Brian Harry's Blog

Sending email to a Team Room

August 26, 2014 Aug 26, 2014 08/26/14

Brian Harry

Here's a very cool way to use our new VS Online extensibility (that will be available in TFS V.Next) to enable sending an email to a Team Room.  Our new REST, OAuth and Service Hooks support can be used in countless creative ways. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/slange/archive/2014/08/26/send-email-to-a-team-room-with-vso-service-hooks-and-zapier...

Retrospective on the Aug 14th VS Online outage

August 22, 2014 Aug 22, 2014 08/22/14

Brian Harry

We had a pretty serious outage last Thursday all told it was a little over 5 hours.  The symptoms were that performance was so bad that the service was basically unavailable for most people (though there was some intermittent access as various mitigation steps were taken).  It started around 14:00 UTC and ended a little before 19:30 ...

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

August 19, 2014 Aug 19, 2014 08/19/14

Brian Harry

Well, today was my turn to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.  This morning I was tagged by both Adam Cogan and Scott Guthrie.  Tempting as it is though, I’m not doing it twice (image)   I don’t know if it’s typical, but Adam challenged me to complete the task within 24 hours.  I spent today thinking about how I would get home early ...

Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 18th

August 19, 2014 Aug 19, 2014 08/19/14

Brian Harry

Yesterday I rolled out the release notes for our sprint 69 deployment.  Check out the updates! P.S. the outage we had last Thursday was *not* caused by the rollout of updates (or, at best only tangentially so).  I’m hoping to get the outage retrospective written up tomorrow. Brian...

Visual Studio “14” CTP 3 available

August 18, 2014 Aug 18, 2014 08/18/14

Brian Harry

Today we released CTP of our next major Visual Studio release.  You can look in the release notes to see what is in it.  You can also read about the highlights on John’s post. There’s no startling new improvements in this CTP but lots of nice, smaller, things. Just a reminder, we aren’t shipping CTP ...

VS Online outage last week

August 18, 2014 Aug 18, 2014 08/18/14

Brian Harry

Let me start by apologizing for the pretty horrific outage we had last week.  I’ve been silent on it because I was on a “last family vacation” in Europe before my oldest son goes off to college.  Buck Hodges and others have been working hard on it.  I’ve been reading up on everything that happened and ...

VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) released

August 4, 2014 Aug 4, 2014 08/4/14

Brian Harry

Today we released the final version of Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 and Team Foundation Server Update 3.  You can get the update using the link below.  Note that the link includes both the Visual Studio & TFS downloads (among other things) if you expand the Details section on the page. Download Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 See the ...

A white frog?

August 4, 2014 Aug 4, 2014 08/4/14

Brian Harry

I was out doing chores on my farm yesterday morning and ran across something surprising (to me, at least).  By the pig pen, we have an electric fence charger and it is covered by buckets.  For some reason I don’t understand (my wife did it), there are two buckets – one nested inside the other.  Yesterday, I removed the top bucket and ...

Explanation of July 18th outage

July 31, 2014 Jul 31, 2014 07/31/14

Brian Harry

Sorry it took me a week and a half to get to this. We had the most significant VS Online outage we’ve had in a while on Friday July 18th.  The entire service was unavailable for about 90 minutes.  Fortunately it happened during non-peak hours so the number of affected customers was fewer than it might have been but I know that&...

The rest of the story (about sand)

July 23, 2014 Jul 23, 2014 07/23/14

Brian Harry

A month ago I wrote about our newly enabled capability to measure quality of service on a customer by customer basis.  In that post I mentioned that we had actually identified a customer experiencing issues before they even contacted us about them and had started working with them to understand the issues.  Well, the rest of that ...