June 2014 | Brian Harry's Blog

Are customers a bag of sand?

Brian HarryJune 13, 2014Jun 13, 201406/13/14

I sometimes use an analogy to a bag of sand. I use it to refer to treating something in the aggregate. Each grain of sand can be inspected for mineral content, density, porosity, size, color, etc. but usually we just talk about how much of it there is. In software people sometimes use a similar technique to deal with customer

The effect of Updates

Brian HarryJune 12, 2014Jun 12, 201406/12/14

There was a question on one of our internal aliases today about version to version improvements in our test capabilities. One of the program managers in that area wrote a response that really caught my eye. Primarily because it seems like an awesome demonstration of the effectiveness of our “Updates” model. It&rsq

Use of SQL 2014 with TFS 2013

Brian HarryJune 10, 2014Jun 10, 201406/10/14

We’ve certified TFS 2013 (and its subsequent updates) to work with SQL 2014. However, there’s a hitch. Because TFS 2013 shipped before SQL, the license than grants the right to use it with SQL Server only allows SQL Server 2012. Starting July 1st, we will be adding SQL Server 2014 to the list of license grants for

Visual Studio Online Update – June 10

Brian HarryJune 10, 2014Jun 10, 201406/10/14

It’s time for our sprint 66 deployment already! Over the next couple of days the update will be rolling out across accounts. The big news in this update is Pull Requests for Git repos. Pull requests are a workflow often used with Git whereby a developer makes some changes in a private branch. They then submit a “pul

VS/TFS 2013.3 CTP 2 is now available

Brian HarryJune 9, 2014Jun 9, 201406/9/14

Today we released the second preview (CTP) of VS/TFS 2013 Update 3. You can download it here. That I know of, there’s not much in the way of new features over and above what I listed in CTP1. The changes are mostly bugs fixed and features refined. I’ll remind you that CTPs are not “go live” and are only prov

Team Foundation Server on Azure IaaS Guidance

Brian HarryJune 6, 2014Jun 6, 201406/6/14

Over the last year, I’ve run across numerous customers who are looking for cloud benefits but aren’t ready to go to VS Online – for any number of reasons. I asked the Ranger team to put together some guidance on helping people make this decision and then best practices should the decision be to go with TFS on Azure VMs.

Visual Studio “14” CTP available as an Azure VM

Brian HarryJune 5, 2014Jun 5, 201406/5/14

This is so cool. Yesterday we uploaded the VS 14 CTP we released the other day as a VM in the Azure VM gallery. In the time that it took me to drink my morning cup of hot chocolate (I don’t drink coffee), I was able to spin up the VM, start up VS, connect to my VSO account (roaming settings made that even easier), sync my pro

The first Visual Studio “14” CTP

Brian HarryJune 3, 2014Jun 3, 201406/3/14

Today we released the first Visual Studio “V.Next” Community Technology Preview. You can read more about it on Soma’s blog post. Don’t confuse this with my announcement of the VS 2013 Update 3 CTP that I announced 4 days ago. We are doing development on the next major version of Visual Studio in parall

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