August 2014 | Brian Harry's Blog

How to purchase VS Online

Brian HarryAugust 27, 2014Aug 27, 201408/27/14

Brian Keller interviewed James Rice (he's on our business team) for Channel 9 about how to purchase Visual Studio Online. This may clear up any uncertainty you have. https://aka.ms/HowToBuyVSO Brian ...

Stakeholder license is live

Brian HarryAugust 27, 2014Aug 27, 201408/27/14

About 6 weeks ago, I announced a plan to make some licensing changes to VS Online and Team Foundation Server that would make it easier for more people to participate in the development process. A few weeks ago, we did part 1 by enabling Test Hub access for VS Online Advanced licenses. Today we have completed step 2 by enabling the ...

Sending email to a Team Room

Brian HarryAugust 26, 2014Aug 26, 201408/26/14

Here's a very cool way to use our new VS Online extensibility (that will be available in TFS V.Next) to enable sending an email to a Team Room. Our new REST, OAuth and Service Hooks support can be used in countless creative ways. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/slange/archive/2014/08/26/send-email-to-a-team-room-with-vso-service-hooks-and-zapier...

Retrospective on the Aug 14th VS Online outage

Brian HarryAugust 22, 2014Aug 22, 201408/22/14

We had a pretty serious outage last Thursday all told it was a little over 5 hours. The symptoms were that performance was so bad that the service was basically unavailable for most people (though there was some intermittent access as various mitigation steps were taken). It started around 14:00 UTC and ended a little before 19:30 ...

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

Brian HarryAugust 19, 2014Aug 19, 201408/19/14

Well, today was my turn to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This morning I was tagged by both Adam Cogan and Scott Guthrie. Tempting as it is though, I’m not doing it twice I don’t know if it’s typical, but Adam challenged me to complete the task within 24 hours. I spent today thinking about how I would get ...

Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 18th

Brian HarryAugust 19, 2014Aug 19, 201408/19/14

Yesterday I rolled out the release notes for our sprint 69 deployment. Check out the updates! P.S. the outage we had last Thursday was *not* caused by the rollout of updates (or, at best only tangentially so). I’m hoping to get the outage retrospective written up tomorrow. Brian...

Visual Studio “14” CTP 3 available

Brian HarryAugust 18, 2014Aug 18, 201408/18/14

Today we released CTP of our next major Visual Studio release. You can look in the release notes to see what is in it. You can also read about the highlights on John’s post. There’s no startling new improvements in this CTP but lots of nice, smaller, things. Just a reminder, we aren’t shipping CTP ...

VS Online outage last week

Brian HarryAugust 18, 2014Aug 18, 201408/18/14

Let me start by apologizing for the pretty horrific outage we had last week. I’ve been silent on it because I was on a “last family vacation” in Europe before my oldest son goes off to college. Buck Hodges and others have been working hard on it. I’ve been reading up on everything that happened and ...

VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) released

Brian HarryAugust 4, 2014Aug 4, 201408/4/14

Today we released the final version of Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 and Team Foundation Server Update 3. You can get the update using the link below. Note that the link includes both the Visual Studio & TFS downloads (among other things) if you expand the Details section on the page. Download Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 See the ...

A white frog?