New Cross Platform version of my Generate Release Notes VSTS Extension

author Richard Fennell calendar Apr 12, 2017 · 2 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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My Generate Release Notes VSTS extension has been my most popular by a long way. I have enhanced it, with the help of others via pull requests, but there have been two repeating common questions that have not been resolved

  1. Is it cross platform?
  2. Why does it show different work items and commit associations to the VSTS Release Status UI?

Well the answer to the first is that the core of the logic for the extension came from a PowerShell script we used internally, so PowerShell was the obvious first platform, especially as though my PowerShell skills are not great, my Node was weaker!

The second issue is due to my original extension and VSTS’s UI doing very different things. My old extension was based around inspecting build results, so when working in a release it finds all the builds between the current release and last successful one and looks at the details of each build in turn, building a big list or changes. VSTS’s Release summary UI does not do this, it make a few current undocumented ‘compare this to that’ API calls to get the lists.

In an attempt to address both these questions I have over the past few weeks created a new Cross Platform Generate Release Notes Extension. Now don’t worry, the old one is still there and supported, they do different jobs. This new extension is cross platform and tries to use the same API calls the VSTS Release summary UI uses.

There are of course a few gotchas

  • I did have to adopt a work around for TFVC changeset history as Microsoft use an old internal API call, but that that was the only place I had to do this. So apologies if there are any differences in the changesets returned.
  • The template format is very similar to that used in my original Generate Release Notes VSTS extension, but due to the change from PowerShell to Node I had to move from $($widetail.fields.'System.Title') style to ${widetail.fields['System.Title']}

So I hope people find this new extension useful, I can now go off happily closing old Issues in GitHub