It wasn’t until after I posted my “news” post this morning and I was perusing our news site that I realized that the first news post was almost exactly 1 year ago on August 6th 2012.  These are precisely the kinds of things that sneak up on you unawares.  Who could have guessed that we’ve been doing this for a year now?  It seems like it was just yesterday.

It’s been a busy year.  I spent a little time reviewing the news posts from the past year and figured I’d summarize some of the “highlights”.

• News feed and a new server status page
• Kanban support
• Dramatically improved source control experiences – syntax highlighting, diff, image diff, annotate, history, browse, find, etc.
• Server based build drops
• Released the service and announced a little pricing framework
• Account rename
• Work item tagging
• Git support
• Web based test case management
• OData support
• IaaS build VMs and support for Windows Phone, Windows Store and more
• Agile portfolio management with work hierarchies
• Code commenting
• Team room
• Cloud load testing

This is, of course, just a sampling.  Every sprint has brought continued improvement.  It’s pretty amazing to look back over it and realize how much has been done.  And there’s a long way to go.

There have also been issues along the way.  Our March 22nd deployment was a mess and caused at least one to two months of “fallout”.  Every failure is an opportunity to learn and get better.  Every success is an opportunity to celebrate and reinvigorate ourselves to do even more.

I continue to be VERY excited about how the service is growing and look forward to great things as we continue to evolve it.  As always we strongly encourage your feedback and suggestions.

Brian