New Visual Studio Team Services Dashboard Widget

2016-03-03

Microsoft released new capabilities for building your own dashboard widgets. The Widget SDK is now in public preview. One of the advantages of being an ALM Ranger is that we get early access to these new features to help the team test them and deliver guidance.

Together with Mathias Olausen I’ve been working on a widget that shows a countdown on your dashboard. You can configure things like the front and background color, title and of course the date that you want to count down to. We also created a second widget that automatically retrieves the end of your current iteration and uses that for the countdown.

On the official ALM Rangers blog we’ve published an article that describes some key points of the widget and how we’ve build it.

  1. Getting started with Widgets
  2. Developing the Widget
  3. Issues and resolving them
  4. Publishing Widgets

So please go and install our new widget and let us know what you think!