June 10, 2014 When you want people on your team to review code in a onyou can use a pull request to review and merge the code. Pull requests enable developers working in topic branches to get feedback on their changes from other developers prior to submitting the code into the master branch. Create a topic branch Before you commit your code in Visual Studio, create a topic branch. Commit your changes to the topic branch. When you are ready to share your work, publish the branch. For example, Jamal creates his topic branch and pushes it to the server. Create a pull request Open the web portal. Start commit oid is not part of the pull request your web browser, create the pull request. Select your topic branch as the source and the branch you want to merge into as the target branch. Specify the title, description, and assign reviewers. Conduct a pull request Reviewers make comments on specific lines of code. If you want to be specific, select a specific block of code before inserting the comment. Reviewers add general comments to the pull request. Tip: To add a new line to a comment, press Shift+Enter. All conversations and other events appear on the Discussion tab. Make changes on the source branch To act on the feedback, the requestor revises the code on their dev machine and pushes the changes so that reviewers can see them. Complete the pull request Each reviewer approves or rejects the pull request. A single approval is sufficient to approve the pull request. A single rejection overrides all approvals and causes the status to be rejected. When you approve or reject the pull request, team members are alerted if they have subscribed to alerts. If the code in topic branch changes, your vote does not automatically change. So for example, if you approved the pull request but would want to re-check it if changes were made, you should. When the requestor and the reviewers are satisfied that the pull request is ready to merge, you can do it from the web browser. After the merge, the target branch is updated with the changes from the topic branch. To keep your repository from getting cluttered by obsolete branches, you can delete the topic branch in your web browser. Your target branch has been updated and the topic branch has been deleted. All of the commits that were merged are still in the repo. All the commits and comments in pull request are still available if you need to refer to them later. If you want to be notified about new pull requests, changes, approvals, and rejections, then subscribe to email alerts. Q: How do I see the full content of the file. A: Select the file in the left pane. What should I do about it. A: If changes are pushed to the target branch during the pull request, retry the merge to make sure there are no conflicts. If there are no conflicts, then you are ready to merge again. If there are conflicts, see Q: Can I continue working on the target branch during the pull request. Can I merge changes from the target branch to the source branch. If you want to merge the changes from the target branch, pull the changes to your dev machine. What should I do about it. A: Conflicts can occur when you try to merge two branches. For example, a conflict often occurs when you merge two branches in which the same file is changed. If you are trying to merge from source to target, you see merge conflicts in the pull request. You are also blocked by the conflict if you try to merge from target to source. After you merge the branches in Visual Studio, use the merge tool to resolve the conflicts. Q: Why did a comment move or disappear. A: Comments are anchored to the line number and column of the commit on which comment was made. Adam — We don't yet have distinct permissions for contributing via push and contributing via pull request, but this is a scenario that we're working on enabling in a future update. PeteGoo — I'm assuming that you're talking about the commenting experience — no, we do not support either of those at this time. It would be great if you filed a suggestion on visualstudio. Following your example, I've noticed that, after pushing the commit containing the revisions suggested by the feedback received, the code reviews continue to point to the same line number — meaning that if i added several lines of code at the beginning of the file, all the code reviews will point to irrelevant lines. I didn't have any merge conflict. I guess it would be tricky to do in case of merge conflicts, but are there any chances it would work for simples cases in the future. Carlos — Not yet, but we're considering adding a —no-ff option that can be set to require that a pull request is always merged. We might also make this a setting at the branch or repo level. If you added a suggestion on visualstudio. Francois — You're correct, today we anchor comments to the original line number at which they were left by the reviewer, and this is not updated when further changes are pushed. We do have plans to improve this experience so that the comment will be able to be seen in the correct context. Do we have option to merge —squash for the merge step. This is an awesome feature and we are using it a lot. It really helped structure our development process. This way it is more obvious who is responsible for integrating this push request into the master branch. Who wrote the feature is obvious anyway from the commits. At least we see it that way in our team. Daniel G — Currently, we don't have a way to specify the default reviewers, but we have a start commit oid is not part of the pull request on our backlog tracking this. Alex — Not yet, but we are tracking this on our backlog. Daniel — We don't have a definitive timeline for fork. It would be helpful for you to post a suggestion on visualstudio. As someone coming from the git world, we just tried and failed to use this in our environment. The restriction to the same repository basically defeats the purpose for me. Can people enlighten me serious question for what this is used. I read the previous comments saying that this is on the roadmap, but I guess it's better to track these things on uservoice?.
