About wikis, READMEs, and Markdown
TFS 2018
To support your team or contributors to your project, use Markdown to add rich formatting, tables, and images to your team project. You can use Markdown format within a team project wiki, content you add to a dashboard, your team project README file, or other repository README file.
Wiki
Use your team project wiki to share information with other team members. When you provision a wiki from scratch, a new Git repository stores your Markdown files, images, attachments, and sequence of pages. This wiki supports collaborative editing of its content and structure.
Note
The built-in wiki is available with TFS 2018 and later versions. To download Azure DevOps Server, see Visual Studio Downloads.
The following features are supported for a team project wiki. For more information, see Create a wiki for your team project and Add and edit wiki pages.
| Feature | TFS version |
|---|---|
| Markdown format | TFS 2018 |
| HTML tags | TFS 2018 |
| Insert and resize images | TFS 2018 |
| Link to work items using # | TFS 2018 |
| Attach files | TFS 2018 |
| Filter wiki TOC | TFS 2018 |
| Mathematical notation and characters | TFS 2018.2 |
| Preview a wiki page while editing | TFS 2018.2 |
| Print a wiki page 1 | TFS 2018.2 |
| Wiki keyboard shortcuts | TFS 2018.2 |
Markdown
Markdown makes it easy to format text and include images. You can also link to documents within your project pages, README files, dashboards, and pull requests. You can provide guidance to your team in the following places using Markdown:
- Add and edit wiki pages
- Add Markdown to a dashboard
- Project page or Welcome pages
- Repository README files
- Pull requests
For supported syntax, see Use Markdown in Azure DevOps.
READMEs
You can define a README file or multiple files for each repo or team project. Write your README in Markdown instead of plain text.
Use README pages to orient contributors to work within your project. Consider adding the following guidance:
- Project focus
- Prerequisites
- Setting up the environment
- Tips for getting things done within the project
- Purpose or use of specific files
- Project-specific terms and acronyms
- Workflow guidance about committing or uploading changes and adding branches
- Project sponsors or contacts
Here are some great READMEs that use this format and speak to all audiences for reference and inspiration: