Wave the Banners

Sometimes you just go and read through the help files and reference documents of the tools you use. More often than not you find an option that you didn’t know or did forget. Just the other day when I was looking through the VSTS CLI my a banner option caught my attention.

You can use a banner to inform your users about something when they enter their project. Maybe you want to inform them something changed or just want to annoy them with a daily message. I didn’t find the option available through the UI. So this is about the VSTS CLI you can find here. The client is easy to use and some defaulting:

vsts login --instance https://dev.azure.com/<youraccount> --pat <yourPAT>
vsts configure --defaults instance=https://dev.azure.com/<youraccount>
vsts configure --defaults project=<yourprojectname>

Besides the normal subgroups: build, code, package, project, work that you can find in the UI. You also find banner under the admin subgroup this option you cannot find in the UI.

vsts admin banner -h

Here you can create a simple message your users will receive when they refresh their page. When they close the message they won’t get it again.

vsts admin banner add --message "this project is for historic purpose only, to continue go to <your other url>"

Have fun

Erick