This month we're kicking off the Visual Studio Team Services monthly digest on the Azure blog. Visual Studio Team Services offers the best DevOps tooling to create an efficient continuous integration and release pipeline to Azure.

With the rapidly expanding list of features in Team Services, teams can start to leverage it more efficiently for all areas of their Azure workflow, for apps written in any language and deployed to any OS. This post series will provide the latest updates and news for Visual Studio Team Services and will be a great way for Azure users to keep up-to-date with new features being released every three weeks.

SSH Support for Git Repos is now available

You can now connect to any Team Services Git repo using an SSH key. This is particularly helpful if you develop on Linux or Mac.

Try paid Team Services extensions

You can now try Team Services paid extensions free for 30 days. This allows you to test an extension easily and see if its the right fit for your use case.

Team Services plugins for IntelliJ and Android Studio 1.0 released

After several months in preview, we are excited to announce the release of the official 1.0 version of the Team Services plugin for IntelliJ and Android Studio.

A new build task to queue Jenkins jobs from Team Services

Team Services sprint 102 introduces a new build task, Jenkins Queue Job. Now your Team Services/TFS builds can integrate with Jenkins to queue and monitor Jenkins jobs. The Jenkins Queue Job task is cross-platform and does not require any additional build agent dependencies.

The Team Services plugin for Visual Studio Code now supports connecting to Team Foundation Server Update 2 or later

The Team Services plugin for Visual Studio Code allows you to manage your pull requests for your Team Services and Team Foundation Server Git repositories, as well as monitor builds and work items for your team project. With just a glance at the status bar, you can see the number of active pull requests assigned to you and check the status of the latest build for your repository.

Inside Team Services: Kanban boards with Patrick Desjardins

Each month, we will bring you the insiders view into Visual Studio Team Services: How the product is developed, how we dog food it and use it every day, who are the people behind it and tips and tricks on becoming a power user.

This month, we interview Patrick Desjardins, a software developer on the team that develops the Agile tooling at the Microsoft Redmond campus.