v1.9.0

Major changes:

• Support for markdown fields (such as descriptions or repro steps). Note that the raw markdown is diffed because ADO provides no API to get the rendered html (in contrast to the markdown support in comments). Also see #4.
• Spaces in non-html fields are now retained. This is most relevant for the markdown fields, but affects also old plain text fields.
• Improved fork of htmldiff: better support of <br>, <hr> and <span> elements. The <span> element is sometimes used by ADO for formatting purposes. htmldiff is now at v3.0.1.
• Updated dependencies.

Full Changelog: v1.8.0...v1.9.0

v1.8.0

Major changes:

• Switched to a custom fork of the htmldiff library (commit 566a45f specifically). The fork is based on a much more recent other fork than before, and I implemented additional fixes. Hence, this release of the ADO extension shows a better diff, for example in the following circumstances:
  • Pure formatting changes (e.g. making text bold without changing the actual text content) were not shown as diff, now they are.
  • Much better detection of what classifies as a "word". For example, the apostrophe in don't or the Umlaut (ä) in läuft no longer cause a split of the word.
  • Languages that do not use spaces as word separators (e.g. Japanese) should work a lot better. This has been implemented via the Intl.Segmenter API. All major browsers support it since 2024. (If it is not available, it falls back to separating words by white space only.)
• Updated dependencies.

Full Changelog: v1.7.0...v1.8.0

v1.7.0

Major changes:

• Added an option to limit the maximum tile width to improve readability on wide screens.
• Improved placement of the two configuration buttons: Positioned outside the history tiles when possible, or at the top-right corner of the screen otherwise.
• Reduced visual flickering of elements when loading the history.
• Display a request for a marketplace rating and a GitHub star after one month of use. I put so much time and effort into the extension, so it would be nice to see these two increase a bit 😉
• Various minor bugfixes and optimizations.
• Updated dependencies.

Full Changelog: v1.6.0...v1.7.0

v1.6.0

Major changes:

• New feature: Optionally show only the changed lines + some context lines above and below. The number of additional lines is configurable by the user in the settings.
• Redesigned the way the history is presented. The optical "clutter" has been reduced.

Full Changelog: v1.5.1...v1.6.0

v1.5.1

Major changes:

• The "Rev" and "Stack Rank" fields are now no longer forcefully hidden by the extension. Instead, they are added by default to the configurable filters that were added in v1.5.0 of the extension. Therefore, users can choose to show these fields in the history now. Also see GitHub issues #2 and #3.
• Improved loading performance of the history tab compared to v1.5.0 by up to approximately 20%. Background: The new configurable filters introduced in v1.5.0 require additional REST API calls, and those calls are now performed asynchronously with the retrieval of the work item history.
• The config dialog is now shown on the right side of the page, near the "Filters" button. This makes usage more convenient especially on very wide screens.
• Updated dependencies.

Full Changelog: v1.5.0...v1.5.1

v1.5.0

Major changes:

• New feature: Users can now filter out uninteresting fields (e.g. work logging related fields) from the history by using the new button at the top right of the history page.
• Fixed comments: Newer Azure DevOps versions (2022, Services) failed to show comments correctly (missing text and/or invalid image URLs).
• Large images are now scaled down to the history page's width.
• If changes are made by the special Microsoft.TeamFoundation.System user, its UUID value is no longer shown in the user's name.
• Updated dependencies.

Full Changelog: v1.4.0...v1.5.0

v1.4.0

Major changes:

• The extension now uses the same font as the rest of ADO.
• Fixed that some artifact links were not shown correctly as clickable links (namely when a separator in the underlying vstfs URL was %2f instead of %2F).
• The stack rank of an item is no longer shown in the history. Its value is meaningless to the user. It is used by ADO for sorting e.g. the backlog.
• Fixed vertical alignment of bullet points/numbers in lists when the whole list item is new or deleted.
• Showing all comments if there are many. Before, the number of comments shown was limited to whatever ADO reported in a single request.
• Parameter fields in test cases and shared parameter sets are no longer shown. The extension incorrectly diffed them as HTML although they contain XML or JSON. The whole test case scenario is currently not supported because it requires to write custom non-trivial parsers for the content of the fields.

Full Changelog: v1.3.0...v1.4.0

v1.3.0

Major changes:

• Added support for artifact links to build, code, requirements, test and wiki artifacts.
• Greatly improved installation instructions in the readme.

Full Changelog: v1.2.0...v1.3.0

v1.2.0

Major changes:

• Improved loading times by a factor of 2 or more by merging and minimizing the distributed files via webpack.
• File attachments already showed up in the history before, but clicking the link downloaded them with some GUID-like name. This is fixed now: The name suggested by the browser is now the actual file name.

Full Changelog: v1.1.0...v1.2.0

v1.1.0

Changes:

• The full history of work item comments (created, edited and deleted) is now shown and incorporated into the list of changes according to their change date.
• The minimum required API version was increased from 5.0 to 5.1 in order to implement the history of comments. Tests have shown that Azure DevOps Server 2019.1.2 (and of course later versions) support version 5.1, so this should not be a practical restriction.
• Azure DevOps supports comments on links (they show up in ADO in the rightmost column in the "Links" tab). The History-Diff extension now displays the newest version of the comment (if available) on the history entry for the creation of the link. Unfortunately, ADO does not provide a way to get the history of link comments, so it will not get any better than this.
• Newline characters (\n) in string and plainText fields are now displayed properly. This in itself is not that useful because ADO shows both field types as a single line always. However, there are extensions (e.g. this one) which do allow multiline fields without HTML formatting and that make use of the string or plainText field types.
• Minor tweaks to the UI/layout and the initialization of the extension.

Full Changelog: v1.0.0...v1.1.0