Changes in creating VSO Environments in Visual Studio IDE

This post details changes in the workflow for creating and managing environments in Visual Studio Online (VSO) and Visual Studio IDE. Previously, deploying an Azure Resource Manager template to an environment provisioned the Azure Resource Group, deployed the application, and registered it as an Environment in VSO. This environment could be shared, started, stopped, and its history tracked. The updated workflow now prefers 'Deploy to Resource Group' for application deployment to Azure Resource Groups, and users will encounter a 404 error if they attempt to deploy to an environment. The 'Environments' hub, previously in the Team Explorer of Visual Studio IDE, has been removed. Developers are now directed to the new Azure portal to view and manage environments, as they are backed by Azure Resource Groups. This change is a result of feedback aiming for consistency across VS IDE, Build, Test, and Release Management (RM) experiences, and a move towards supporting various cloud providers through the Team Web Access.