Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
A bit more on the Feb 3 and 4 incidents
Please read my post from yesterday first. Unfortunately I had a family commitment and had to leave early Friday afternoon before the post was complete. I asked someone on my team to finish it and he did an excellent job and I'm grateful. There are a few things I would yet like to add to the discussion. First I want to emphasize point #4 from the second incident. And note, I described the incidents in order of "worst" incident first. Actually, the second incident happened the day before the first one. That blip out to the right of the graph in the second incident was actually an occurrence of the very same ...
VS Team Services incidents on Feb 3 & 4
We had two serious availability incidents in the past 2 days. I'm incredibly sorry for the problems that these have caused. Increasingly we are bringing on more and more customers who rely on this service day in and day out and any significant interruption is entirely unacceptable. We know it. We live it. We breath it and, in the last 2 days, we have failed twice. We take this responsibility very seriously and continue to work to ensure such things do not happen. Both of these incidents were service wide incidents that affect large numbers of customers and critical scenarios. Worldwide outage causing log...
Package Management now available in Europe and Australia
When we first released the Package Management preview in November, it was only available in the US - If your VS Team Services account was in some region other than the US, installing the Package Management extension would fail. This week, we deployed Package Management instances in Australia and Europe (which are the only other two regions in which we have Team Services instances). So, as of this week, you can install the Package Management extension in any VSTS account and your Package Management instance will automatically be hosted in the same region as the VSTS account. Give it a try and let us know what...
Update Blog software
For months the team has been working on migrating our msdn blogs off of the "old" blogging system we used onto WordPress. In the last few days, my blog was migrated and is now running on WordPress. The system we had been using had gotten pretty out of date and clunky. I haven't used WordPress a lot but it generally has a good reputation and I'm looking forward to learning it and hope I'm really going to like it. Given some of the complaints I've gotten about the blogging software I've gotten over the past year, I hope you are going to see it as an improvement too. The new url is http://blogs.msdn.microsoft.co...
VS Team Services Update – Jan 25th
This week we are deploying the changes from sprints 93 and 94 (they spanned Christmas/New Years so we combined them into a single deployment. You can read the release notes for all the details.As usual, as I write this, the updates have not yet made it to all tenants but they will over the next day or two.This deployment has an unusually large list of improvements in it. I particularly like the test reporting improvements that continues the build + test + release management investment that makes 1 + 1 + 1 = 5. But there’s a ton of new stuff across the product.Also, keep an eye on the roadm...
Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap update
Today we are making a major update to our “Features Timeline” for TFS and VSTS. To remind you, the Features Timeline provides an indication of some of the bigger, higher demand things we are working on and when we think they will be delivered – both on premises in TFS and in the cloud in VSTS (formerly VS Online). A few caveats… It doesn’t represent everything we are doing - just some of the most highly demanded things. We'll continue to provide detailed release notes with every deployment/release. As with any prediction of the future some things may not turn out as we imagine. Right now the approach we’re ...
Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap update
Today we are making a major update to our “Features Timeline” for TFS and VSTS. To remind you, the Features Timeline provides an indication of some of the bigger, higher demand things we are working on and when we think they will be delivered – both on premises in TFS and in the cloud in VSTS (formerly VS Online).A few caveats… Right now the approach we’re taking with this is to update the roadmap about every 3 months and to project about 6 months ahead. There are other forums – blog posts, conference presentations, sales engagements, etc. where we provide h...
Team Explorer Everywhere 14.0.2 released
We recently released a small update to Team Explorer Everywhere – a cross platform command line and Eclipse plug-in for working Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services.You can download it here: Improvements include: Brian
Is your stomach bigger than your eyes?
For the past several months, friends have been bugging me to write another farm post – it’s been quite a while. The problem is that I haven’t been able to think of anything terribly interesting. Most farm work does make for a good blog post – chores, feeding, cutting hay, repairing fences, … Just not great content for an interesting post. Well today I had an experience that I thought was worth sharing. It’s Wed Dec 23rd and I’m off work. I’ve been doing a lot of farm work but, in the last couple of days, it has been raining like crazy – over 4 inches, I think. My fields are like huge grassy ponds and t...