>> Hey, everyone, in this new episode of
DevOps Lab we got Dan Hellem with us,
and we're going to dive in and see what's
new in Visual Studio 2019.
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Welcome to the DevOps Lab today,
I'm super excited because for our guest we have Dan Hellem. Dan.
>> Thanks, Abel. My name again is Dan Hellem,
I'm a Program Manager on the Visual Studio, I'm sorry,
on the Azure DevOps team and we're talking here today about
the integration that we just redid for our Visual Studio 2019.
>> Yeah. I'm super excited.
Visual Studio 2019.
Right now we're at what? Preview three?
>> Preview three is out now,
and then we have, I think,
April 2nd is when Visual Studio goes live for RTM.
>> Very, very cool. I'm super excited.
I've been using Visual Studio for I think all my careers,
so I'm really excited about this.
Won't you tell us some of the new features and
new things that's coming in Visual Studio 2019.
>> Yeah. So let me put it in a context a little bit.
So if we take a look at like 2015, 2017,
we've always had work item integration
within TFS and now Azure DevOps.
So what we've done is we've pivoted a little bit in 2019.
So if we take a look at
again those older versions, you create queries,
you run the queries,
does you all the things you need to as
a developer to go ahead and find
the work items and relate to your work, to those work items.
But we found that the barrier to entry is a little high.
So anyone who's coming in is doing things like.NET Core,
it's just too much work like what is this query thing,
I have to figure out this query crap
out, edit the queries and run them.
So we pivoted a little bit to focus less on
query management and just give me a list of my work items.
Give me the things that are assigned to me,
give me the list of things that maybe
I'm following or people that mention me,
and the idea there is get rid of some of
road blockers or roadblocks to
get people into it and then just get going.
So that's the idea.
>> So it's a simpler path
into my work items that are on Azure DevOps.
>> Exactly. The other flip side of that is
we're making this journey into modernizing custom of our platform,
and some of that platform is within
the integration within Visual Studio is on old tech.
So we're trying to up the tech a little bit and
get rid of some of the old junk and get onto the new stuff.
>> Cool. So I would love to see some of this.
>> Yeah, good. So let's start with, I have a project,
and if we go ahead and we take a look at this say hey
I'm on the home screen,
everything is really the same here.
I've connected to my Azure DevOps account,
I'm going ahead, I've created
a project and I'm working on it, etc.
You'll see here now I have my work items,
which is the same as it's always been and
this is a Git project here, specifically.
So when I click on work items are here,
this is where the experience is different.
>> Okay.
>> So here, you can see right away.
Is I don't have a query to run,
I'm not executing a query,
doing anything like that query management.
It just gives me a list of the items that are assigned to me.
I can flip through multiple different types of views, so to speak.
We have assigned to me, things that I'm following,
things that are mentioned, my activity, etc.
So the idea here is just directly replicates
to my work items that are over in Azure DevOps,
and is basically the same APIs and
everything in the same screens that we would go ahead and follow.
What we've done here is too is we've
added different filters on top of the view.
So, for example, here you can see I got quite close items.
So as an engineer and I'm working on
new stuff I probably don't care about
the closed stuff anymore, right?
So I can go ahead and just say,
you know what, let's just go ahead and hide the close ones.
We can go ahead and obviously give me a view of
missing or with the close items removed.
The other thing we've done too is
here as you can see we have a bunch of
work items where if I
want to do like quick editing, I can do that.
We're not going to make like a full-blown editing experience,
the idea is go over to the web, do it there.
But if I want to go ahead and quickly
maybe assign something to somebody else,
I can do so, I can go ahead and change a state.
If I want to change a state.
So if I want to go ahead and make this
active or close or whatever it might be,
whatever state it is that work items in,
and I can also do quick adding on the item itself.
The idea here is it's simple.
We don't want to do a bunch of management of work items,
we just want to get our work
done if we have to make some minor edits,
so be it, we'll do that right inside of UI.
Another thing that we've added here too is,
and this isn't really new,
is we can go ahead and create
work items directly from Visual Studio,
but again the experience is super simple.
So if I want to create a new user story,
really all has to do is put in
the title and create it and I'm done.
>> Oh, nice.
>> What do you think? So that's all I did.
>> So much simpler than before.
>> Yeah. It's so much easier than before.
Now, the only downside is is if you're
a complex process and that thing has a bunch of rules,
it's going to bark at you and say,
hey you can't create it here, you got to go into the web,
create it, and directly take you right to the web,
so yo can create the work item there.
>> Got it.
>> But for the 90 percent of people who
don't do a bunch of crazy rules on their work items,
I can just enter the title and it will be done with it.
>> Fantastic.
>> Yeah. The other thing that we've done too is another view here,
where you can see where I have a bunch of things like you can see
the status and state of the work item and who's assigned to.
A lot of people don't
care about that information because it's just,
I don't know what this stuff is,
it's mine, I don't really care about it.
So we basically reduce it to a view called ListView.
>> Okay.
>> So you can see here now it's nice and concise,
it's quick, it's easy, that thing.
Okay. Some new features that
we've added is if I want to go ahead now.
So here I have some work that maybe I want to change,
and I'm working on this particular item,
I can go ahead here and create a new
branch directly from a work item.
>> Oh, nice.
>> So here I'll just type in, I don't know,
we'll just do users/dan and we'll do a test.
So we'll go ahead and recreate that branch.
What that does is it actually creates the branch,
relates to work item directly to that branch.
So now as I start doing work and when I do my check,
my commit later on, it's already has it associated.
>> That's kind of task.
>> That's a nice new feature.
>> Yeah.
>> So here, you can see that they're here,
I don't have any changes yet, but you
can see that it's directly related.
>> So we used to have this experience
from the Kanban boards on the UI of Azure DevOps.
>> Yes.
>> Now, you guys have brought that into Visual Studio.
>> Yeah. But the difference is,
is that actually created a server side branch,
this one here just local branch.
So this is only on my machine,
I've created my quick branch that I want to do for a master,
or whatever it is, and now I
go ahead and do my work and then align them,
doing my commit, my pull request and that thing later.
>> Fantastic.
>> So if I come back in here to
another nice new feature too is we've added is,
I'm going through my work items,
I can go ahead and quickly
say you know what, let's relate to changes.
So what that does it quickly relates to work item,
to the work that I'm working on,
and so when I do them I commit,
and again it's already associated.
>> Nice. Nice.
>> So let's go ahead and make a quick change here.
I'm just going to remove some code real quick,
pretty straightforward. We'll come in here.
Now, if I come into my,
let's go ahead and save it, and I come into my changes,
and you can see now I've got those two work items,
they're associated to my change that I made,
and let's say for some reason maybe
there's other work items I don't want to do for.
So now, I can come in here and say let's just do a pound,
and we could do them at mentioned, or pound mentioned,
and you can see now from the list is we now
have a list of all the work items that are again associated to me,
or associated to my search here.
So if I want to say just release.
It'll give me everything that has the word release in it,
and now I can quickly add work items and associate those
to the commit as well directly from the at mentions.
>> Cool. Very cool.
>> Let's go ahead and add, let's say one more here,
just so you can see it in action.
So as I'm adding them,
it throws them directly
inside of related work items, and I'm ready to go.
So now, I'll just put in
some commit language whatever it is, and we'll do a commit,
and now if we want to go ahead and do a push,
there it goes, nice and fast.
If I come in here now to my actual pull requests.
>> We'll see it here.
>> You should be able to go ahead and create
a pull request and now you're going to see
all those work items that were associated to
this particular pull request for this particular commit.
>> Nice.
>> Okay. So yeah.
That's the general experience.
I think in general, those are the changes that we made, again,
we streamlined it quite a bit for developers to say, look,
give me the things that I'm focused on,
and don't bother me with all those query craziness.
>> I got to admit this.
That when I first started playing with the Visual Studio 2019,
this change in the work items,
and this was drawing for me because I
already had queries all set up,
I knew exactly what to do,
about using this forever.
But now that you've shown me how to
use the new work item experience in VS 2019,
you're right, this is super streamline, this is really nice.
>> Yeah. Super streamline. Actually to get
your point like queries were
great for if I had like a bunch of
different conditions to go find work items all over the place.
People would use queries to go ahead and do things like
manage and plan their sprints and those kinds of things.
We let's get out of that.
If you want to go do that, go do it to the web.
>> Makes perfect sense.
>> Let's go ahead and do it here. Then actually we
also have a search experience here though for,
if there is this work item that's randomly
sitting out there that you need to go take a look at,
that's not in your other lists,
so you can use a search experience up here as well.
>> So I still construct for work items.
>> You can still work for work items across your entire project,
it doesn't matter who they're assigned to,
that thing, and just do a quick check.
So for example, I can just do
a quick title search, if I just want to do,
I think I have an RC2 type item,
and I'll go ahead and just go ahead and search
the entire project and pull that up.
>> Nice.
>> There's also other searching
that you can do different conditions,
where you can do show me all the assigned to able
were created by Dan or
a particular state or a particular working on types.
So for example, if I want him to show me like
all the bugs that are out there, I can do so.
>> I'm in love this streamline service.
>> So the searching should give
people what they need
and study using queries and that's the hope anyway.
>> Yes. Yes. I've got to say I love
this new streamlined experience. This is great.
>> Awesome.
>> So call to actions.
We want developers download this preview,
start using it, RTM is right around the corner, April?
>> April second I believe this is when [inaudible].
>> So there's no more new features are going to be rolled in.
Just bug fixes. So download this,
start using this and give us feedback.
>> Yeah. exactly.
>> How are we supposed to give feedback back to the VS?
>> Yeah. So we're going to do something a little bit different.
I want people just to contact me directly.
So go ahead and you get and hit my Twitter page,
people can go ahead and just hit that,
send me a message directly.
You can see here I'm @danhellem.
What we want to do is eventually
like the old legacy way is going to go away completely,
especially for a Git project.
>> So you're talking about four work items?
>> Four work items. So the whole legacy way
of doing things with queries
and that thing, that's going to go away.
We found that people still like that,
but they're not providing us a feedback
for us to make changes to the new view.
We're going to eventually have
the new one's going to take over completely.
So we want people to send us feedback as much as you can,
let us know what you like, what you don't like,
how we can improve it so we can make it awesome,
and so that people love it when we get into Visual Studio 2020.
>> Awesome. Thank you so much, Dan,
developers, download this, start using this.
Please give us feedbacks,
like Dan said we can make this awesome and thank you-all so much.
>> Cool. Thanks, Abel.
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