Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
TFS 2015 Compatibility
As the release of TFS 2015 has approached, I’ve gotten a lot of compatibility questions. We were a little slow documenting the story but we have it now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/TFS/administer/requirements The short story is the TFS 2015 compat matrix is about the same at the TFS 2013 one was – we didn’t make big changes in that respect. There’s a few tweaks that I’d still like to see in the document but it’s close. If you find anything missing, let us know. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – July 7
I’m a bit late on this post. It’s been a busy week of travel. Last week we began deploying our sprint 84 release. Because of the logistics around finalizing our TFS 2015 release, it was delayed a bit. Sprint 83 is actually the last sprint that went into TFS 2015 RTM and we wanted to keep it live on the service longer while we iterated on the remaining bug fixes. But as of last week we moved forward. We’re now trying to “catch back up” and the sprint 85 deployment should be starting later this week. I’ll post again when I have something useful...
Team Foundation Server 2015 RC2 available
Today we released Release Candidate 2 of Team Foundation Server 2015. I believe this release is VERY close to the final bits we will ship. I’d encourage people to try out upgrades on production backups, pre-production environments and, production environments. We will support you regardless of the path you choose. Download: TFS 2015 RC2 Be aware that this TFS RC2 cannot be installed on the same machine as VS 2015 RC. It can be accessed by the VS RC just fine, but not installed on the same machine – this has to do with some versioning issues on some files that are shared between...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2015 RTM
We have released Team Explorer Everywhere 2015. It’s available on the Download Center and on the Eclipse Marketplace. Soma announced that VS 2015 will release on July 20th so stay tuned. This isn’t a particularly big release but it has some very welcome enhancements: Build.vnext and Team Project Rename are, of course, only available when using VS Online or TFS 2015. Please give us any feedback you have. Thanks, Brian
Team Foundation Server and VS Online adoption at Microsoft
Someone asked me in a blog comment recently to post an update on internal adoption – the last one was almost a year ago. I’m going to keep it reasonably short. The best summary is adoption continues to grow. TFS on-prem is growing slowly because it’s already huge. VS Online usage is growing more rapidly but is still far smaller than TFS on-prem. Here’s the latest TFS on-prem summary from our IT team that runs the production TFS servers: Here’s a month by month trend of VS Online adoption by major organization. The numbers look a little larger than they really are because adoption is still early and p...
Visual Studio Online Update – June 3rd
***PLEASE READ*** Ahh, my fortune for “delayed publish” in Live Writer. I was trying to grab screenshots for this and accidentally hit publish a day too early. The release notes won’t be published until tomorrow (June 3rd). I’m sorry for the inconvenience but with the number of people who get email notifications of my blog post, there’s no pulling it back, so I’ll just leave it up there. Today, we begin the process of rolling out our sprint 83 results. You can read the release notes to see the highlights of the new features. The kanban and task boards are making great progress towards having all the fea...
Visual Studio Online Update – May 15th
This week we are deploying our sprint 82 work for VS Online. This is a very BIG deployment – lot’s of stuff. You can read the release notes. First and foremost Build.VNext is here! It is now in Public Preview and everyone can try it. We also now have a hosted build pool so you don’t have to install a local build agent on Windows if you don’t want to. If you want to build on Linux or the MacOS, you will still need to setup up local agent for now. Since I offered a early peek at Build.VNext on my blog a month or so ago, I’ve been inundated with people requ...
A fun project for customer connection
Last week the VS Code team came to us saying that they really wanted a great experience getting bug reports from customers. Microsoft Connect just isn’t a pleasant experience. They looked at UserVoice and it’s great for suggestions but not optimized for bugs. We decided to pull a few people from across the VS Online team together and do a 3 day Hack-a-thon to see what we could put together. I’ve been blown away by what they accomplished. They shipped an increment at the end of each day – sometimes more than once, and delivered a fully functional experience at the en...
VS Online hosted in Australia
Today, we are expanding our VS Online footprint to include an instance in Australia. This adds to the several instances we have in the US and the one we have in Europe. It is part of our drive to make VS Online available to everyone, in a geography you are comfortable with and with performance you are happy with. Australia East is the Sydney/New South Wales data center. VS Online has logic to auto-select your region based on the IP address you are signing up from. It tries to default you to the “best” region for you. You can, of course, override it by choosing any of the regions from the list. The Au...