Updated 03/21/2020 – New shorts for navigating to to boards, backlogs, sprints, and queries (b,l,i,q)

For the full list of Azure Devops Shortcuts, see Microsoft Documentation Here

below are the three most helpful shortcuts I have used so far..

(g,w) – Go to work
This shortcut opens up the work items board. Now that the boards dropdown is open, more keys become available to navigate between Work Items, Boards, Backlogs, Sprints, and Queries.

[ w ] – open work items
[ l ] – open backlog
[ b ] – open board (easiest to remember for me; I remember the key combos as (g, w,b) “go to work on the board”
[ q ] q for queries

(g,w) goes here

(g,c) This Shortcut navigates to the Code Category

(g,b) This shortcut goes to the Build Pipeline Home. this may be useful in conjunction with with the above shortcut. In my workflow, I often like to jump between looking at Code, and configuring my builds. These two shortcuts make it easy to jump quickly between the two.

I Still can’t find a way to easily jump between Pipelines.Builds and Pipelines.Releases, hopefully there will be a shortcut for this soon

(g b) goes here

At anytime it is useful to press [?] to show a list of available shortcuts on the current screen.

I checked out Visual Studio 2019 Preview today to try to get a feel for what’s coming in the next big update to Visual Studio

After my previous experience of trying VS Code, part of me dreamed VS 2019 would feel a bit more like VS Code with more command line visibility, things like zen mode, and first class support for open source extensions.

However, the reality is that serious development and backwards compatibility still require that Visual Studio 2019 stay mostly the same. Despite being more modular, Visual Studio is still an enormous application. Enabling .net development still costs me over 7GB of hard disk space.

I like the 3D dot plot, and I hope they keep this for the final release. I feel that the infinity purple x symbol with it’s sharp, angular, modern look is lacking a sort of coziness and lightness or humanness which in general I feel is missing from much of modern technology today.

The dot plot reminds me of the covers of old programming books from 20 years ago, so I think this image is a good one for balancing the new with the past.

The new start screen offers a quick way to Clone or Check out code from a remote repository. This is great, though in order to clone my github repo I still had to go to github first to git the url, and paste it in to the url field in Visual Studio.

It would be a lot nicer if a github connection could be built directly into this start screen, so I could select my github repositories directly and natively from Visual Studio. This is definitely a step in the right direction though, and much easier than having to download the github plugin before anything github related will work.

The most useful feature I have seen so far is the “Search Visual Studio” search feature. This search does not search the code (it may be better if it did), but searches all Visual Studio commands and settings.

I can’t tell you how many times I have struggled to find the Source Control Explorer quickly (until I finally memorized the shortcut alt+v,e,s)

With this new search I can find any setting or window immediately. If anyone can find the shortcut for typing in this search, that would really supercharge this feature.

These are the biggest things I have found so far in thew new version. I will continue to monitor and experiment with the new features as we move forward..