Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
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Back by Popular Demand
Due to the demand for the VSTS Web Access v2.0 preview, we have again made it available on the devBiz site here: http://www.devbiz.com/teamplain/webaccess/download.aspx This is a pre-release of what will become the TFS Power Tool release of the VSTS Web Access feature. As I've mentioned before, testing has not yet been completed on it so some caution is advised. However, the list of improcements is compelling, so I understand why demand for it has been so high :) Of course, the previously shipping V1 download is also still available. Here's the list of enhancements the preview contains...
Update on Team Foundation Server Roadmap
It's been about 4 months now since I published the first Team Foundation Server roadmap. A lot has happened since then. For one thing, we've just about completed all of the feature work (final feature checkins will be this week). For another, we announced the acquisition of devBiz - which I knew was in the works when I wrote the first one, but couldn't talk about :(. We're approaching releasing Beta 1. Not all of the TFS feature work that I describe here will be in Beta 1 - we forked off Beta 1 for stabilization a couple of months ago and have been working on the final features for Beta 2 ...
New Forum on MSDN for Team System Web Access
In the last few days, we have launched a new MSDN Forum for discussions of Team System Web Access: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1466&SiteID=1 We have redirected the forums at the devBiz site to the new forum on MSDN. We had originally anticipated waiting a bit longer for this but we were having problems with SPAM on the devBiz forums. Fortunately MSDN has a reasonable spam filtering system. So the move saves us the time of manually filtering through the spam on the devBiz site. This change does not change the fact that the current downloads available fr...
Update on devBiz Acquisition
We're about a week past the closing of the devBiz (makers of TeamPlain Web Access for VSTS) acquisition and it's been a busy week. There's been a lot of interest and questions and people are really excited. Clearly there have been a lot of comments on my blog and on the devBiz forums. I wanted to give you an update on some of the issues that have been raised and what we are doing. As you know the V1 Web Access product is now available for download from the DevBiz website. Before the acquisition, there was also a V2 release candidate on the site but it was removed. ...
Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain!
Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser. The focus of TeamPlain is on work item tracking but it also includes some valuable version control capabilities (like viewing history/change sets, diffing files, browsing the source base, etc.), some SharePoint integration, Reporting services integration, and some upcoming build support. TeamPlain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach...
New Guidance on TFS
Check out the newly released guidance that the Patterns and Practices team has been working on for TFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/03/26/vsts-guidance-project-update.aspxIt includes: Brian
SD West and the Jolt Awards
On Monday of this week I was in San Jose at the SD West conference to give a keynote. I'm told that a couple of years ago we (Microsoft) gave a "marketing" keynote and the audience was extremely dissatisfied. So I went in with a very different approach. I did a talk on our experiences building TFS, a high scale enterprise ready, production server on .NET and SQL Server. I talked about all of the challenges we hit, mistakes we made along the way and amazing results we finally achieved. I also talked about the lessons learned - things to watch out for, etc when building a really high s...
TFS Branching Guidance
We get lots of questions about how to organize version control in TFS, particularly around branching. We've wrtten a white paper describing branching approaches and best practices. A lot of this is based on who we do it internally. Jeff wrote a longer article on it than I'm planning to so I'll just point you at his blog announcement :) http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/03/21/branching-guidance-now-available.aspx Bran
TFS 2005 & SQL Server 2005 SP2
I've gotten a bunch of questions lately about whether or not TFS works with SQL SP2. I confirmed today that all of our Microsoft production instances of TFS (about 15 of them) are running SQL 2005 SP2. So I have pretty darned solid confirmation that it works well. Just wanted you to know in case you were wondering :) Brian