Explore alternative/additional ways to share release notes

[alex-frankel]

Currently we share our new releases in the following formats:

• Community call
• GitHub release notes
• Twitter (which just points to community call & release notes)

@miqm brought up that these are not always the easiest to follow, so we discussed a few additional options:

• Open a new tab in VS Code to show release notes (similar to how VS Code does release notes)
  • They take great care in this doc with detailed explanations on usage, GIFs, etc.
• Blog?

Open question: can we use a copilot to assist with the drafting process?

Options:

• Article per release
  • Mention all highlights and bug fixes, highlights with examples and bug fixes with an explanation
• Article per quarter
  • Pick the top features we want to address, and give full explanations and a gif or walkthrough
• Video demo per quarter of all features
  • Can be one person, can be multiple people
• VS Code Release Notes Tab

[slavizh]

In favor of blog post or vscode. Also it is hard to understand where the docs for the new features land and when.

[ahelland]

Good release notes are always appreciated.

I appreciate the work the VS Code team puts into their release notes. Might just be me though, but the release notes directly in VS Code in a sense break my flow so I often end up dismissing them to get on with work and not revisit them. Extensions in VS Code are less intrusive so I often take a look at the changelog before restarting the extension. (Though you probably don't want a ten page changelog - it would be better to link to separate notes for that purpose.)

Release notes on a blog is something I'm more likely to read at my own leisure. I feel the blogs under devblogs.microsoft.com offer slightly better readability than the ones under techcommunity.microsoft.com. (I feel authoring blogs on Tech Community is slightly clunky too, but that's a different topic.)

The bigger job with release notes is to bringing the right mix of content - bug fixes are ok to just link to a GitHub issue. Experimental features might not require "official docs" but should have a decent explanation attached and proper new features should have links to proper docs. It's easy to create a rabbit hole index where the release notes just point to GH issues and discussions that are hard to sort out. And I totally get that this is easy to say for me since I'm not responsible for implementing it :)

[DV-W-vanSchaijk]

I like to have the release notes in vs code, like:

Don't know how it's linked, but if it's possible to link this tab to a release note feed it will be great.