Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 2nd
This week we are rolling out the sprint 74 updates to VS Online. You can read details about the features on the service news page. There’s nothing huge here. After the larger announcements we made at Connect(); in November, we’re back to iterating on and improving capabilities more incrementally. For large organizations, my favorite improvement is the new identity control. As it evolved, I kept asking the team to try to make it work like address resolution in Outlook works – I like it a lot. It’s not quite the same because we don’t have a local copy of the add...
Outage on Monday Nov-24
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 something went wrong. Then I woke up Monday morning to see that we were in the middle of an incident. It started at 7:00 UTC (11:06 Sunday night, PST). By the time I got online at about 11:30 UTC, the team had been engaged for hours and were working diligently o...
Special Offers from Visual Studio Partners
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 out this short video on Channel 9 to learn more about the partner ecosystem and these great offers. These offers are live on the MSDN Special offers page and include: We just added another partner offer with Team Companion Bridge the gap between stakeholders and d...
Incident response
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 acceptable. I know it disrupted important work happening for our customers and we take that very seriously. At the same time, they happen. Nothing you can do can ever 100% prevent them. As a result, how you respond to them is as important as the work you do to prevent them. I wante...
News from Connect();
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 Online & TFS in the not too distant future. We did *not* release a preview of TFS 2015 today – not because we aren’t working on it but rather because we’ve found that shipping these capabilities to VS Online is by far the fastest way to provide you with a preview of what is coming ...
Connect(); is today
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 live stream – it starts at 10:00am eastern time (the times on the website appear to be Pacific time). Looking forward to chatting with you today. I’ll try to keep up with blog comments, etc today. It’s a pretty busy day so I may not be prompt wi...
VS Online Data Protection
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 presentation, he also put together a VS Online Data Protection document to share the information even more broadly. You’ll find it hosted along with other key service documents (like our service level agreement) on the VS Online support page. In addition to working ...
Super simple load test trial experience
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 having a conversation about whether or not we want to leave it that way but that's the status for now. If you go to your account home page on any VS Online account, you’ll see a new top level tab. If you click on it you’ll get a page that allows you to run a very sim...
TechEd Europe 2014 News
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, we announced a new extensibility approach for VS Online, and ultimately for TFS too, based on REST, OAuth and Service Hooks. Today, we announced that the V1.0 of these APIs are now final. That’s not to say, by any stretch, that we are done with the APIs completely but rather th...