YAML improvements in Azure Pipelines – Sprint 142 Update

In the Sprint 142 Update of Azure DevOps, there have been several improvements to YAML, such as adding custom counters to your builds, specifying branches to build for pull requests and using templates inline. We have also turned on the new navigation for all users, introduced a dark theme and improved the linking and attachments experiences in Azure Boards.

General:

• New navigation is on for all users
• Dark theme

Azure Boards:

• Organise reference materials with richer work item attachments
• Manage dependencies by linking work items across your organisations
• Open work items from search

Azure Repos:

• Extension authors can query context about the current repo

Azure Pipelines:

• Add custom build counters to your builds
• Use YAML to specify branches to build for pull requests
• Use YAML template expressions inline
• Improve troubleshooting with the pipeline initialisation log
• Default retention for YAML pipelines
• Build on Linux/ARM and Windows 32-bit platforms
• Clone variable groups
• See commits and work items for all linked sources
• Run from Package supported in Azure App Service deployments
• Deploy Linux containers with the App Server Deploy task

Azure Test Plans:

• Azure Test Runner client to run manual tests for desktop applications

Azure Artifacts:

• Public preview of Pipeline Artifacts

Wiki:

• Publish code as wiki with Contribute permissions

Administration:

• PATs enforce CAP