In the latest release of GitHub for Visual Studio, we fixed bugs, eliminated warnings, and made a few performance improvements. We’re excited to share some of the new features that we’ve introduced, including the ability to view conversations, new status circles in the pull request list, and an improved experience around opening and cloning repositories.

View conversations in pull requests

You can participate in conversations (or get up to speed) on each pull request by opening the new conversations view pane. Now you have the same GitHub experience on Visual Studio thanks to @grokys.

From a pull request, click the comment count link to open the conversation and see a history of commits and reviews.

Status circles

The pull request list now shows more detail with a status circle that changes colors when checks have mixed statuses. For example, if there are three checks and only two pass, the status circle will show two-thirds of the circle in green and one-third of the circle in red. Props to @stanleygoldman for working on this enhancement.

What else is new

For the past few months, @jcansdale has been working to improve the user experience of cloning and opening a repository. We conducted an A/B test where we experimented showing different tabs for cloning by selecting a repository from a list, or cloning the repository by entering a URL. The results of the A/B test revealed that users rarely switch tabs, so we decided to unify the tabs on the clone dialog. Now you can easily clone or open a repository by entering a repository URL or selecting it from the list.

The last thing we want to highlight in this release is localization. @stanleygoldman worked with Microsoft to translate our extension across 13 different languages. Now we have parity with the same languages that the Visual Studio IDE have localized. We hope this will allow more users to use the extension in their language of choice.

Be a contributor

We love feedback—try out the new conversation feature and let us know how we can make it even better.

Do you have ideas for the GitHub for Visual Studio extension? Want to be a contributor? Reach out to us in our repository or on Twitter.