Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
The future of Team Foundation Version control
I've written about this before but it keeps coming back. From time to time I get the question "Is TFVC dead?" I guess I have to just keep answering it. No, it is not. We added support for Git in TFS 2013 so that we'd support the best centralized version control system and the best dvcs in the industry. We've been investing heavily in Git because there's a ton of work to do to bring it up to parity with what we can do with TFVC. I think people get confused for a number or reasons. We talk about our progress on Git a lot. The industry talks about Git a lot. And, if yo...
Visual Studio Online Update – Mar 10
Sorry for being a little late to the party this week. We are rolling out our sprint 79 build to VS Online build this week. You can read more about it here: https://www.visualstudio.com/news/2015-mar-10-vso. I haven't said anything about it explicitly but a while back we made the decision to increase our focus on burning down our UserVoice priority list. This week we delivered the #3 item on the list with 2,203 votes. Of course, we are also working on the #1 and #2 items. But, that's one very popular item delivered and 2,203 votes released to vote on something else :) As Aaron notes in the release notes, ...
VS 2015 CTP6 and TFS 2015 CTP1 shipped today
Today we shipped Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 and TFS 2015 CTP1. You can download both here: Download Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP You can also read the release notes to learn more about them: Please submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE. I know many people have been waiting a long time to see the first CTP of TFS 2015. I’ve even had quite a few people unsure of whether or not to believe that we actually intended to ship it :). We did. But, I keep telling people, that if you...
Visual Studio Online Update – Feb 18
Yesterday we began our sprint 78 VS Online deployment. You can check out the release notes here: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2015-feb-18-vso. there are a few nice improvements. It will likely take 4 or 5 days to upgrade all accounts so don’t be surprised if you don’t see the changes in your account right away. I also encourage you to check out our Features Timeline. We’ve made some updated recently, including some Agile/Kanban items, a Build.vnext entry, added a timeframe for Team project rename and more. Brian
Code Search on VS Online
In November, at our Connect(); event, I gave a sneak peek at a few features/services coming to VS Online, and ultimately Team Foundation Server. Among the things I demoed was a new source code search feature. I’m happy to say that the next step in that journey is upon us. Today, we announced a “limited preview” of our new Code Search capability. Limited preview means that not everyone will get access – you have request it and we will only enable a certain number of accounts. The feature is still early but it’s now at the point that it is very useful – we have been using it internally for more than a month an...
New page on VS Online Agile Tooling
We’re in the process of trying to significantly upgrade the content on our Visual Studio website. We’re starting with the pages that describe what VS Online is and why you might want to use it. The first new page is on Agile Tools. In parallel, we are also working to add some more educational/best practices content. I’m looking forward to seeing the site get better and better.Brian
Licensing changes – User acceptance testing and Agile planning
This is next in a series of licensing and feature changes that I laid out in December. With this, I think all of the cloud changes (and more) that I described have been made. Some of the on-prem changes will be available as we release more on-prem updates. User acceptance testing As of this week, you will no longer need a VS Online Advanced license to do user acceptance testing with Visual Studio Online. You will still need one to create and manage test plans but if you just need to execute tests, report results, file bugs, etc, then you only need a VS Online Basic license. Agile planning This w...
Hiring for VS Online and Team Foundation Server
Microsoft has an extensive recruiting effort. But we recently decided to try something new to try to find more people who might want to help build VS Online and Team Foundation Server. We added a Jobs page to visualstudio.com. It has a little info on what we do and links to job postings on the Microsoft careers site and some information about who we are. We've got quite a few positions open right now and are hoping to fill them as quickly as we can. This is a bit of an experiment. If it works well, we will probably expand it to include other parts of Visual Studio. Brian
Journey to cloud
Transforming a sizeable development organization from "classic" development practices to Agile cloud development is something I talk about a lot. Bhavik Shah, who used to work on our team, left Microsoft to go to business school and now works a Mckinsey, recently wrote an article on that transformation process. Buck Hodges, one of our Engineering Directors worked with Bhavik and others on it. It's a nice read: https://tmt.mckinsey.com/ The link is a link to the Mckinsey home page - I don't have a perma-link to the article. It's on the front page as I write this. The article is titled "From...