Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

What are “Off-times”?

I got called out in email, I think reasonably appropriately, for using the term “off-times” when referring to choosing a better time to do our sprintly upgrades.  In a 24x7 continuous service world, there really is no such thing as a “good” time to have a problem.  I’ve written in the past about the extensive lengths to ...

Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 11

Today we did our last deployment of 2013 (Sprint 57).  You can read about it here: http://visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2013-dec-11-vso Our next deployment would normally fall very close to the Christmas holiday and to avoid that, we’ll be skipping the Sprint 58 deployment and just rolling all of that work into the Sprint 59 ...

Visual Studio 2013.1 RC is Available

We are doing a pretty quick turn of the crank on VS 2013 Update 1.  Originally we were thinking our first Update would take a little longer but for a variety of reasons (most prominently the feedback about VS supporting versions of IE before IE 10), we decided to do a quick initial Update focused on just some key bug fixes.  Our ...

Load Testing VSOnline/TFS

Ed Glas, Bill Barnett and Jiange Sun published a detailed write up of their experiences load testing VSOnline/TFS.  It’s a good read because they go into a lot of the reasons for the things they do and also talk about things they’ve tried that didn’t work.  They’ve now moved almost all of their load testing to...