Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

Explanation of July 18th outage

Sorry it took me a week and a half to get to this. We had the most significant VS Online outage we’ve had in a while on Friday July 18th.  The entire service was unavailable for about 90 minutes.  Fortunately it happened during non-peak hours so the number of affected customers was fewer than it might have been but I know that&...

The rest of the story (about sand)

A month ago I wrote about our newly enabled capability to measure quality of service on a customer by customer basis.  In that post I mentioned that we had actually identified a customer experiencing issues before they even contacted us about them and had started working with them to understand the issues.  Well, the rest of that ...

Visual Studio Online Update – July 21

Today we began deployment of our sprint 68 work.  There’s a bunch of really good stuff there.  I say “begun” because deployment is a multi day event now as we roll it out across instances.  Everyone should have the updates by tomorrow (Tue) afternoon.  You can read the release notes to get details. ...

Upcoming VS Online Licensing Changes

Through the fall and spring, we transitioned VS Online from Preview to General Availability.  That process included changes to branding, the SLA, the announcement of pricing, the end of the early adopter program and more.  We’ve been working closely with customers to understand where the friction is and what we can do to make ...

Visual Studio “14” CTP 2 Available

I’m not going to make too big a deal about this because there’s going to be tons of them between now and when VS “14” ships.  But we shipped another CTP today and you can learn more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/07/08/visual-studio-14-ctp-2-available.aspx We’re continuing ...

TFS Adoption at Microsoft – July 2014

Years ago, I used to do monthly updates on TFS adoption at Microsoft.  Eventually, the numbers got so astronomical that it just seemed silly so I stopped doing them.  It’s been long enough and there’s some changes happening that I figured it was worth updating you all on where we are. First of all, adoption has continued ...

TFS Upgrade Improvements in TFS 2013.3

I’ve talked about this before but something happened today that got me thinking about it again.  One of the necessary components of the rapid release cycle we are on for VS and TFS is an easy and seamless upgrade process.  All through the 2012 Update cycle (.1, .2, .3) we worked on making the TFS Upgrade process easier and more...

VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) RC

Today we are releasing Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3. You’ll find a complete list of download links in the release notes. This is a “go-live” release and is expected to be the last preview before Update 3 is released.  It will be supported in production, can be used to upgrade production...

Visual Studio Online Update – July 1

This week we are deploying our sprint 67 updates.  We've started on a set of small changes to the Agile Project Management experience and you'll see the first of them in this sprint's release notes: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-07-01-vso. Of course, we continue moving forward in other areas as well but I hope these will ...