Brian Harry's Blog

Outage on Monday Nov-24

December 3, 2014 Dec 3, 2014 12/3/14

Brian Harry

Just Friday, the week before, I was speaking to Buck about the incident we had the previous week and expressing a strong desire to avoid another incident anytime soon.  We agreed to postpone the VS Online deployment so that we didn’t have to rush it in a short holiday week and we could ensure that everyone needed was on hand in case...

Special Offers from Visual Studio Partners

November 20, 2014 Nov 20, 2014 11/20/14

Brian Harry

Last week at our Connect(); event in New York City, we made some big announcements regarding our ecosystem from a developer as well as a partner point of view.  In addition to those announcements, I wanted to call your attention to special offers for MSDN subscribers from some of our top Visual Studio partners.  You can also check ...

Incident response

November 19, 2014 Nov 19, 2014 11/19/14

Brian Harry

We had an incident on VS Online yesterday, starting at 1 AM UTC (5:00 PM PST).  The incident was caused by an underlying Azure storage incident affecting many stamps in several regions.  I don’t know the root cause of that yet but I’m sure I’ll find out. I want to start by apologizing for the incident.  No incident is good or ...

News from Connect();

November 12, 2014 Nov 12, 2014 11/12/14

Brian Harry

This week we had our “Connect();” developer event in New York.  We made a ton of announcements.  You’ll find a bunch on Soma’s blog, the Visual Studio blog, the Visual Studio ALM blog and in the release notes. At the highest level, we announced: I also previewed some features that will be coming to VS ...

Connect(); is today

November 12, 2014 Nov 12, 2014 11/12/14

Brian Harry

Our Connect(); event for developers is today.  I’m in New York getting ready for a few presentations I’m giving.  It’s going to be a busy day because we have a lot of stuff to tell you about – some of it, I think, pretty exciting and unexpected.  If you’ve got time, I encourage you to tune into the ...

VS Online Data Protection

October 30, 2014 Oct 30, 2014 10/30/14

Brian Harry

It’s not uncommon that I get questions about data security and privacy in Visual Studio Online.  It’s something we take very seriously, design for, test for and focus on. Jeff Beehler, who runs our compliance team, did a talk at TechEd Europe this week on our data protection approach.  As he worked to put together his ...

Super simple load test trial experience

October 29, 2014 Oct 29, 2014 10/29/14

Brian Harry

In order to make it super easy for anyone to get a tiny taste of what the VS Online load test experience is about, we added a new web based experience a few days ago. ***UPDATE 10/29/2014 12:30PM EDT*** - When I wrote this, I wasn't aware that it is only available to VS Online customers licensed with an MSDN Ultimate subscription.  We're ...

TechEd Europe 2014 News

October 28, 2014 Oct 28, 2014 10/28/14

Brian Harry

Today, in the keynote for TechEd Europe, we announced several cool new things… VS Online European data center We now have a VS Online instance in the Azure “West Europe” data center and it is open for business.  You can read more about it in my separate post. VS Online REST APIs and Service Hooks RTM This spring, at TechEd in the US...

Visual Studio Online is in Europe!

October 27, 2014 Oct 27, 2014 10/27/14

Brian Harry

Today we opened up our shiny, new VS Online instance in the Azure “West Europe” region, which is located in the Netherlands.  This is a big step and is the first of many more to come in making VS Online a truly global service.  I’ve been getting requests for over a year to provide the ability to host data in different regions – for ...

Visual Studio and TFS 2013.4 (Update 4) Release Candidate

October 16, 2014 Oct 16, 2014 10/16/14

Brian Harry

It’s time!  The Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013.4 and Team Foundation Server 2013.4 is here. I’ve written some posts about the CTPs along the way.  But I’ll give a high-level recap of the ALM improvements and talk about a few of the new things showing up in this RC. Work item tracking and Agile project ...