Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 18th

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

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

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

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?

I was out doing chores on my farm yesterday morning and ran across something surprising (to me, at least).  By the pig pen, we have an electric fence charger and it is covered by buckets.  For some reason I don’t understand (my wife did it), there are two buckets – one nested inside the other.  Yesterday, I removed the top bucket and ...

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. Licensing You’ll see that one ...

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 ...