Preview fully parsed YAML document without running the pipeline

With this update, we've added a preview but don't run mode for YAML pipelines so you can try out a YAML pipeline without running it or committing it to a repo. This will let you see a fully parsed YAML document without running the pipeline.

Check out the Features list below for details.

Features

General:

• Disable Request Access policy

Azure Pipelines:

• Preview fully parsed YAML document without committing or running the pipeline
• Disable automatic agents upgrades at a pool level
• Azure File Copy Task now supports AzCopy V10

Azure Repos:

• Custom notification subscription for draft pull requests

General

Disable Request Access policy

Administrators can now turn off the Request Access feature in Azure DevOps. With Request Access, users are able to request access to a resource if they do not have access to an Organization in their tenant or to a Project within an Organization. The request resulted in an email notification to the administrators asking them to review and provide access as needed.

This new policy can be found under Organization Settings -> User policies.

When they turn off the Request Access feature, administrators will be prompted to provide a URL to their internal documentation with details to the process required for users to gain access to the associated Organization.

Azure Pipelines

Preview fully parsed YAML document without committing or running the pipeline

We've added a preview but don't run mode for YAML pipelines. Now, you can try out a YAML pipeline without committing it to a repo or running it. Given an existing pipeline and an optional new YAML payload, this new API will give you back the full YAML pipeline. In future updates, this API will be used in a new editor feature.

For developers: POST to dev.azure.com/<org>/<project>/_apis/pipelines/<pipelineId>/runs?api-version=5.1-preview with a JSON body like this:

{
  "PreviewRun": true,
  "YamlOverride": "
# your new YAML here, optionally
"
}

The response will contain the rendered YAML.

Disable automatic agents upgrades at a pool level

Currently, pipelines agents will automatically update to the latest version when required. This typically happens when there is a new feature or task which requires a newer agent version to function correctly. With this update, we're adding the ability to disable automatic upgrades at a pool level. In this mode, if no agent of the correct version is connected to the pool, pipelines will fail with a clear error message instead of requesting agents to update. This feature is mostly of interest for customers with self-hosted pools and very strict change-control requirements. Automatic updates are enabled by default, and we don’t recommend most customers disable them.

Azure File Copy Task now supports AzCopy V10

The Azure file copy task can be used in a build or release pipeline to copy files to Microsoft storage blobs or virtual machines (VMs). The task uses AzCopy, the command-line utility build for fast copying of data from and into Azure storage accounts. With this update, we've added support for AzCopy V10 which is the latest version of AzCopy.

The azcopy copy command supports only the arguments associated with it. Because of the change in syntax of AzCopy, some of the existing capabilities are not available in AzCopy V10. These include:

• Specifying log location
• Cleaning log and plan files after the copy
• Resume copy if job fails

The additional capabilities supported in this version of the task are:

• Wildcard symbols in the file name/path of the source
• Inferring the content type based on file extension when no arguments are provided
• Defining the log verbosity for the log file by passing an argument

Azure Repos

Custom notification subscription for draft pull requests

​ To help reduce the number of email notifications from pull requests, you can now create a custom notification subscription for pull requests that are created or updated in draft state. You can get emails specifically for draft pull requests or filter out emails from draft pull requests so your team doesn't get notified before the pull request is ready to be reviewed.

Next steps

Note

These features will roll out over the next two to three weeks.

Head over to Azure DevOps and take a look.

Go to Azure DevOps

How to provide feedback

We would love to hear what you think about these features. Use the help menu to report a problem or provide a suggestion.

You can also get advice and your questions answered by the community on Stack Overflow.

Thanks,

Gopinath Chigakkagari (Twitter)