Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Final word on unexpected VS 2008 Beta 2 expirations
The final mitigation for our unexpectedly expiring VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 Beta 2 VPC is now in place. Yesterday we uploaded new VPC images with the expirations changed. Again, remember that the issue only affects VPC images. If you installed the actual setups, there will not be any early expiration issue. You can read more about the background on this issue in Jeff's blog thread or mine. The new VPCs should not expire before March 2008 (as originally planned). Once again, I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused people. Releasing betas as VPCs is a fairly new process to us - th...
Bug handling on Connect & Transparency
I've blogged a fair about over the past couple of years on transparency in our process. I've also advocated for it a great deal internally. This post caught my eye today both because it is a great commentary on transparency and a great description of how we handle bugs that customers enter throught the http://connect.microsoft.com site. All too often I see the other side of it where a customer is upset because we rejected a bug and didn't provide any reasonable feedback as to why. We continue to work on making sure everyone in the division who deals with customer bugs is properly educated ...
Team System Widgets
I think I blogged about this site a couple of years ago but they recently improved it and it's worth another mention. This is the best site I've ever seen for finding a handy list of the multitude of additional Team System add-ons. I frequently complain to our marketing team asking "Why can't we have a list as good as theirs?" :). Since we don't, I still recommend Accentient's page as the best game in town. Brian
Error in VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 Beta 2 expiration date
Some time ago, I wrote a post about the Beta 2 expiration date saying that it would expire in March 2008. Well, for the non-VPC version that continues to be true, however, we have discovered that the OS image in the VPC is set to expire on Thurs, November 1, 2007 - only a couple of days from now and well before the March date that we believed it to be. I appologize profusely for the inconvenience this causes you. I want to thank J.Eggers for his comment on my original post informing us of the impending problem. Over the past week or so, we've been working hard on this and you may have seen sever...
TFS plugin compatibility between TFS 2005 and TFS 2008
As I've written many times, we strove to maintain a very high degree of compatibility between TFS 2005 and TFS 2008. One result is that either client can be used with either server. However, our success was not without exceptions. One of those is that any code you've compiled against the TFS 2005 object model will always run against the 2005 object model, never the 2008 object model. In many cases this is fine because the TFS 2005 object model works just fine against a TFS 2008 server. However, there are some cases where it is problematic. The biggest issue occurs when you are loadin...
TFS 2008 System Recommendations
We have just completed our testing for TFS 2008 scalability and are ready to publish the final recommendations on server sizing and hardware configurations. If you want to compare this to the TFS 2005 recommendations, you will find them here. Ultimately making capacity recommendations is a little like throwing darts at a board. The problem is that no two teams are the same. They use different processes, have different usage patterns, have different sized applications, are organized differently, etc. When we make estimates on things like how much load an average user puts on the system, we ...
Final set of TFS test patches released
Over the weekend we released the final set of TFS 2008 test patches for Beta 2 (see below for links). As I described in an earlier post, these patches fix real bugs but are primarily to allow us to test our servicing process and make sure that by the time TFS 2008 ships we are able to quickly release reliable patches with a good installation/uninstallation experience. If you have TFS 2008 installed, please try out these patches and let us know whether or not they work right away. You don't need to uninstall the previous round of patches if you've already installed them. There isn't th...
TeamCompanion – A new TFS Add-on for Outlook
Check out TeamCompanion by Ekobit. It's a new Outlook add-on that allow you to work with TFS work items inside Outlook. In addition to email integration and you favorite Outlook list management features, it also provides read-only offline access to you work items. They have a 30-day free trial here. Try it out and let me know what you think.Brian
Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF)
We recently did a small reorg and my team is now responsible for the MSF components that ship in Visual Studio Team System. This means I now need to understand it even better than I do now and work to make sure it's delivering everything you want. Coincidentally, Jeff Beehler wrote a post asking for feedback on MSF. I'd really appreciate it if you would leave any comments you have on MSF and what you would like to see as a comment on his blog post. I promise I'll read that feedback and use it to help shape what I think we should be doing in MSF going forward. Thanks, Brian