Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

Team Foundation Service Update – Oct 21

If you check out the news post yesterday, you’ll see that the big change in this sprint’s deployment was to the project and account home pages.  Quite honestly the account home page was mostly useless and not very visually appealing.  One of the big things we focused on with these updates was improving the getting started experience.  ...

Visual Studio 2013 RTM Available

In the wee hours of the morning this morning, we made the final versions of Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server 2013 and .NET 4.51 available.  You can download the trials and related products and MSDN subscribers can download the licensed product from the subscriber portal.  You can learn more about what’s new in VS 2013...

How do you measure quality of a service?

Since we started down the path of building an online service a couple of years ago, I have learned a lot.  One of the things I’ve learned a lot about is measuring the health of a service.  I don’t pretend to have the only solution to the problem so I’m happy to have anyone with a differing opinion chime in. For the purpose of this ...

Running a high scale TFS server

Grant Holliday, recently wrote a post on managing TFS servers.  Grant has a colorful history.  I first met him when he joined the Team Foundation Server MVP program.  He was so knowledgeable and helpful that I eventually offered him a position on my team to help us manage internal adoption of TFS (over 45,000 people today). ...

VS 2012.4 and TFS 2012.4 RC 4 is available

Yesterday we released the final release candidate for Update 4 for VS 2012 and TFS 2012. We’re on track to release the final versions in a month or so.  I encourage you to try them out and let us know if there are any last minute issues we need to fix.  One thing to keep in mind – If you install TFS 2012.4 RC4, ...

Hosting GPLv3 Projects on CodePlex

I’ve been a bit quiet here recently about what’s been going on with CodePlex.  I don’t blog every time we do a release otherwise I’d be blogging about the site every week, but we made a change today that I thought was worth mentioning – the GPLv3 license has been added to the list of open source licenses available when creating a ...

Team Foundation Service Update – Sept 30

Today we deployed our sprint 54 release.  All of the “new” stuff you’ll find in this sprint are refinements of existing features: Check out the release notes for more. This sprint was also really our last TFS 2013 sprint.  As you know our release is scheduled for Oct 18th and we are pretty much done.  We are still ...

TFS 2013 Power Tools are available

I apologize for the long wait.  But, the TFS 2013 Power Tools are finally available.  There’s no new features in this release but there are a fair number of bug fixes and the Power Tools have all been updated to work with VS 2013 and TFS 2013.  Also, the version checking has been changed so that these Power Tools will also...

What is a Product Owner?

Adam Cogan, one of our TFS MVPs, had his company put together a short animated video on the role of the product owner.  I thought it was pretty cool so I figured I’d share it.  It’s only a few minutes.  It’s worth checking out… http://tv.ssw.com/what-is-a-product-owner   Brian...