VSO is Happy to See You! Project Welcome Pages
The August 18th news article on the Visual Studio site announced a fun new addition to VSO: Project Welcome pages.
Think of Welcome pages as documentation, a greeting, or basic contextual information for the Team Project. You can use a Welcome pages for things like:
- Describing the purpose/business value of the project.
- Basic tips and tricks for navigating the VSO project.
- Project-specific nomenclature or acronyms
- Project sponsors or contacts
- You get the idea.. whatever!
The implementation of these pages is surprisingly simple. Pages are really just Markdown files (.md) which are checked in/committed to the root of your project. The default page is named “readme.md”. For example, in my “Awesome Calculator” project, I checked in a “readme.md”:
Now if I got to my project’s homepage, I see a “Welcome” tab. If I click on that, I get to any/all of my Welcome pages:
Adding additional Welcome pages is simple as well. Just check in/commit more markdown files!
My new markdown file, “The Truth.md”, then renders like this:
If you’re not familiar with markdown, don’t fear. It’s a simple and fast markup. VSO utilizes of GitHub Flavored Markdown, a common convention already used in some open source version control systems, based on then “marked” open source library. You can use virtually any editor (they are just text files) to work on your markdown files, including VIsual Studio, MarkdownPad, and others.
For additional details, please read Martin Woodward’s post on the Visual Studio ALM blog.
Enjoy!
Comments
Anonymous
August 21, 2014
Fantastic to see you competing with GitHub on this. Adding features like these that makes developers lives substantially better is how to win!Anonymous
August 23, 2014
Excellent stuff. Markdown should not be feared!! Sara @ http://www.simplenewz.comAnonymous
January 27, 2016
Hi, Is it possible to direct reference a work item from MD? It is part of github flavored markdown, but I can't make it work in VSTS.