Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes

Someone forwarded me a link to a blog post that put a smile on my face today.  I enjoyed reading how VS Online was such a natural journey for this person.  I’d like to think Azure would be a great choice for hosting the app, but I’ll be happy that VSO is a satisfying starting point. Read it yourself… http://...

Creating installers with Visual Studio

Some years ago we discontinued support for creating installer projects in Visual Studio and directed people to InstallShield for that functionality.  There were a number of reasons for that decision that I won’t detail here.  However, there was vocal feedback from many of our users that they were very unhappy with that decision...

Is Microsoft abandoning TFVC in favor of Git?

No. This is an example of the power of social media.  I had planned to ignore it but I’ve had enough requests for “official confirmation” that I guess I have to say something :). Last week someone tweeted “Microsoft phasing out the TFS version control repository and moving to Git. Unofficially confirmed at a TFS ...

Visual Studio Online Update – Apr 8th

You probably didn’t notice that we did our sprint 63 deployment last week.  I didn’t blog about it because there wasn’t much to say.  We announced a whole bunch of new stuff at Build the week before and there wasn’t much new in sprint 63 beyond consolidating on the Build feature set and preparing for our next ...

New Azure Portal Overview

Brian Keller did a very nice blog post on how you can use the new Azure portal to create a super cool devops dashboard: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2014/04/10/building-your-dream-devops-dashboard-with-the-new-azure-preview-portal.aspxBrian...

Visual Studio Online Integration in the Azure portal

Today, at Build, we unveiled a new Azure Portal experience we are building.  I want to give you some insights into the work that VS Online team is doing to help with it.  I’m not on the Azure team and am no expert on how they’d like to describe to the world, so please take any comments I make here about the new Azure portal as my...

Visual Studio Online “General Availability”

Today is a monumental day for VS Online.  It’s the culmination of a long journey from a glimmer of an idea to prototype, private preview, limited preview, public preview, “go-live” and now, finally General Availability.  VS Online is ready and open for business. I’ve written a fair amount about the transition ...

Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server Release Notes

For well over a year now, we’ve been posting release notes for Visual Studio Online roughly every 3 weeks describing the enhancements we deploy each sprint.  In our last redesign of the visualstudio.com site, we added a similar news feed for the on-premises products but haven’t updated it very often or provided a ton of detail...

TFS 2013.2 (Update 2) Released

And VS 2013.2 RC released… OK, this is weird, I admit, so I’ll explain.  Today we officially released the final version of TFS 2013 Update 2 and we released a Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2.  It’s weird that we RTMed TFS Update to but only RCed VS Update 2.  We generally work hard to RTM them...

Visual Studio Online Update – Mar 18th

  Wow, this post is late.  It’s been a pretty tough month for me personally.  Probably the highlight was an ice storm that hit central North Carolina and crushed us.  My house was without power for 4 days.  The whole area looked like a war zone.  There were trees down everywhere.  Roads were impassable...