Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
VS Online & Power BI
I briefly described our new Power BI integration for VS Online in my //Build/ post last week. I didn’t however provide any details on how to use it. Jeff Levinson has written a very detailed walk through that explains many of the concepts and shows you how to get connected. Check out his VS Online Power BI tutorial.Brian
A Real Madrid story
Real Madrid is one of the biggest and most successful sports franchises in the world. Over the past several months we’ve been working with them to build some digital experiences to provide their fans the best possible experience. As part of that, they wanted to have a great way to understand how their mobile/cloud experiences were working for their customers. Our Application Insights team has been working with them to instrument all aspects of their application – mobile devices, backend services, etc. to give a 360 degree view of the customer experience – reliability, performan...
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server at Build 2015
It’s conference season – //Build/ is this week and Ignite is next week. As you might expect, we have a TON of stuff to share so I’ll get right to it. Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2015 Release Candidate This week released the release candidates for both VS 2015 and TFS 2015. Both are “go-live” releases and are reliable enough to be used in production environments. At the same time, neither are finished so we know there are some remaining issues that we plan to fix between now and the final release. Useful links: Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2013 Upda...
VS Online Update – April 27th
This week we are rolling out our Sprint 81 work. 3 instances have been updated so far and the remaining 3 will update over the next couple of days – so, as usual, you may not see the changes immediately. This update comes close on the heels of the last one. We just finished the sprint 80 update only a week ago. It was delayed because of the huge changes to support team project rename. Starting with this sprint, we should be back on a normal schedule. There are some VERY nice changes in this deployment. You can read the release notes. Our #1 support request right now is people w...
First TFS 2015 RC production upgrade I know of
I got the first customer report of a production upgrade to the TFS 2015 release candidate today. Understand, we haven’t released it yet but we gave an early copy to our MVPs to give us final feedback on. One of our MVPs reported that he upgraded a customer with a 9GB team project collection (not terribly large, obviously), and that it took 11 minutes. I was happy to hear that it was both successful and reasonably fast. This release has a lot of database changes to support Team Project rename and other things so, for large databases, we expect the upgrade times will be significant. To...
Team Project Rename available on VS Online
Today we enabled Team Project rename on all VS Online accounts. Team Project rename is our #1 User Voice request, by far and the longest standing customer complaint. 6,156 votes and 178 comments later, it’s here (both on VSO – today and in the TFS 2015 RC – available shortly). I know it’s been a long time coming and I appreciate everyone who has been both patient and persistent. I really hope this will address all the pent up demand and all the mis-named projects out there :) You can try it by navigating to your project in the VSO web experience, then hit the settings icon on the upper right. There are ...
TFVC & Git support
I got a question on a blog post about differences in TFVC and Git support in TFS and VS Online. Here’s a link to the question for context: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2015/03/12/the-future-of-team-foundation-version-control.aspx#10608301 I can’t answer in a comment with reasonable formatting so I’ll answer in a post. One thing you can check out is an MSDN topic on the subject here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181368.aspx. There’s some useful information there but I feel like that page is trying to do too many things at once – explain some of the ...
VS Online Update – April 10th
We are deploying our sprint 80 results this week. You can read the release notes on visualstudio.com. There are some very nice improvements for both the Agile tooling and Git. This is an unusual deployment. First it's delayed a week and second it's going to take a couple of weeks before all the instances of VS Online are updated. As I write this, only the internal "Canary" and European instances have been updated. Today we are starting 2 US instances. Later this week we hope to start the largest instance - and we expect that will take 4 days to upgrade. Why so stra...
Ever want to create bugs from email?
Someone recently posted an open source copy of a popular internal tool called Mail2Bug. https://github.com/microsoft/mail2bug It will automatically create bugs from an email and then keep the bug up to date with any further conversation that happens on the email thread. It works for both VS Online and TFS but requires that you use Exchange (or O365). Check it out... Brian