Package Management GA, Release Management GA, import to Team Services, and work item search preview - Nov 16

We hope you are enjoying the Connect() conference! We have announced and released some exciting new things today.

Package Management General Availability

Today, we announce the general availability of Package Management. Package Management now hosts NuGet and npm packages and helps you manage the lifecycle of your packages with new features like release views. It continues to offer best-in-class support for the latest NuGet updates and great integration with Team Build.

Packages enable you to share code across your organization: you can compose a large product, develop multiple products based on a common shared framework, or create and share reusable components and libraries. Package Management facilitates code sharing by hosting your packages, sharing them with the people you select, and making them easily accessible to Team Build and Release Management.

The Package Management extension is available in the marketplace. You can find more information in this blog post.

Release Management General Availability

We are excited to announce the general availability of Release Management in Visual Studio Team Services. Release Management is also available in Team Foundation Server 2017. Using Release Management, you can fully automate the delivery of your software all the way to production. It is an essential element of DevOps that helps your team continuously deliver software to your customers at a faster pace and with lower risk.

To use Release Management, first create release definitions and then configure environments and specify automation steps in each environment to deploy the software and run tests against it. You can set up automatic deployment to the environments as soon as the build is available to deliver value continuously to your customers. You can also configure approvals on each environment.

You can find more information in the blog post.

Database Import Service

We are announcing the preview of the TFS Database Import Service for Visual Studio Team Services. Team Foundation Server customers have been asking Microsoft to be able to import their TFS databases to take advantage of all the great capabilities of Visual Studio Team Services.

You can find more information in this blog post. Our guide and tooling is available here.

Work Item Search preview

We are also announcing the public preview of Work Item Search in Visual Studio Team Services. Work Item Search provides fast and flexible search across all your work items over all projects in an account.

You can use the Work Item Search full text search engine to easily search for terms across all work item fields and efficiently locate relevant work items. Use in-line search filters on any work item field to narrow down quickly to a list of work items.

The extension is available in the marketplace. You can find more information in the blog post.