Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

Application Insights extension for Visual Studio Update – May 12

Today we shipped an update (version 1.3) of our plugin for Visual Studio 2013 that makes working with Application Insights from Visual Studio really easy.  Improvements include: If you have any of the Preview releases, you can get the update several ways, including: If you don’t already have the tools, you ...

VS 2013 Update 2 and other TechEd news

Today at TechEd in Houston, we announced the final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2.  Remember that Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 released about a month ago.  You can get the Visual Studio update from the VS updates service in the IDE or look in the “Additional software and updates” section in the VS download...

A new API for Visual Studio Online

The “big” news that I announced at TechEd this week was a new API for accessing Visual Studio Online (and, in a future release, Team Foundation Server).  This new API is based on REST, OAUTH, Json and Service Hooks – all standard web technologies broadly supported in the industry.  The API is still currently in preview while we take ...

Visual Studio Online Update – May 1st

This week, we are deploying our sprint 64 work.  You’ll notice that there’s no update on the release notes page.  We decided to skip the release notes because there wasn’t really anything new to tell you about.  Why?  A couple of reasons – we released a bunch of stuff at Build less than a month ago, ...

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...