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We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website today.

Pull Request Changes

In this release, we have begun to re-focus on Pull Requests to ensure a productive experience between the project users and developers. We feel we made significant progress in this area for this release and look forward to using your feedback to drive future iterations.

One of the biggest hurdles people have indicated is the inability to see what a pull request includes without pulling the source down from a Mercurial client. With today’s changes, any user has the ability to view a pull request, the changesets / changes included, and perform an inline diff of the file.

When a pull request is made, the CodePlex website will query for all outgoing changes from the fork to the main repository for a point-in-time comparison. Because of this point-in-time comparison…

1. All existing pull requests created prior to this release will not have changesets associated with them.
2. If new commits are pushed to the fork while a pull request is active, they will not appear associated with the pull request. The pull request will need to be re-submitted for them to appear.

Once a pull request is created, you can “View the Pull Request” which takes you to a page that looks like

As you may notice, we now display a lot more detailed information regarding that pull request including who it was requested by and when, the associated changesets, the description, who it’s assigned to (we’ll come back to this) and the listing of summarized file changes. What you’ll also notice, is that each modified file has the ability to view a diff of all changes made. When you click “(view diff)” for a file, an inline diff experience appears.

This new experience allows you to quickly navigate through all of the modified files as well as viewing the various change blocks for each file. You’ll also notice as you browse through each file’s changes, we update the URL to include the file path so you can quickly send a direct link to a pull request’s file. Clicking “(close diff)” will bring you back to the original pull request view. View this pull request live on WikiPlex.

Pull Request Review Assignment

Another new feature we added for pull requests is the ability for project members to assign pull requests for review.

Any project member has the ability to assign (and re-assign if needed) a pull request to a project member. Once the assignment has been made, that project member will be notified via email of the assignment. Once they complete the review of the pull request, they can either accept or deny it similarly to the previous process.

Multi-Selection in Advanced View Filters

One of the more recent requests we have heard from users is the ability multi-select advanced view filters for work items. We are happy to announce this is now possible. Simply control-click the multiple options for each filter item and your work item query will be refined as such.

Should you happen to unselect all options for a given filter, it will automatically reset to the default option for that filter. Furthermore, the “Direct Link” URL will be updated to include the multi-selected options for each filter.

Note: The “Direct Link” feature was released in our previous deployment, just never written about. It allows you to capture the current state of your query and send it to other individuals.

Advertisement Changes

Very recently, the advertiser (The Lounge) we partnered to provide advertising revenue for projects, or donated to charity, was acquired by Lake Quincy Media. There has been no change in the advertising platform offering, and all projects have been converted over to using the new infrastructure. Project owners should note the new contact information for getting paid.

The CodePlex team values your feedback, and is frequently monitoring Twitter, our Discussions and Issue Tracker for new features or problems. If you’ve not visited the Issue Tracker recently, please take a few moments to log an idea or vote for the features you would most like to see implemented on CodePlex.