Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 7th
This week we are rolling out our Sprint 86 work. You can read details on the VSO release notes. Included is the next set of work to improve our Agile planning experiences and availability of a NuGet package for our TFS/VSO SDK. The NuGet package is a big step forward in making it easier to work with. You no longer have to mess with the complexity of getting an MSI installed. You can just copy the SDK files and you are good to go. Your app can be self contained and not have to worry about pre-reqs.The NuGet Package with work with TFS today and the Agile improvements will come to...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Final Release
Today we released the final version of Team Foundation Server 2015. TFS 2015 is a major step forward, with tons of improvements throughout the development process but with special emphasis on DevOps capabilities. Here are all of the TFS 2015 related downloads. Look under Visual Studio 2015 for things like Test Professional, under Team Foundation Server 2015 for TFS, Project Server, etc. and under Tools for Visual Studio 2015 for Release Management, Test Agents, etc. You can, of course, get TFS 2015 through your MSDN subscriber downloads and other places you normally acquire Microsoft softwar...
Included CALs and Tiered Pricing
I have to say that when I wrote my post last week on TFS and VSO related licensing and packaging changes, I didn’t think I’d be writing another one quite so soon. But I found out that we’re disclosing the next set of changes this week to help people plan, even though they don’t go into effect for another month. This isn’t some random path we are on. We have a reasonably clear picture of where we’re headed and we have quite a number of changes we are making on that journey. Please don’t ask me to describe the destination quite yet because I’m not re...
Self forming teams at scale
I want to share with you all a strange thing that we do. It’s unorthodox but has been very successful for us. Teams change. People come. People go. People move around. Reorgs happen. This is a fact of life, particularly in any large organization, and something managers spend a fair amount of time on – recruiting, re-recruiting, managing, developing, etc. Many years ago (I want to say around 2008), we had a reorg to do. In general, we do them every couple of years, usually associated with some big milestone/inflection, and use them to rebalance, apply talent to the new problems, fund new projects, etc...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 5 RC Available
As part of the 2015 wave of releases, in addition to the 2015 products and a 2013 Update 5, we are also releasing a VS 2012 Update 5 (not one for TFS 2012 though). This Update includes a few bug fixes. The most notable, from my perspective, are some changes to make using VS 2012 with a TFS or VS Online Team Project that gets renamed. This update will handle some of the local reaction work, like workspace updates, automatically rather than relying on manual fix-ups. You can find information on the release candidate here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=615776 I don’t have a date for ...
Licensing and packaging changes for TFS 2015
Over the past year, we have been working to simplify licensing for Team Foundation Server and make things as straight forward as possible for customers to adopt it. This has included changes like the introduction of the Stakeholder plan for broad access to work items within the organization, simplifications to release management to eliminate per deployment environment billing, reductions in cloud load testing prices and more. You’ll find some previous posts here: Today I want to tell you about another set of changes we are making that I think will move us yet another step forward. All of thes...
Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Released
Today, we released Visual Studio 2015, .NET 4.6, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 5. As I announced in a post a few weeks ago, Team Foundation Server 2015 is going to take just a bit longer (more on this in a minute), but you can get RC2 now if you like and it will work just fine with VS 2015 (and other versions too). We’re having an online event today to talk about this wave of releases if you want to learn more. I won’t repeat all of the great content on the Visual Studio blog post or on Soma’s post. Check those out for lots more info on what&rsquo...
Visual Studio Online Update – July 17
I told you a week or so ago it would come quickly :) We’re deploying our Sprint 85 work now. As always, it will take a few days for it to make it across the entirety of the service. You can find the details on the new capabilities in the release notes. I think you’ll be pleased to see a whole bunch of new Agile planning improvements. One of the “small” changes to the card styling feature macro support. Greg gave one example in the release notes. I thought I’d share a few more that someone sent around in an internal email to spark your thinking on how you might creatively use these. The Sprint 86...
Update on Team Foundation Server RC2
I wrote a post about a week ago announcing TFS 2015 RC2. Today, we released downloads for the rest of the languages, along with release notes. All the information in my previous post is still accurate and the links all point to the updated downloads. Brian