The official release of the Visual Studio Foundation Server 2012 replacement nears! Microsoft has pushed out the final prerelease candidate of Azure DevOps Server, with a number of new additions.
Microsoft Azure DevOps Server 2019 reached RC2 status, according to this post on the official blog by Erin Dormie, the program manager of the product.
And he has confirmed that RC2 is the company’s last planned prerelease before the final release of the platform that is aimed at organizations in need of developer team collaborations — particularly when the server is deployed locally.
Although, of course, it is possible to run the server on Azure architecture, too.
We last covered development a few months back, and since then a bunch of new features are added to the latest release candidate of this on-premises code management platform turned DevOps engine.
First of these is the ability to link GitHub Enterprise commits and pull requests to Azure Boards work items. This is an integration that comes as no surprise, with Microsoft highlighting that users will be able to make use of all the goodness on offer at Azure Boards.
Including sprint planning tools.
Developers will still be able to integrate with developer workflows in GitHub.
Additionally, bugs and customer work items can now be shown as a card annotation — previously they were restricted to backlog level types.
Other changes include configuration of builds using YAML, the addition of draft pull requests, and a new branch picker that should go a long way in making life easier for organizations that have several branches in their repositories.
Moving away from features, Microsoft has also included licenses for Artifacts and Release Management Deployment Pipelines in the basic license for Azure DevOps Server.
The company says that this was a response to user feedback.
This release comes a couple of months after the first release candidate saw daylight, and now we can look forward to the official launch in the very near future.
Brilliant.
