation based on response body or a callback from the external service
  • Invoke an Azure function and perform validation based on response or a callback from the function
  • Query Azure Monitor rules for active alerts
  • Ensure the pipeline extends one or more YAML templates

Additional control of your deployments.

Approval notification

When you add an approval to an environment or a service connection, all multi-stage pipelines that use the resource automatically wait for the approval at the start of the stage. The designated approvers need to complete the approval before the pipeline can continue.

With this update, the approvers are sent an email notification for the pending approval. Users and team owners can opt-out of or configure custom subscriptions using notification settings.

Approval notification.

In addition to email notifications, project administrators can also direct notifications to Microsoft Teams or Slack.

Azure Artifacts

Auditing events are now available

Azure Artifacts feeds events are now available in the audit logs. These logs can be accessed from Organization Settings -> Auditing. The following events are now available for feeds:

  • Create, delete, or modify an organization or project-scoped feed
  • Create, delete or modify a feed view
  • Set or delete a package retention policy on any given feed
  • Permissions changes

npm performance improvements

We have made changes to our core design to improve the way we store and deliver npm packages in Azure Artifacts feeds. This has helped us achieve up to 10-fold reduction in latency for some of the highest used APIs for npm.

Accessibility improvements

We have deployed fixes to address accessibility issues on our feeds page. The fixes include the following:

  • Create feed experience
  • Global feed settings experience
  • Connect to feed experience

Next steps

Note

These features will roll out over the next two to three weeks.

Head over to Azure DevOps and take a look.

Go to Azure DevOps

How to provide feedback

We would love to hear what you think about these features. Use the help menu to report a problem or provide a suggestion.

Make a suggestion

You can also get advice and your questions answered by the community on Stack Overflow.