Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Revitalizing the VS hotfix downloads
In my last post, I referred to "a couple" of VS2008 initiatives that we are breathing new life into. In that post I talked about our specification sharing process for Rosario. The second one we've been reinvigorating is our publicly available downloads. In the later part of the VS2008 product cycle, the site went a bit stale. We have updated with recent fixes and it now contains about 70 (and growing) available hot fixes. Feedback we've gotten before is that having this available is a big help to you. I hope this is still true and we are always looking for feedback. Brian
VSTS codename 'Rosario' Specifications begin to arrive
During the VS 2008 product cycle, we started several new initiatives to increase transparency. Some of them continued strong and some of them sputtered. We are breathing new life into a couple of them. The first to be reinvigorated it the specification publishing process. We'll be publishing early previews of specs for our Rosario release here. Right now, you will find 3 specs on TFS improvements there. It is my sincere desire to increase both the count and breadth of the specs that are available. To help focus the energy around the published specs, we have also created a forum...
November Rosario CTP is available
It's a bit of an anticlimax in the shadow of the Visual Studio 2008 RTM last week, but the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Code Name 'Rosario' November 2007 CTP is now available for download. Those you you who don't enjoy living on the bleeding edge can ignore it and bask in the glow of your shiny new VS 2008 download :) Those of you who've been using VS 2008 CTPs and Betas for a year or more and are wondering why everyone is making so big a deal about it actually shipping might want to take a peak at the Rosario CTP. Please keep in mind that this is not a Beta - it is still a very early look at t...
Update #2 on Installation Questions
The problems with getting TFS Workgroup Edition from MSDN Subscriber downloads should now be resolved. It has now been made available to all appropriately licensed subscribers and should show up in your list of download choices. If you still can't see it and you believe you should, let me know and we'll investigate. Sorry for the delays. I can't say I fully understand the logic but in an attempt to limit the download spike in bandwidth, they scheduled the availability of various product downloads over the first week after RTM. Brian
Update for Visual SourceSafe coming
We are working on an update for Visual SourceSafe 2005 to make it work with VS 2008. We had originally planned to have it available at the same time as VS 2008 downloads went live but we hit a last minute bug that is taking a little time to work out. Our current expectation is that it will be available in mid December. I will announce it as soon as it is. In the meantime, if you need to use SourceSafe with VS 2008, there is a CTP of the update available - although it requires one manual work around for during installation. You can read more about it on Richard's blog here: http://blogs.msd...
Update on Akamai download problems
In my "questions..." post, I referenced a blog post by Richard Hundhausen detailing his bad experience using the Akamai download manager to get VS 2008. It appears it has been a very hot topic in the blogosphere. People have been working not stop to address the issues and we apologize for the problems. We are moving to both patch the issues in the Akamai download manager and to provide more of the content via the MSDN download manager. The problem, of course, is that we fear MSDN may not be able to handle all of the load so we are watching it carefully. Status I saw on Tuesday showed...
Update #1 to Installation Questions
We have tracked down the URL for downloading Team Explorer 2008 from microsoft.com (when I first wrote the post I wrote that I didn't know where it was). The url is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0ED12659-3D41-4420-BBB0-A46E51BFCA86&displaylang=en I have since updated the original post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/22/2008-installation-questions.aspx so that future readers can find it and not have to thread all of the updates together. Remember to use Team Explorer 2008, you need a 2008 TFS CAL. The only way you could have that right now is...
Visual Studio 2008 SDK has been released
Along with the RTM of VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 and .NET 3.5 this week, we have released a compatible version of the Visual Studio SDK. The changes to the TFS portion of this SDK are fairly minimal. We updated all of the TFS samples so that there are both VB and C# versions and we updated the TFS object model assemblies to the TFS 2008 versions so that you can build TFS 2008 applications now. Beyond those TFS features, the new SDK also includes: · Visual Studio Shell development support · Enhancements...
TFS Licensing Change for TFS 2008
We made one significant licensing change for TFS with the release of TFS 2008. We've gotten a lot of feedback over the past 2 years that there are classes of users who make very light use of TFS and for those users a $500 CAL (list price) is just too much. Most of these scenarios involve some kind of very infrequent access to work item tracking. We've decided to tackle one of the scenarios with licensing changes in 2008. The new licensing provisions are designed to make it easy if you want to allow lots of people in your company to use TFS to file bugs, feature requests, etc and have them availa...