Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 is available
Today released CTP 5 of Visual Studio 2015. This is not a “go-live” build but is getting close to functionally complete. If you’re curious what’s coming in VS 2015, check it out. Once again, we did not release a TFS preview with this VS CTP, however, this is the last time. Our next VS 2015 preview will also include a preview of TFS 2015. So, if you’ve been wondering where it is, you won’t have to wait too much longer. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio Online ISO 27001 Certification and European Model Clauses
In December, we hit an important milestone for Visual Studio Online. We received ISO 27001 certification and added the European Model Clauses to our service terms. We take protection of customer data very seriously and work hard to ensure your data is safe and that we comply with expected policies in all the regions in which we operate. These two milestones are important steps on a journey of increasing our guarantees and documenting our adherence to our policies. Here’s a nice image of our certification document (blushing with pride :))… You can find the documentation on our inclusion of European ...
Build & Load Test pricing changes are in effect
The changes to the VS Online build and load testing services that I described a few weeks ago are now complete. This represents a substantial reduction in price for both services. We’ve also removed the 10 user limit of Visual Studio Online Professional subscriptions. The slider goes up to 100 now. You can contact support if you need more than that. You can see the latest VS Online Pricing on the pricing page. Last, but not least, the change to remove the per-processor charges for Team Foundation Server on-premises release management capability has also been removed. The rest of the changes...
Git vulnerability with .gitconfig
Today the Git community disclosed an issue in Git that, in the worst case, could allow a developer’s machine to be taken over. This is an issue that manifests across much of the Git ecosystem and is not unique to Microsoft’s Git implementation or to Windows. I’ll describe the problem and the steps we’ve taken to ensure our customers using Git repositories are protected against this issue. First, I want to thank the Hg (Mercurial) community for their help. An analogous issue was discovered in Hg. They took the time to look at Git and discovered that the same issue ex...
Improved Welcome/Wiki experience
I mentioned this in my post on the sprint 75 deployment and I wanted to include a video but it wasn’t ready. Now it is and I want to share it. Keep in mind that the deployment is still in progress so it may not be available in your account yet. The deployment should be done by tomorrow (Friday). https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/briankel/Lightweight-Web-Editing-with-Markdown-Files-in-Visual-Studio-Online I’m just tickled at how nicely this experience is turning out. I hope you like it too. Of course, all of this will show up in TFS 2015 too. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 17
This week we are deploying our sprint 75 results. You can read details on the VS Online release notes. For whatever confluence of reasons, a lot of things came together in this sprint an there’s a ton of new stuff that I think you will like. One of my personal favorites is the updated Wiki/Welcome page experience. It’s now incredibly easy to create and update Wiki pages using markdown in VS Online. I encourage you to check it out. This is the last deployment of this year. In fact, we’ll be honoring our tradition of skipping the deployment that overlaps heavily with ...
A new Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server Features Timeline
We are always working on ways to communicate more effectively with customers about what we have done, what people like and don’t like, what they want, what we’re planning, etc. A year or so ago we added a Features Timeline page to our News section of visualstudio.com as one step in that journey. The news section, for VS Online particularly, announces the new features that we’ve deployed each sprint. The Features Timeline then maps those new features to the on-premises TFS release you can find them in. Here’s an example snippet: At the same time, it’s all backward looking – stuff we’ve already done an...
Microsoft acquires HockeyApp
I’m excited to announce our acquisition of HockeyApp – the next step in our journey to turn Application Insights into the best tool in the world for helping you get insight into your applications. With HockeyApp we add great support for mobile devices, allowing you see more of your application and helping you answer: 1) Is my application available/reliable? 2) Is my application performing? 3) Is my application succeeding – allowing my users to accomplish what they intend and delivering on my business goals? HockeyApp brings a fantastic solution for: And HockeyApp provides fantastic support fo...
More pricing and licensing changes coming
Earlier this year, we started a process of reviewing our pricing and licensing for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online. Our intent was to review all of the customer feedback we’ve received to look for changes that would simplify purchasing and make it more affordable for teams to include everyone in the broader organization who needs to interact with the development team. I previewed the first set of changes in July which included a new Stakeholder license that enables people outside the “development team” to track progress, make suggestions, file bugs, etc. This means th...