Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Giving feedback
Six months ago I wrote a post on Taking Feedback. Several people asked me to write a follow up on giving feedback. Amazing how time flies and somehow I just haven’t gotten around to it – so I’m doing it now. Here's a key snippet from the Taking Feedback post if you don't want to go read the whole thing... At some level, all feedback is valid. It is the perception of another person based on some interaction with us. As such it’s important that we listen, understand and think about how we can improve. Yet, not all feedback is to be taken as given – meaning the person giving the feedback may have heard somet...
All good things…
After more than 23 years at Microsoft, I’ve decided it’s time for me to take a break. Starting March 12th 2018, I’ll be taking a leave of absence for a year. Deciding to do this has been one of the most gut-wrenching decisions of my life. As someone who has largely defined myself by the work I’ve done, it’s incredibly hard to imagine life without going to work and working 10 hours every day. But, after a few years of debate with my wife, we’ve decided that it’s time to take a break and dedicate more time to home and family for a while. I have no fear of having nothing to do. I have learned over the past 10 yea...
VSTS Update – Mar 5
This week we began rolling out the sprint 131 updates. You can get the details in the release notes. There are some good things in this sprint payload (a good start at a new Work items hub, Azure DevOps projects support for VMs, improved GitHub integration, release badges and more). At the same time, this isn't the most value packed sprint. The reason is that we have some really big new things that will start coming to light in the next few sprints and much of the team has been busy working on those things. Stay tuned for great things that are coming. Brian
A good incident postmortem
I wanted to call your attention to a good incident postmortem done by Taylor Lafrinere this week. Taylor sits in my team room and, for a week, I saw him bent over his keyboard, often with two or three people staring over his shoulders trying to figure out what had caused this incident and what we needed to do to prevent it in the future. This is the kind of tenacity you have to have to, in the long term, run a highly available service. Only if you really understand the root cause and build mitigations and resiliency will you get there. It's a bit long and detailed but it's a good read. This is also a goo...
TFS Security updates
On Wednesday, we released a roll up of fixes for security vulnerabilities for several versions of Team Foundation Server. There are no new features in this update. Most of the vulnerabilities are related to cross site scripting (XSS), some of which were customer reported. The others include an improperly encoded API, a service endpoint editing experience which exposes a previously configured password, and a regex denial of service vulnerability in our web portal. We recommend customers install these updates. These fixes are included in the recently released Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. The release on We...
VSTS and TFS roadmap update
This week we updated the roadmap (Feature Timeline) for Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server. Check it out to see many of the significant improvements we are working on/planning. If you have feedback or suggestions for other improvements that are important to you, our User Voice forum is the best place to provide it. When we first envisioned the feature timeline idea, the thinking was to update it quarterly. However, over time, it turned out that didn't work well with our planning rhythm - that involves cross team backlog reviews every 3 sprints - or every 9 weeks. It made sense to do roa...
TFS 2018.1 RTM is available
Today we released the final build of Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. I've shared some key links in this post.
Goats up high
Let me start with a little background. Every year, we have new goats born on the farm - generally in March/April. Last year, we had about 10 or so. They live in the field with their moms until breeding season - ~October. During breeding season, we have to remove the young goats from the adult herd so they aren't accidentally bred - they are too young at that point. We don't have a great fenced area to put them right now so we put them in a large stall in the barn. All of that happened this year as usual. The other piece of information you need to know is that goats establish a dominance hierarchy and t...
TFS 2018 Update 1 RC is available
Today we released the release candidate for Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. I've shared some important links in this post.
Merging conflicts in the browser
One of the cool things about having VSTS used across all of Microsoft is that when there's some useful missing feature, one of the many teams using it might fill the gap and we get to harvest it and make it available to all VSTS customers. Exactly that has just happened. I've written several times about GVFS and the adoption of Git by our Windows team (Actually WDG - Windows and Devices Group). It's a big organization managing a lot of teams, branches and releases at the same time. Because of this they have a lot of code flowing around and need to merging the various streams of development. To help with th...
Twitter sentiment as a release gate
I'm really excited to talk about a new Twitter sentiment release gate extension in the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) marketplace today. Before I say more, let me step back and give some context... Any responsible DevOps practice uses techniques to limit the damage done by bugs that get deployed into production. One of the common techniques is to break up a production environment into a set of separate instances of an app and then configure deployments to only update one instance at a time, with a waiting period between them. During that waiting period, you watch for any signs (telemetry, customer compl...
A VSTS Release Gate with ServiceNow
Tarun has written a great post on creating a VSTS Release Gate that will gate deployments on approvals registered in ServiceNow. This is a great example of how you can use the extensibility of Release Gates to automate and integrate your release pipeline. Check it out! Brian
VSTS Update – Nov 28
This week we will be deploying our sprint 126 work. This deployment is probably one of the most complicated in a while. Quite a lot of it actually rolled out at our Connect(); event the week before Thanksgiving and then Thanksgiving week stalled the completion of the deployments so we are just getting back to it this week.  All the ruckus around Connect(); and Thanksgiving has caused the sprint 126 deployment to run up against the sprint 127 deployment. The sprint 127 deployment will begin to hit public rings within a week. Also, to be quite honest, the rush to get all of our new capabilities deployed and ...
Connect(); announcements
We're announcing a bunch of new things at Connect(); this week. It's an exciting time. Connect(); is an annual developer event where we focus particularly on improving the overall experience for developers. We've queued up a lot of good news and I wanted to share a few highlights - particularly from the DevOps space that I'm deeply engaged in. Team Foundation Server 2018 final release I'm excited to announce that we released Team Foundation Server 2018 this week. We've been hard at work on it since we released TFS 2017 Update 2 back in July. TFS 2018 is a major update to Team Foundation Server and has a to...
DevOps at Microsoft – lots of videos
My team is responsible for many of the engineering tools we use at Microsoft (affectionately called the One Engineering System or 1ES - paralleling Satya's "One Microsoft" mantra). As part of that responsibility we get to interact deeply with teams across the company and learn from what they are doing. We try to take the best ideas and harvest them for use in our own team and also share them across the company. We also deliver the same broad set of DevOps tooling to a wide array of external customers. As part of that responsibility we get to interact with customers of a myriad of sizes, in every industry. ...
DevOps @ Connect(); 2017
I am excited…There will be lots of news…at Microsoft Connect(); 2017 happening Wednesday Nov 15th in New York City. Please join the live stream starting at 10:00 AM EST for Scott Guthrie’s keynote, where he will showcase lots of new innovations across Azure, .NET, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services and more. At 3:00 PM EST, I am going to double-click on the DevOps news and dive deeper into the latest updates to Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services. Click here to drop a reminder in your calendar. Brian
Visual Studio Team Services in Hong Kong
Today we opened a new VSTS instance in Hong Kong - the Azure "East Asia" region. This adds to our instances in US, Europe, Brazil, India and Australia, giving us reasonably short distance access to every part of the world - except Africa. We will continue to build out local support in new regions and make sure we have capacity around the globe. You can read more details about the new instance and how to get started with it on our DevOps blog. Brian
Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 3 available
Today we released the final build of TFS 2017 Update 3. This release follows the release candidate and addresses all the customer feedback we have gotten and all the issues we have found in extensive testing. If you are on TFS 2017 or are upgrading to it, this is the release I would recommend for you. As I've mentioned before, TFS 2017 Update 3 is not a major feature release. For a while now (since Update 2), all our feature work has been rolling into TFS 2018 which already has an RC available. TFS 2017 Update 3 is, mostly, a bug fix release, with a roll up of fixes for customer repor...