Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
New TFS offline support in Beta 2
Matias did a very nice write up of the new TFS version control offline support that is now available in Beta 2. I thought it would be good to share it with you. He mentions one issue about having to close and reopen the solution - we are looking into that problem now. Overall, the offline experience for TFS in 2005 was not very good. We improved it a bit with the Power Tool offline support but now it's markedly better with the new integration into the IDE. We're certainly interested in any feedback you have about it. Brian
Upgrading to Orcas Beta 2
With Orcas Beta 2 now available, I'm starting to see questions about the upgrade process and the availability and interoperability of other components (that don't ship in the box with Orcas). Let me try to clear some of this up. VSTS Web Access - This is the new web UI (formerly TeamPlain) that we acquired a few months ago. Our work to run it through the Microsoft release process for a Power Tool release is nearly complete. I'm expecting it to be available for download for licensed TFS users in the next day or two - watch for my announcement and list of improvements, etc. This version...
Orcas Beta 2 download URLs
Here's a long list of download urls to help you quickly find what you need... All the downloads are live!!! Below are links to landing pages as well as individual SKU downloads: · Marketing launchpad http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ · Express landing page is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/future/downloads/default.aspx SKU download sites: Other download sites include: Akamai (which is referenced in the Microsoft.com download pages for f...
Orcas Beta 2 is Available!
Unfortunately, I don't have much time to write something up right now, but I wanted to let you know that Orcas Beta 2 is available today. You can download it here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx You can also read more about it on Soma's blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/07/26/announcing-the-release-of-visual-studio-2008-beta-2-net-fx-3-5-beta-2-and-silverlight-1-0-rc.aspx The short of it is this... In the next few days I'll be publishing a post with the final Orcas feature set for TFS (did I mention it's basically done? :)). We're looking for y...
An interesting Agile viewport into TFS
David Anderson (who used to work on the MSF team here a Microsoft) continues to be a strong advocate of Agile development practices and has an interesting idea for how to manage a virtual whiteboard based on TFS work items. http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/DigitalWhiteboardExperime.html Brian
A Rosario Milestone
Yesterday, we signed off on the release of the first CTP for our Rosario release of VSTS. Rosario, as you may recall, is the code name for the release of VSTS that will follow the VS/VSTS 2008 (Orcas) release. We have not (and will not soon) be announcing anticipated timelines for Rosario, so for now you'll have to be happy with getting your hands on the bits to play with :) I believe this first CTP will actually be called CTP8 (that's what we call it internally). That's because it's the CTP after the 8th iteration of development. The next CTP will be after iteration 10 and will be in abou...
Finalized guidance published for WSS 3.0 support with TFS 2005
Jeff Beehler blogged today about the final release of the WSS 3.0 guidance. It hasn't changed much from the "pre-release" version but has incorporated some feedback. If you have already successfully used the guidance, you are set. If not, you can check this out. Of course, Orcas is coming pretty soon and it has WSS 3.0 support built in. This guidance was written by the VSTS Ranger team in concert with the TFS team. The Ranger team is a group of people with Microsoft Consulting Services experience who work closely with the VSTS product group to provide out of band solutions to adoptio...
Update on adoption of TFS at Microsoft
Our internal adoption team produced an update on our status this week and I thought I'd share the results with you. We're now up to 21 TFS instances in production, hosting a total of 734 projects about 5,600 users. 2 of those instances are running an Orcas Beta 2 build. 3 are running a very early build of Rosario. and the other 16 are running TFS 2005. We plan on upgrading the remaining TFS 2005 instances to Orcas (TFS 2008) in August. I know I've talked before about the Office's adoption of TFS for project management. Their use has really taken off over the pa...
SR1 of VSTS for Database Professionals released
Yesterday we released a servicing release for VSTS database role product. The improvements include: • Cross-database referencesSupport is improved to enable you to reference objects in different databases by using database project references or referencing a database metafile (.dbmeta). This support will reduce or eliminate the cross database reference warnings within a database project.• Improved file support within SQL Server file groups You may define files within file groups as database project properties instead of having to create files and file groups within the pre-deployment storage scrip...