It's the entire experience. The UI is terribly clunky everywhere. The worst for me are pull requests. Incredibly tough to work with people on a pull request. I can't even point you to "a" particular problem - for us it's broken everywhere. From the weird file comparison with overlays to the missing support for (us) important file formats like ipython notebooks. The way notifications bubble up in a facebook like format on a pull request. The emails that have 20000 lines and never the exact information I need. The amount of clicks to go from comparing two files to open the current version. Other people mentioned the lacking caching support for builds, so I am not going to go into more detail here. Another missing piece for me: Where are my statistics. I'd love to see commit, PR, response, comment etc statistics per team member / teams / groups.
Using Azure DevOps board is a nightmare of its own...
btw: most of these issues are part of the whole "azure" experience. The Azure portal suffers from the exact same interface issues of horizontally stacking fields. One wrong click and your last edits have disappeared into the ether
But the Azure UI is so bad that people are willing to forego stuff like that just to avoid being on Azure.
The Azure product teams have asked for feedback from startup multiple times with consistent answers on UI - I'm no longer willing to believe that this isn't the consequence of some global UI mandate to make things look "windows-y"
Its a single geographic region. Its not allowed according to financial or healthcare data regulations in India.
P.S. i personally am working with the "Big 4" consulting guys to get a white paper to work with this. But big missed opportunity for Azure. All because of bad UI.
I have managed to forget the search terms I entered, but the first thing I have stumbled on, is this :
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/SL15.html
Keyboard shortcuts across Silverlight applications.
I have no idea what became of Silverlight. But I liked it very much more when I understood Silverlight was the future.
(how anyone understood the tech road maps at the time Silverlight was introduced, I can't imagine)
I personally see the problem is that search engines are disinterested in the furtherance of any kind of consistency capable of reducing the utility of a layer of discovery that they can provide. If you explained to your senator, that whoever dominates the browser market, effectively controls how all the information contained in the www is displayed and arranged by publishers, and the standards bodies intent to introduce semantic markup and accessibility across the www potentially can eliminate the need for search engines for a variety of constituencies and professional workers, no less cutting spam most certainly in the process, maybe they'd see the inherent conflict to be as undesirable as I see it to be.
I keep thinking I need to at least spend a while considering how possibly a browser might technically introduce undo / redo for arbitrary websites. This is what I would be trying to accomplish, if I held the necessary influence with the Edge team. Even the ability to be informed whatever it is that I just did to the page, would be enormously valuable to me and everyone I know. I'm going to risk thinking that since Microsoft are contributing to the chrome codebase, and the default supposition is surely that Microsoft wouldn't want any advancement of any features that have desktop equivalence, maybe a diplomatic possibility exists for introducing the semantics and accessibility consistency we desperately need, by a little sacrifice. I would love to be able to hit a key combination inside a Azure page, that thanks to the aforementioned accessibility standards, had a (possibly expanded) command line consistent equivalent and, permitting a little browser specific markup, could, with a single further stroke, break the interaction out of the browser and into powershell. It seems to be the aim for Microsoft to be the universal developer interface for all. This is entirely consistent with the same idea. The number of developers is only likely to be increasingly close to the whole user base of PCs, as voice and other interfaces develop. Get VSC for VB6 on Android and the job's done, in one short generation ...
The API is probably your only chance..
A dashboard interface for messages/notifications in VSTS would be helpful.
Aside, switching to a GraphQL type interface with something that updates your UI consistently would be nice. Some screens update fine, others just get lost/disconnected and you don't even know where you are at.
Overall, I haven't experienced the agent issues in TFA, but I've had plenty of other issues and continue to use the beast that I know. I do think the issue tracking is decent and the integration is as nice as other products I've tried imho. Sometimes simpler is easier though.
I feel like I must shoulder some of the responsibility here for not being louder about these issues. But must say, I'm disappointed to hear you're "surprised" about the UX issues. I've been telling your folks the UX is dreadful (e.g. as far back as pre-launch) and kept hearing back "we know, we're fixing it". I'll start formalizing the feedback and push it through the pipes, stay tuned. I'm also local (Bellevue), would love to come in and try to pipeline our relatively simple oss .net/wpf/uwp app. I suspect it'll be an eye opener for the both of us.
Some examples:
* You can't build a pipeline with a git repo. that contains submodules
* Found it impossible to edit the PATH for some custom tooling
* The New Pipeline experience just doesn't make a lot of sense, new users clicking around will eventually end up at the wrong Docs.
I believe their feedback mechanisms are placebo, pacifiers for loud people. Microsoft pesters you to give feedback and works hard to ignore them. And then goes ahead with what they initially planned. At the end, they'll announce - "We had delivered what you wanted. Based on feedback..."
And then you start wondering if you're in the minority and other people are simply crazy until you see multiple complaints about the same things.
Their music app, Windows phone, Windows 10, Skype and Edge are where I experienced this. In all cases, user experience kept getting worse with each "IMPROVEMENT."
The only time Microsoft listens is when people ignore official feedback channels and there are massive outcries on many fronts. Even then, Microsoft often retreats only temporary.
And I get told regularly by people who only use the Microsoft ecosystem that’s it is me who is the problem as well!? These people are just assuming the status quo is being punched in the dick all day.
It'll cost less, answer faster and wouldn't be any worse than the current outsourced indian community support staff.
You should be able to recurse submodules in a pipeline. In the visual designer, select "Checkout Submodules" in the pipeline's get sources step. If you use YAML, set "submodules: true" or "submodules: recursive" in the checkout keyword.
You should also be able to specify environment variables (including PATH) with the env keyword. But do reach out and we can get to the bottom of this.
The build log showed permission issues, and I did try workarounds suggested like changing the sub module URL and adding ssh keys as part of the checkout step, but in the end, my 8 hours allocated to “get vsts building” ended with this problem and I have not continued. The performance of builds was also poor.
It’s unfortunately burnt me enough that I’m just making an ec2 instance with teamcity.
I kind of wish $bash (git for window's bash version) was available as a shell option as that might make things easier as well.
Another issue is searching is painful... "TFS" vs "VSTS" vs "Azure DevOps" and half the time, the results are dated.
Several products aimed at tech people seem to make this mistake. We are power users, we don't want stuff hidden away. Stop having UX that's designed as if we were trying to browse twitter.
For example, when you go to do a release and you of course want to do release notes, previously you could copy and paste the related issues output into any document.
Now its been CSSified to be big, bubbly, and utterly useless to do anything but look at, and there is no print or export feature.
I'm more used to the old UI but some features are not easily discoverable. I wrote some posts on how to build branches and pull requests as it's not obvious: https://unop.uk/build-and-release-all-pull-request-merge-res...
I'm on the "new" UI and I'm not seeing it. You've just re-skinned the same buggy and broken cruft that was there before.
It reminds me of the Visual Studio 2019 blog posts about new icons, themes, and fonts as their big new features while ignoring the massive performance problems people have been asking about for years.
DevOps with or without the new branding/UI is the same poorly designed product that doesn't know what it wants to be and is super un-polished. It would be better if you made it really good for one specific user scenario rather than poor for dozens.
(It's not just you. The "why did they spend all that effort to change things that didn't need to be changed" question has come up for me countless times upon seeing redesigns of other products.)
As someone who's used it through VSO/VSTS/ADO days it's got foibles but yes, it's improving continuously.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/
I’d also add that I use 2017 and 2019 daily, and build by build, I see massive improvements for performance.
I've also had very odd issues where agent pools will have an idle worker but the pipeline will sit saying there are no agents, waiting. Eventually it goes, but... It's just a bad impression when you're showing it and it's not consistent.
Also, the UI. Tis horrible. Take a nod from AWS guys and get rid of the widgety attempt at entertaining some exec who doesn't use Azure. AWS interfaces load consistently for the most part and do a much better job in being not annoying, comparatively.
Another bad user experience is if you write a pipeline, by hand, without the GUI and try to run your pipeline - well, good luck. Authorization for certain components of your pipeline will fail, even if they follow the pipeline documentation to the T. Why? Because the pipeline web GUI workflow does linking of authorization between components on first run and if you only kick your build off using, say a code check-in, the pipeline will just fail. And it will give you a non-descript authorization error until you pull all your hair out and randomly do a commit from the Repository GUI of which it will pop up a message asking you to authorize the thing that had been failing for the last hour. Either document this better or give users a descript error of the actual problem. This, again, is oft where I find Azure lacking.
The UI keeps changing, but doesn't fix underlying bugs that have been around for ages.
Multiple issues where the builds don't actually update in the browser when they go through the steps (f5 only fixes), the builds show out of order in the UI, and many many other wonky things.
Also releases aren't YAML yet. Builds are, and are a good feature.
Azure Devops is almost perfect, and with a bit of TLC would be excellent.
I know it's probably getting translated to yaml from the old way which was a bunch of forms with build options, but we had some trouble with this. At the time, yaml releases were also still in development/preview mode.
One thing I'm going to miss is being able to discover things through the build wizard. Now it's just a blank yaml file and I feel that hurts the initial impression. I'd really like an option to build yaml files using the old way, but still get the yaml output for version control, that way I have all of the options and their potential values immediately available and I don't have to memorize and type everything.
There's a bunch I like about Azure DevOps though. Hopefully I haven't missed something really obvious.
Sorry that you didn't hear back though :(
You should reach out to some PM's on Twitter! I know many are fairly active, and I'm sure would love suggestions or feedback.
Great example here: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-team-servic...
It looks like you did something that users didn't actually ask for in 2017, closed this, and then have been ignoring 1.5 years worth of comments being told what users actually want. From our end it's simple - the embedded burndown chart on the scrum board should be able to show story points, not just hours (like with any other scrum board tool). I shudder to think how many engineering hours went into solving the wrong thing here...
So sure, I'm missing caching that I've had on Travis. But honestly, it builds reliably fast anyway. On Travis, I always needed to wait a LONG time to get macOS agents, on Appveyor, we were limited to 2 parallel builds. Here, everything starts all at once, completes under 10 minutes (there's quite a lot to build and test).
If I could, I would love to have an sccache ( https://github.com/mozilla/sccache ) compatible distributed free caching solution for my C++ projects. That'd be a killer feature!
Also, considering I make exactly $0 per month from it, it's either be patient or use another service that had more capacity and faster builders.
I believe that Travis-CI had a higher limit for parallel jobs, but your builds would most often end up queued because of a low capacity for a certain type of agents. Also, something quite noticeable was their lower limits on build time, which is why for some builds a cache was necessary. It got a bit hairy when you needed a full successful build to properly populate the cache but they would never finish in time. And of course, the biggest drawback from Travis-CI back then was the lack of Windows support.
As for Azure CI, I believe there's something like a 10 parallel builds limit. And I've got exactly 10 configurations!
Haven’t looked to deeply what devops has to offer yet, but things I’d be looking for before migrating.
- I want to be able to develop, run and debug most, or all, of the steps in the graph on my development machine without roundtripping through long chains of triggers and pushing to code repos and pull requests
- I want to run as much as possible in parallel, preferably agnostic of wether it’s on the same machine or several
- I need to build and assemble many components from same repository (monorepo setup)
- only impacted components should build
- Sub-components may depend on different build tools (service fabric services with both webpack and msbuild based packages)
- Some steps may depend on configurations and secrets with a different lifecycle than the code branch being built
I imagine something clever could be built on docker to support both running things locally as well as customize build nodes.
I don’t care to much for scripting in yaml. In fact I spent the day converting some yaml (and cake) scripting to Invoke-Build. Invoke-Build is quite nice actually, the only thing I miss is the option to orchestrate tasks in parallel onto several build nodes. That plus something like ncrunch build/test engine for csharp projects
(really the entire vs/msbuild things needs to be replace with something truly distributed, incremental and repeatable)
Builds are 100% stateless within the CI cluster and rely on tracking/publishing just about anything you can imagine or plug as a resource; out-of-the-box inclusions being docker images (registry), S3 (e.g. minio, AWS) and git.
It's a bit strange to reason about in the beginning but I have yet to try anything that comes remotely close to Concourse when it comes to orchestrating across multiple sources of input/output and non-linear pipelines.
Thanks!
So I think that I'm not understanding what you're creating, or where. Can you drop me an email with a screenshot? It's my HN username @microsoft.com. Thanks!
I have a 4K laptop, evan on high res, the lack of horizontal scrolling in Azure portal and other Azure tools is a dailly irritant.
Stop trying to badly emulate Android phone look & feel ... for desktop usage !!!
We are professionals, we can handle scrollbars without screwing up.
However, this confidence was seriously undermined when I noticed recently that my GitHub pull request validation build stopped working when I closed the DevOps tab.
Yes, seriously. I have to keep the DevOps tab open for my builds to actually trigger. My mind boggles at how such a design could even be possible.
The UI has so far changed five times in the past three months. It is insane. The current iteration is at least fine. Before it was a big blob of round circle that showed that the steps that succeeded succeeded. And then a big text saying it failed. It was worthless.
Maybe you should start investing smartly.
beetlejuice,beetlejuice,BEETLEJUICE!
Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the majority of our customers. So this is certainly a place where I'll follow up with the author to learn more.