如何在VSTS的App Center Distribute任务中格式化发布说明？

Hey Gareth, sorry to hear you’ve burned an hour on this without luck—let’s fix that right away!

From my experience with the App Center Distribute task in VSTS, the key here is that it supports basic Markdown formatting for release notes, not full HTML. That’s why your HTML attempts didn’t work, and plain text was collapsing all lines into one block.

Here’s what you can do to get clean, readable release notes:

• Use Markdown line breaks and basic structure:

  • To force a line break within a paragraph, add two spaces at the end of each line.
  • To create separate paragraphs, leave a blank line between blocks of text.
  • You can even use simple Markdown elements like bullet lists (- at the start of lines) to organize content, which will render properly in both the email notifications and App Center’s release details page.

  Example of a properly formatted release notes file (save as UTF-8 plain text):

  What's new in this build:
  - Fixed crash on Android login screen  
  - Optimized pull-to-refresh performance on product lists
  
  Important notes:
  Users will need to re-authenticate after updating to this version
  

• Double-check your task configuration:
  Make sure you’re pointing the App Center Distribute task to this formatted UTF-8 file—no extra steps needed, the task will automatically parse the Markdown syntax when pushing the release.

A quick tip: You can test the formatting first by manually entering the same Markdown content into the release notes field in the App Center web UI and previewing it, then copy that exact content into your file to ensure consistency.

Hope this gets your release notes looking clean and readable!

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Gaz Winter