Turning on the new navigation for Visual Studio Team Services

Although I'm hoping everyone reading this doesn't need this I thought I'd share anyway. A little under a month ago Jeremy Epling (@jeremy_epling) posted on the Microsoft DevOps Blog about the New Navigation for Visual Studio Team Services. I'm not going to repeat the very detailed blog post but I am going to show you how to enabled the amazing experience quickly.

I've been using it for a while and now have just decided to log into each account and switch it on for all of them, with this I thought it might be worth sharing as lots of people don't know the preview feature flags exist in the product 🙂.

If you still land on your VSTS account home page and it looks like below then this post is for you 🙂

Figure: VSTS account home page with old navigation

Enabling the new navigation

First off what you are going to want to do is

Hover over your profile image
Click on Preview features

Figure: VSTS profile menu with Preview features highlighted

if you are the account owner you are able to switch these features on for the entire account if you want by changing the scope of the preview features you are viewing

Figure: VSTS Preview features scope selection, allowing enabling for the entire account

Now all that is left to do is switch the New Navigation flag and refresh your page

Figure: VSTS Preview features with New Navigation toggle switched on

You should now see something like below

Figure: VSTS account home page with new navigation

and when going into a specific project you'll notice the new navigation on the left

Figure: VSTS project page with new navigation on the left

Hopefully you find the new UI as awesome as I do 😁

Providing feedback

If you do have feedback on something that you think needs to change or doesn't quite work for you, you can always contact the team on twitter @vsts or using the Developer Community support forums.