In November 2014, at Connect(), we unveiled the Release Management Service in Visual Studio Online. We have received a good amount of feedback since, and here, I will share some of the big ticket items that we are working on currently. These will go live in the next quarter or two.
Web interface for release management
Yes, we are working on a web interface that is integrated with the rest of VSO web interface. From here, you will be able to author release definitions, initiate releases, manage approvals, and view summary of releases.
Ability to deploy to on-premise environments from release management service
In the current release management service, you can only deploy components from a VSO hosted build to an Azure cloud service. We are working on helping you release to an on-premise environment from VSO. The experience will be similar to how you set up an on-premise build agent pool configured to run builds queued in your VSO account (except that in this case, you will set up an on-prem agent pool for builds and releases). The tasks to perform on-premise deployments will be run on these on-prem agents.
Better task catalog
The current offering in VSO is limited by the range of out-of-the-box deployment and testing tasks. We are working on enabling more out-of-the-box tasks to deploy to Azure web sites and Azure cloud services, to run Powershell scripts or command line tools, to deploy using Chef cookbooks, and to run automated tests as part of each environment in a release.
Please stay tuned for updates on each of these areas in the next few months.
Visual Studio Release Management Team