Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Giving feedback
Six months ago I wrote a post on Taking Feedback. Several people asked me to write a follow up on giving feedback. Amazing how time flies and somehow I just haven’t gotten around to it – so I’m doing it now. Here's a key snippet from the Taking Feedback post if you don't want to go read the whole thing... At some level, all feedback is valid. It is the perception of another person based on some interaction with us. As such it’s important that we listen, understand and think about how we can improve. Yet, not all feedback is to be taken as given – meaning the person giving the feedback may have heard somet...
All good things…
After more than 23 years at Microsoft, I’ve decided it’s time for me to take a break. Starting March 12th 2018, I’ll be taking a leave of absence for a year. Deciding to do this has been one of the most gut-wrenching decisions of my life. As someone who has largely defined myself by the work I’ve done, it’s incredibly hard to imagine life without going to work and working 10 hours every day. But, after a few years of debate with my wife, we’ve decided that it’s time to take a break and dedicate more time to home and family for a while. I have no fear of having nothing to do. I have learned over the past 10 yea...
VSTS Update – Mar 5
This week we began rolling out the sprint 131 updates. You can get the details in the release notes. There are some good things in this sprint payload (a good start at a new Work items hub, Azure DevOps projects support for VMs, improved GitHub integration, release badges and more). At the same time, this isn't the most value packed sprint. The reason is that we have some really big new things that will start coming to light in the next few sprints and much of the team has been busy working on those things. Stay tuned for great things that are coming. Brian
A good incident postmortem
I wanted to call your attention to a good incident postmortem done by Taylor Lafrinere this week. Taylor sits in my team room and, for a week, I saw him bent over his keyboard, often with two or three people staring over his shoulders trying to figure out what had caused this incident and what we needed to do to prevent it in the future. This is the kind of tenacity you have to have to, in the long term, run a highly available service. Only if you really understand the root cause and build mitigations and resiliency will you get there. It's a bit long and detailed but it's a good read. This is also a goo...
TFS Security updates
On Wednesday, we released a roll up of fixes for security vulnerabilities for several versions of Team Foundation Server. There are no new features in this update. Most of the vulnerabilities are related to cross site scripting (XSS), some of which were customer reported. The others include an improperly encoded API, a service endpoint editing experience which exposes a previously configured password, and a regex denial of service vulnerability in our web portal. We recommend customers install these updates. These fixes are included in the recently released Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. The release on We...
VSTS and TFS roadmap update
This week we updated the roadmap (Feature Timeline) for Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server. Check it out to see many of the significant improvements we are working on/planning. If you have feedback or suggestions for other improvements that are important to you, our User Voice forum is the best place to provide it. When we first envisioned the feature timeline idea, the thinking was to update it quarterly. However, over time, it turned out that didn't work well with our planning rhythm - that involves cross team backlog reviews every 3 sprints - or every 9 weeks. It made sense to do roa...
TFS 2018.1 RTM is available
Today we released the final build of Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. I've shared some key links in this post.
Goats up high
Let me start with a little background. Every year, we have new goats born on the farm - generally in March/April. Last year, we had about 10 or so. They live in the field with their moms until breeding season - ~October. During breeding season, we have to remove the young goats from the adult herd so they aren't accidentally bred - they are too young at that point. We don't have a great fenced area to put them right now so we put them in a large stall in the barn. All of that happened this year as usual. The other piece of information you need to know is that goats establish a dominance hierarchy and t...
TFS 2018 Update 1 RC is available
Today we released the release candidate for Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. I've shared some important links in this post.