Visual Studio Team Services notifications in Visual Studio IDE

Ruben

October 19th, 2017

In our earlier post “Continuous Delivery Tools Extension for Visual Studio 2017” , we introduced failure notifications for a single tracked Continuous Integration (CI) build on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).

In subsequent releases of the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension, our notification model evolved, to provide notifications scoped to build events requested on behalf of accounts on your keychain and associated with the solution that’s currently open.

Work Item notifications

Getting key information about your projects in a timely and efficient manner, is essential to minimizing distractions and enabling you to speed up the delivery of the functionality.

That’s why in today’s release of the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension, we are expanding our notifications experience to include work item notifications for VSTS projects.

Whenever a work item (e.g. task, bug, etc.) in the current solution’s VSTS team project is assigned to you, you’ll receive a notification calling out the type of work item that was assigned to you, as well as extra information about the item. Clicking on the notification takes you to the VSTS page for the work item.

On instances where multiple work items are assigned simultaneously, you’ll receive a notification letting you know about the type and Id of the work items that were assigned. Clicking on this notification, takes you to “Assigned to me” query in VSTS.

Looking ahead

As we continue our journey towards creating a great notification experience inside the Visual Studio IDE, we’ll be focusing on improving the visual presentation of the notifications, keeping track of missed notifications and expanding the customization options amongst other things. Stay tuned for future announcement around these experiences.

Please Share Your Feedback

Please download the Continuous Delivery Tools for Visual Studio extension, try out the notification experiences we have to date, and let us know what you think via our Slack channel, Twitter or our team alias vsdevops@microsoft.com.

Thanks! Ruben Rios