Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

Giving feedback

March 12, 2018 Mar 12, 2018 03/12/18
Brian Harry
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 ...

All good things…

March 9, 2018 Mar 9, 2018 03/9/18
Brian Harry
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...

VSTS Update – Mar 5

March 7, 2018 Mar 7, 2018 03/7/18
Brian Harry
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 ...

A good incident postmortem

March 2, 2018 Mar 2, 2018 03/2/18
Brian Harry
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.  ...

TFS Security updates

March 2, 2018 Mar 2, 2018 03/2/18
Brian Harry
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 Wednesday was for older versions and for customers who are not yet ready to update to the TFS 2018.

VSTS and TFS roadmap update

February 28, 2018 Feb 28, 2018 02/28/18
Brian Harry
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. ...

Goats up high

February 7, 2018 Feb 7, 2018 02/7/18
Brian Harry
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 - ...

Merging conflicts in the browser

January 29, 2018 Jan 29, 2018 01/29/18
Brian Harry
One of the cool things about having VSTS used across all of Microsoft is that when there's some useful missing feature, one of the many teams using it might fill the gap and we get to harvest it and make it available to all VSTS customers.  Exactly that has just happened. I've written several times about GVFS and the adoption of Git by our...