Pulse now has built-in support for the Mercurial SCM, in the form of a new plugin. Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool.

All SCM capabilities, including personal builds, are supported. Personal builds may be submitted using the built-in client or by using hg to generate unified or git-style diffs.

Pulse now has built-in support for Maven 3, via a new maven3 command, maven3.pp post-processor and updated maven resource discovery.

The new plugin builds on existing Maven 2 support. Parallel installation of multiple Maven versions is supported, with resource discovery able to distinguish them.

The entire server section of the web interface has been overhauled with new styling, more efficient page updates, and cleaner layouts.

The server activity page in particular now displays more information about queued and active builds, with build stages nested under the builds they correspond to for clarity.

The agents section of the interface has also been updated with a cleaner style and layout, and with more information about builds running on agents.

The main agents page contains the most significant changes, with new graphical indications of agents status and menus for quick access to agent tabs and actions. The agent status tab also shows more information about the executing build stage.

A new history tab has been added to the server section, showing a record of all completed builds across all projects. Likewise, each agent now also has a history tab showing completed builds that involved that agent (in one or more build stages).

All history tabs (including the existing project history tab) now also support adjustment of the number of builds shown per page.

Project administrators now have the ability to "pin" builds. Pinned builds may not be deleted, and are exempt from automatic cleanup rules.

Pinning is useful to ensure your most important builds are retained, even as other builds are cleaned up to save space. If you change your mind you can choose to "unpin" a build, returning it to normal.

Support for terminating builds has been improved with the addition of platform-specific code to kill process trees. On Windows the "taskkill" utility will be used where available.

Pulse administrators now also have the ability to "kill" builds. Killing terminates a build quickly, without waiting for the process tree to exit and without cleaning up.

The configuration UI now includes an action allowing administrators to easily revert an overridden field to its inherited value. This was previously a tedious multi-step operation.

Another action allows administrators to quickly jump to where an inherited value is defined. This is far more convenient when you need to edit such a value at the source.

The templated configuration system now supports a new "introduce parent" refactoring. This action adds a new template parent above an existing project or agent. You can choose to have existing configuration left in the original instance or pulled up into the new parent.

This, and other refactorings, allow you to adjust your hierarchy over time to take full advantage of templates.