Microsoft has pushed out the final pre-release candidate of its Azure DevOps Server product ahead of the official release of the Visual Studio Foundation Server 2012 replacement.

The vendor has flagged up a number of new additions to the latest release candidate of the on-prem code management platform turned DevOps engine. 

The first of these is the ability to link GitHub Enterprise commits and pull requests to Azure Boards work items, an integration that will surprise no-one. The vendor says this means you get to exploit all the Azure Boards goodies, such as sprint planning tools, and still be able to integrate with developer workflows in GitHub.

Bugs and customer work items can now be shown as a card annotation. Previously they were restricted to backlog level types.

Builds can now be configured using YAML, so a continuous integration pipeline can be automated by checking in a YAML file to a repository. The release notes said this has meant a change in the default behaviours for new resources to work across pipelines in a project, though this can be disabled.

Other changes include the addition of draft pull requests, and a new branch picker, which should make life easier for organisations with many branches in their repositories.

Away from the features list, Microsoft will now include licenses for Artifacts and Release Management Deployment Pipelines in the basic license for Azure DevOps Server. Redmond said this was a response to user feedback.

You can see the release notes for RC2 here. This comes a couple of months after the first release candidate was unleashed.