Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Team Services Update – Sept 2
Yes, I'm a bit late on this one. I was traveling to India and Israel in early Sept and didn't have a change to post about this. A little over a week ago we deployed the sprint 105 work to Team Services. Check out the release notes for details. We continued our journey this sprint to bring full process customization to Team Services with the ability to add custom work item types. Eventually this will lead to the full replacement of the Power Tools Process Template Editor with the new web based experience in TFS on-prem too. One of my favorite improvements this sprint is the new work item history experience. Th...
Paid extensions in the Visual Studio marketplace
It's hard to believe it but it's been almost a year since we introduced the Visual Studio Marketplace. It provides a single point of entry for finding extensions for Visual Studio, VS Team Services and VS Code - and since then hundreds upon hundreds of new extensions have been published. From day one, our vision was to enable the marketplace to be, well, a marketplace - meaning that part of its purpose is to provide a venue for extension authors to sell their creations. While I expect the vast majority of extensions will continue to be free, I expect to see an increasing number of high value, high quality exte...
New navigation for Team Services
In my blog post announcing TFS 15 RC1, I mentioned that we are working on a new navigation UI. In a somewhat unusual turn of events, it showed up in an on premises preview before it showed up in the cloud. Today we enabled the new navigation experience in Team Services, making it really easy for anyone to give it a try. This new experience is VERY much a work in progress. We know lots of issues remain and are working on them but it's time for us to start getting some meaningful feedback outside our own 4 walls. To minimize disruption, we've disabled it by default for every Team Services user. You must take ex...
Team Services Update – Aug 17
I missed a few updates while I was out over the summer but, hopefully, now I'm back on my normal cadence. This week, we are deploying our sprint 104 work to VS Team Services. It looks to me like it's a new record on number of items (defined by number of lines in the release notes) released in a sprint. You can read the release notes for all the details. A few things I want to comment on... I mentioned in a previous post that we are in the middle of some UI updates. One of the big areas of investment here is in pull requests and you can really see that work coming to life in this deployment. There's a long lis...
Pre-reqs for Team Foundation Server 15
A couple of aspects of this have come up on the post where I announced the TFS 15 RC1 and I thought it was worth a more explicit call out. First some context. We have 2 release "types" for TFS - major releases (TFS 2013, TFS 2015, TFS 15, etc.) and Updates (TFS 2015 Update 1, TFS 2015 Update 2, ...). We think about them very differently and have different promises around them. While nothing I say here should be taken too much as an absolute, they are the principles we try to operate by. Updates are intended to be "no-brainers". We work very hard in Updates not to break anything or change anything that might d...
TFS "15" RC1 is available
Today we released Team Foundation Server 15 Release Candidate 1. This is a "go-live" release, fit for production use and supported by our support team. You can find all the details on the following links: It's called RC1 because, yes, there will be an RC2. I don't expect an RC3 but that will depend on the feedback that we get. This release is "mostly" feature complete. It includes almost all of the major new features that we have shipped on VS Team Services and makes them available for on-premises TFS users - features like code search and package management. It has long standing top requests - li...
What I missed while I was relaxing this summer
I missed blogging about a ton of stuff that happened in late June and most of July while I was out. I'm not going to try to recap is all. You can find lots of it on the Visual Studio ALM blog or in the Team Services release notes. I do want to highlight a few things though. Hopefully, now that I'm back, I'll be able to keep up with all the news :) Brian
Where in the world is Brian?
I apologize for being away for so long. It's been a weird summer. I was out of the office for almost a month and have spent the last week furiously trying to catch up. So I've been absent from my blog for a while now. I'll fill you in on some of the details. Italy This year is my parent's 50th anniversary. My brother and I (well actually our wives) decided to take them on a trip to celebrate. We packed up my family (my wife and I + 4 kids) and my brother's family (he and his wife and 2 kids) and our parents and went to Italy. All told we were gone about 10 days (2 of which were just flying). We spent time...
Visual Studio Team Services Community Updates
I’m excited to see the recent surge in community activities around Team Services. Many meetups are taking place around the world in June/July where you can go and talk to Team Services users and fans in your area about some of the new features we’ve released recently and get some Team Services swag as well. You can also meet members of the engineering team in a few of these. The Team Services user community is increasingly engaging with each other and with us on Stackoverflow and Quora. We’re also getting a lot of great feature requests via our UserVoice site and via “Send a Smile” within Team Services. We’ve bee...