Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
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VS 2015 Update 1 and TFS 2015 Update 1 are available
Today we shipped the final releases of Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 1. Here are the release notes: There were very few changes between the last release candidates and this final release – just a hand full of bug fixes. Check out the release notes for all the new stuff in this update – there’s a lot. You can install directly over a pre-release of this update (both VS and TFS) and it will update your installation. For TFS, you can also in-place upgrade previous versions (2013, 2012 and 2010) seamlessly. VS will install side by side with previous versions. Pl...
News from Connect(); 2015
Today is our annual Fall developer Connect(); event in New York. I’m here talking about a ton of new stuff that we’re doing to help developers adopt agile DevOps practices. Normally I would write a detailed post with screenshots and descriptions highlighting the news. However, this time, I’m going to take a different approach. There’s so much stuff to talk about that I can’t write that post – I’d spend days on it and you wouldn’t want to read it :) Instead, I’m going to write a directory of news.Over the next day or two, as blog p...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Management Pack is available
It’s been a painfully and embarrassingly long time coming but the SCOM Management Pack for TFS 2015 is finally available. Give it a spin and let us know if you have any feedback.Download TFS 2015 Management PackBrian
VS 2015 Update 1 RC & TFS 2015 Update 1 RC2 Released
We just released our final “pre-release” of Update 1 for Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio 2015. Lots of useful links are available here: You’ll find the installation links at the top of the release notes pages.As I was looking over things (and finding a few issues with the release notes page :)) to write this post, I was just blown away by how much stuff is included in Update 1. We just shipped 2015 and we already have a *ton* of great new improvements for Update 1. I strongly encourage you to check it out.It’s a bit too early to tell but I exp...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 30
As usual, you can read the release notes for this update on visualstudio.com. One of the most popular improvements released this sprint are our new dashboards. We’ve been dogfooding them internally for a few sprints now and some of my feature teams have put together some very nice dashboards. There are a number of tile types to choose from and you can add custom tile types to show whatever you like. Like most of the stuff we do in the cloud, this is just the beginning and there is lots more to do. Dashboards will evolve rapidly for several more sprints. Expect them to get better and better (like adding th...
Agile at Microsoft
Here's a nice Forbes article on Agile at Microsoft...http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/10/27/surprise-microsoft-is-agile/Brian
TFS Office Integration Installer
One of the things I forgot to mention in my post about TFS 2015 Update 1 RC is that we have also shipped a preview of our new TFS Office Integration Installer (ISO image). This new installer addresses a couple of scenarios: The PowerPoint storyboarding tool is a really nice way to mock up user experiences quickly and easily. You can leverage the PowerPoint skills you already have to build nice walk throughs of user flows before you invest in building them. In building TFS and VSO, we use is all the time. Here’s an example PowerPoint mockup from one of our walk-throughs of our new dashboarding fea...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 8th
Another post I missed last week was an announcement about our sprint 89 deployment for VS Online. You can read the release notes for details.Probably the biggest thing is support for Active Directory group support for managing permissions. This as been a very common request from our larger customers in VSO so they don’t need to maintain shadow groups in VSO and AAD.Another very notable thing is the preview of a new work item form. We are trying to improve the layout to make it “cleaner”, more extensible (setting us up for a good process customization story on the service) and r...
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 1 pre-release available
I’m a bit late to this party because we released them about a week ago. I generally try to sync my blog posts but we had a death in the family last week and I just didn’t have the time to deal with blogging.The Visual Studio preview is named “CTP 1” and you can read more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/10/08/visual-studio-2015-update-1-ctp.aspxThe Team Foundation Server preview is named “RC 1”. The reason for the difference is that we’ve learned over the years with TFS that unless we provide a “go-live” promise (sup...