Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Microsoft’s application lifecycle management system, is to undergo a major shake-up and rebranding. Instead of a single Visual Studio-branded service, it’s being split into five separate Azure-branded services, under the banner Azure DevOps.

The five components:

1. Azure Pipelines, a continuous integration, testing, and deployment system that can connect to any Git repository
2. Azure Boards, a work tracking system with Kanban boards, dashboards, reporting
   
3. Azure Artifacts, a hosting facility for Maven, npm, and NuGet packages
4. Azure Repos, a cloud-hosted private Git repository service
5. Azure Test Plans, for managing tests and capturing data about defects.

I’m not sure but it seems like classic case of Microsoft internal power struggling. Some people will say its to make pricing easy or to justify that VSTS can do any platform, but those does not fit into larger list of counter arguments. Anyways, what does this mean for existing VSTS customers is:

1. URLs will change from abc.visualstudio.com to dev.azure.com/abc. Microsoft will support redirects from visualstudio.com URLs so there will not be broken links for some time.
2. The services have an updated user experience. Like other releases, it will be gradually rolled out to all customers.
3. Users of the on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS) will continue to receive updates based on features live in Azure DevOps. Starting with next version of TFS, the product will be called Azure DevOps Server and will continue to be enhanced through our normal cadence of updates.

More details on this here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-devops/

With respect to this blog,  the category and tags Visual Studio / VSTS may change or not for existing posts and upcoming posts depending upon more details, as and when they become available. This category and sub-category has been renamed to VSTS / Azure DevOps for all previous posts and will be used for upcoming posts related to Visual Studio and Azure DevOps family.