Markdown

-- This extension is in early preview, please report any issues/suggestions at https://github.com/cschleiden/vsts-markdown or cschleid@microsoft.com --

Markdown is a custom work item form control, that allows you to edit the rich text fields on your work items with a Markdown enabled editor.

Features

Headings, Links, Code Snippets, Lists

Auto grow based on content

Markdown adjusts to the content when reading:

and editing:

Drag'n'Drop image upload

Easy drag and drop uploading:

How to: Install for VSTS

You can follow the documentation for VSTS or TFS.

Here are some quick steps to get you started on VSTS:

Step 1

From an inherited process, select the work item type you want to customize. Then, from the Layout tab, add a custom control. For a Feature it looks like this:

Step 2: Select Markdown control

Select the Markdown control from the dropdown:

Step 3: Configure Markdown control

From the Options tab, select the backing field. For example, Description:

Optionally, you can customize the minimum and maximum editor height.

Step 4: Select Markdown control

Place the control in a new group:

Step 5: Hide existing group

Since we don't want two editors on the work item form, hide the existing Description group:

Step 6: Use the Markdown control

All done, since the layout is auto-saved just navigate to an existing or a new work item and the control will show up:

FAQ

Q: When I start using Markdown what happens to the existing HTML content in my work items?

A: Markdown displays existing HTML content just fine. For editing, it detects whether content has been edited using an older editor and allows to convert existing HTML input to markdown, or to overwrite the changes.

Q: What happens with older clients when using Markdown?

A: Markdown stores the original markdown input plus rendered HTML in the actual work item field. It's difficult to edit, but displaying should work fine in all supported clients:

Version History

• 0.4.0 - BREAKING: Switched the markdown renderer from marked to markdown-it to be in sync with VSTS and support syntax highlighting. You might see the Conflict message when editing existing markdown fields. Just hit [Ignore] and save again, you should not lose any information.
• 0.3.0 - First preview release

Planned Features

• Pasting images
• Refer to https://github.com/cschleiden/vsts-markdown/issues/ for an up-to-date list

Code

As always, the code is available at https://github.com/cschleiden/vsts-markdown.