What is rtw release

Now, consider what would happen if the feature branch also had a PR active, and was merged into main before your changes? Changing the target branch even creates a new update to the PR which makes it easy to look back at prior diffs before the target branch change.

One of the challenges for an author of a version control extension is to get the context of the repository being displayed to the user, such as the name, ID and URL.

To help with this, we added the VersionControlRepositoryService as an extension-accessible service. Using this, an extension author can query for information about the current Git repository context within the Web UI. It currently has one method, getCurrentGitRepository.

Here is a sample extension that uses this service. We are making several improvements and rolling out a new version of the Builds page. This new version combines the directory of all your build pipelines and the list of current builds so that you can quickly navigate across your project's builds to see their status. It also includes a preview of test analytics for the selected pipeline. Build and deployment completion emails have been updated to be more filterable by email rules.

Now the subject line includes more relevant information at a glance, the body contains more details, and their styling has been refreshed with the latest brand. Throughout builds and releases, different terms have been used historically for similar concepts. In other cases, meanings of terms were vague.

For example, telling the difference between an agent pool and an agent queue. Terminology has been unified in Azure Pipelines to clarify its concepts. You'll now see the following unified terms:. See the Concepts documentation for more information. A new and fully redesigned user experience is available for the release landing page.

See a list of the release pipelines you release often on the left. You can also search your pipelines and favorite them. Change to the folders view to create folders for organization and security. Security can be set at a folder level.

The new release progress view gives you with live updates of deployment progress and one-click access to further details. The Pipeline view shows the artifacts of the release and the environments where they will be deployed. The Release area provides release details such as the release trigger, artifact versions, and tags. Environments are modeled in a way to help understand their status, along with detailed progress.

At any point, you can get to the logs by clicking on the status link within the environment. If pre-deployment or post-deployment conditions have been set for an environment, it is indicated on the environment with the presence of the approvals and gates. The progress of approvals and gates show up in the status of the environment as well.

With each new release, you can see the list of associated commits and work items for each environment separately by clicking on the environment. The environments show live updates for in-progress deployments, including how many phases and tasks are complete and the running time. This will impact the users of 'Windows Machine File Copy' task version 1. For your pipelines to continue working,. Results from test execution are also surfaced for each environment.

Clicking on the test results opens a view containing test details including results from other extensions that contribute to the process. Existing extensions work in this new view, plus there are new extensibility points to allow extensions develops to surface even more information for an environment. See the contributions and extensions documentation for more information. Automate your continuous integration pipeline using a YAML file checked into your repository.

A complete reference for the YAML schema can be found here. To support YAML-based build pipelines more seamlessly, we changed the default behavior for all new resources that you create e. If you want tighter control on your resources, you can disable the default authorization model see figure below. When you do so, someone with permissions to use the resource must explicitly save the pipeline in the web editor after a resource reference is added to the YAML file.

Large products have several components that are dependent on each other. These components are often independently built. When an upstream component a library, for example changes, the downstream dependencies have to be rebuilt and revalidated. Teams typically manage these dependencies manually. Now you can trigger a build upon the successful completion of another build. Artifacts produced by an upstream build can be downloaded and used in the later build, and you can also get data from these variables: Build.

BuildId, Build. DefinitionId, Build. See the build triggers documentation for more information. Keep in mind that in some cases, a single multi-phase build could meet your needs. However, a build completion trigger is useful if your requirements include different configuration settings, options, or a different team to own the dependent process. Tasks you install from the Gallery sometimes require a newer version of the pipelines agent. If your Azure DevOps Server can connect to the internet, newer versions are downloaded automatically.

If not, then you have to manually upgrade each agent. Beginning with this release, you can configure your Azure DevOps Server to look for the agent package files on its local disk rather than from the internet. This gives you both flexibility and control over what agent versions you make available, without having to expose your Azure DevOps Server to the internet.

Build badges embedded into the homepage of a repository are a common way to show the health of the repository. Although we had build badges until now, there were a few issues:. We are now rolling out a new API for build badges that solves these problems.

The new API allows users to publish a per-branch status and can take users to the latest build of the selected branch.

You can get the Markdown for the new status badge URL by selecting the Status badge menu action in the new Builds page. Build counters provide a way to uniquely number and label builds. Now you can define your own counter variables in your build definition that are auto-incremented every time you run a build. You do this on the variables tab of a definition. This new feature gives you more power in the following ways:. See the documentation on User-defined variables for more information about build counters.

We want ensure stability and security of software early in the development process while bringing development, security, and operations together. Azure Policy helps you manage and prevent IT issues with policy definitions that enforce rules and effects for your resources. When you use Azure Policy, resources stay compliant with your corporate standards and service level agreements. To comply with compliance and security guidelines as part of release process, we have enhanced our Azure resource group deployment experience.

Now, we are failing the Azure Resource Group deployment task with relevant policy related errors in case of any violations while deploying ARM templates. Additionally, we have added Azure Policy Release definition template. This will allow users to create Azure policies and assign these policies to resources, subscriptions, or management groups from the release definition itself.

The Azure Pipelines open source, cross-platform agent has always been supported on bit x64 Windows, macOS, and Linux. Tests tab now has a modern experience that gives you rich, in-context test information for Pipelines. The new experience provides an in-progress test view, full page debugging experience, in context test history, reporting aborted test execution, and run level summary. With the In-Progress Test View, you no longer have to wait for test execution to complete to know the test outcome.

Results are available in near real-time as they are run, helping you to take actions faster. You can debug a failure or abort, file a bug or abort the pipeline. In the future we plan to extend this experience for test execution using Single Agent. The view below shows the In-Progress Test summary in the new release progress view, reporting total test count and number of test failures at a given point in time. By clicking the In-Progress Test summary above, you can view the detailed test summary along with failed or aborted test information in Test Plans.

The test summary refreshes at a periodic interval with the ability to refresh the detail view on demand, based on the availability of new results. Error messages and stack traces are lengthy in nature and need enough real estate to view the details during debugging.

To have an immersive debugging experience, you can now expand the test or test run view to full page view, while still being able to perform the required in context operations like bug creation or requirement association for the current test result.

Historically, teams would have to go to Runs hub to view the history of a test result. With the new experience, we bring the test history right in context within Test Plans tab for build and release.

The test history information is provided in a progressive manner starting with the current build definition or environment for the selected test, followed by other branches and environments for the build and release respectively. Test execution can abort due to multiple reasons such as bad test code, source under test, and environmental issues. Irrespective of the reason for the abort, it is important for you to diagnose the behavior and identify the root cause.

You can now view the aborted tests and test runs, alongside the completed runs in Test Plans. We are adding support for viewing the history of an automated test grouped by various release environments in which the test is run. If you are modelling release environments as release pipelines or test environments, and running tests across such environments, you can find out if a test is passing in the dev environment, but failing in the Integration environment.

You could find out if it is passing in the English locale, but failing in an environment that has Turkish locale. For each environment, you will find the status of the latest test result, and if the test has failed on that environment, you will also find the release since which the test has been failing.

During test execution, a test might spawn multiple instances of tests that contribute to the overall outcome. A few examples include: tests that rerun due to failures , tests composed of an ordered combination of other tests e. Since these tests are related they need to be reported together with the overall outcome derived based on the individual test outcomes.

With this update, we introduce an improved version of test results presented as a hierarchy in the Tests tab on a release. Let's look at an example. Earlier, we introduced the ability to rerun failed tests in the VS Test task. However, we only reported on the last attempt of a test, which somewhat limited the usefulness of this feature. We have now extended this feature to report each instance of the test execution as an attempt.

Additionally, the Test Management API now supports the ability to publish and query hierarchical test results. See the Test results API documentation for more information. Metrics in the test summary section e. Total tests, Passed, etc. Tracking test quality over time and improving test collateral is key to maintaining a healthy pipeline.

The test analytics feature provides near real-time visibility into your test data for builds and release pipelines. It helps improve the efficiency of your pipeline by identifying repetitive, high impact quality issues.

You can group test results by various elements, identify key tests for your branch or test files, or drill down to a specific test to view trends and understand quality issues such as flakiness. View test analytics for builds and release , preview below:.

For more information, see our documentation. Tasks in an agentless phase are orchestrated by and executed on the server. Agentless phases do not require an agent or any target computers. Unlike agent phases, only one task could be added to each agentless phase in the definitions. This meant multiple phases had to be added when there were more than one agentless task in the process, making the definition bulky.

We have relaxed this restriction, which allows you to maintain multiple tasks in an agentless phases. The tasks in the same phase would execute sequentially, just as they do for agent phases. See the server phases documentation for more information. Using release gates, you can specify application health criteria that must be met before a release is promoted to the next environment. All the specified gates are periodically evaluated prior to or after any deployment, until they are all successful.

Four types of gates are available out of the box and you can add more gates from the Marketplace. You will be able to audit that all the necessary criteria for a deployment were met. See the documentation for release gates for more information. Release gates enable automatic evaluation of health criteria before a release is promoted to the next environment. By default, the release progresses after one successful sample for all gates has been received. Even if a gate is erratic and the successful sample received is noise, the release progresses.

To avoid these types of issues, you can now configure the release to verify consistency of the health for a minimum duration before progressing. At run time, the release would ensure consecutive evaluations of the gates are successful before allowing the promotion.

The total time for evaluation depends on "time between reevaluation" and would typically be more than the configured minimum duration.

See the Release deployment control using gates documentation for more information. Previously, when new targets were added to a deployment group, a manual deployment was required to ensure all targets have the same release. You can now configure the environment to automatically deploy the last successful release to the new targets.

See the Deployment Groups documentation for more information. Continuous deployment triggers create a release on build completion. However, sometimes builds are post-processed and the build should only be released after that processing completes. Now you can leverage build tags, which would be assigned during post-processing, in the trigger filters of the release. In a release definition, you can now choose the variables you would like to set when you create the release.

The value provided for the variable when the release is created is only used for that release. This feature will help you avoid multiple steps for Create-in-Draft, update the variables in draft, and trigger the release with the variable. When you do so, an extra control is rendered on the task in the build editor. This is available for the Powershell , Cmd , and Bash tasks.

We have added support for cloning variable groups. Whenever you want to replicate a variable group and just update few of the variables, you don't need to go through the tedious process of adding variables one by one. You can now quickly make a copy of your variable group, update the values appropriately, and save it as a new variable group.

The secret variable values are not copied over when you clone a variable group. You need to update the encrypted variables and then save the cloned variable group. By default, the release pipeline progresses only when all gates are healthy at the same time. In certain situations, such as when expediting a release or after manually checking health, an approver may want to ignore a gate and allow the release to progress even if that gate has yet to evaluate as healthy. The release gates documentation for more information.

You've been able to trigger a build based on a pull request PR and get that quick feedback before a merge for a while. Now you can configure a PR trigger for a release as well. The status of the release will be posted back to the code repository and can be directly seen in the PR page. This is helpful if you want to perform additional functional or manual testing as part of your PR workflow. You can now define an Azure service connection with a service principal and certificate for authentication.

With the Azure service connection now supporting service principal that authenticates with a certificate, you can now deploy to Azure Stack configured with AD FS. To create a service principal with certificate authentication, refer to the article on how to create a service principal that authenticates with a certificate. The Azure App Service Deploy task 4.

App Service supports a number of different techniques to deploy your files such as msdeploy aka WebDeploy , git, ARM and more. But all these techniques have a limitation. With Run From Package, there is no longer a deployment step which copies the individual files to wwwroot. Instead, you just point it to a zip file, and the zip gets mounted on wwwroot as a read-only file system. This has several benefits:. The 4.

The Linux hosting model for Azure Functions is based on Docker containers which bring greater flexibility in terms of packaging and leveraging app specific dependencies. Functions on Linux can be hosted in 2 different modes:. Coinciding with Apple's release of Xcode 10, you can now set your projects to build or be tested specifically with Xcode Your pipeline can also run jobs in parallel with a matrix of Xcode versions. You can use the Microsoft-hosted macOS agent pool to run these builds.

See the guidance for using Xcode in Azure Pipelines. Helm is a tool that streamlines installing and managing Kubernetes applications. It has also gained a lot of popularity and community support in the last year. The Helm Tool Installer task acquires a specific version of Helm from the internet or the tools cache and adds it to the PATH of the agent hosted or private.

Use this task to change the version of Helm used in subsequent tasks such as the. NET Core cli task. Adding this task before the Helm Deploy task in a build or release definition ensures you are packaging and deploying your app with the right Helm version.

This task also helps in optionally installing kubectl tool, which is a prerequisite for Helm to work. Manage your MySQL script files in version control and continuously deploy as part of a release pipeline using a native task rather than PowerShell scripts.

New and improved Windows remote PowerShell based tasks are available. These improvements include several performance fixes and support live logs and console output commands, such as Write-Host and Write-Output.

PowerShell on Target task version: 3. Azure File Copy task version: 2. When releasing from GitHub Enterprise or external Git repos, now you can configure the specific branches that will be released. For example, you may want to deploy only builds coming from a specific branch to production. If the targeted Go Tool version is already installed on the agent, this task will skip the process of downloading and installing it again.

The Go task helps you download dependencies, build, or test your application. You can also use this task to run a custom Go command of your choice. A new Python Script task simplifies running Python scripts in your pipeline. The task will run a script from a Python file. The task will use the version of Python in the path, or you can specify an absolute path to a Python interpreter to use. The Xcode build task now automatically uses xcpretty when it is available on the agent machine, as it is on hosted macOS agents.

Though xcpretty output can be different and less verbose than xcodebuild output, we make the full xcodebuild logs available with each build. You can now use the Test Runner Azure Test Plans client to run manual tests for desktop applications. Please refer to our guidance here. Using the Test Runner client, you can run your manual tests and record the test results for each test step.

You also have data collection capabilities such as screenshot, image action log, and audio video recording. If you find an issue when testing, use Test Runner to create a bug with test steps, screenshots, and comments automatically included in the bug. Test Runner Azure Test Plans requires a one-time download and install of the runner. Select Run for desktop application as shown below.

Azure DevOps Server brings substantial updates to the upstream sources available on your Azure Artifacts feeds:. We've also introduced a new role in Azure Artifacts: "Collaborator". A Collaborator can save packages from an upstream source, but cannot publish packages packages directly into the feed e.

This enables you to restrict package publish to a trusted user or the build system while allowing your engineers to use new packages from your upstream sources. The Follow button is also compatible with release views. A few of the interactions on the feed settings page have been improved. Now, changes you make, such as adding an upstream or a permission, are saved immediately. Quality is fair at this point. The higher number beta, the higher the quality. One last chance for customers to provide feedback and find major blocking issues.

Product is complete and ready to be shipped to customers. True, this still goes on today believe it or not, but this mode of delivery is on the decline for certain types of software. SPs are service packs. It means product updates and bug fixes for that release.

While R2 refers to Release 2, and it generally includes enhancements that cannot be included as part of service packs. It used to be that SPs rarely included new features, but it seems to be the norm now that they do. Service Packs tend to include all the hotfixes and patches released since the product originally was released, which is convenient for the end user in not having to install every fix individually.

Businesses are given the chance to try it out, see how it fits into their routines and provide Microsoft with feedback.