Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Visual Studio Online is in Europe!
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 some it’s about the comfort of having their data on “home soil”. For others it’s about reduced latency to access the service. Whatever your reason, Europe is now an option for you. You can get started today by going to http://visualstudio.com and creating a new account. The accou...
Visual Studio and TFS 2013.4 (Update 4) Release Candidate
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 management improvements – This update includes a ton of “smallish” improvements to work item tracking. Things like trend charts, area path search, better embedded url support, performance improvements, full screen support and more. No single thing is likely to blow your socks off but, in t...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 14th
Today we began releasing our Sprint 72 build on VS Online. You can read the release notes on the site. As usual, it will take a couple of days for the changes to propagate across all accounts. This sprint was a pretty light sprint. We released the “Test artifacts as work items” changes, previously made available in TFS 2013.3, that enable customization (eventually), auditing, permissioning, querying, etc. We also introduced a small new feature to enabling copying formatted query results to the clipboard. The truth is we spent much of this sprint making progress on some of the f...
Visual Studio Online Update – Sept 23th
This week we are releasing our sprint 71 work on VS Online. You can read more about the changes on the news page. In the past, we’ve struggled with how to “time” the publishing of release notes with the deployment of the software. As we get more and more instances (we have 4 now and will be adding a 5th one soon), it becomes increasingly hard to get any timing right. Starting this sprint we are going to publish the release notes when the upgrade for the first public instance starts. That means the release notes will always be available a little before the features a...
Visual Studio and TFS 2013.4 CTP2 is available
Today we released the second CTP (community technology preview) of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and TFS 2013 Update 4. You can read about the VS changes on the Visual Studio blog. You can download the CTP. Or you can check out the release notes. Also here’s the link to the blog post I wrote on CTP1. TFS improvements in this CTP include: The addition of support for stakeholder licensing is certainly the largest change in this CTP. You can read more about stakeholder licensing. And you can go to the “Access Levels” tab in the TFS web access s...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2013.2 (Update 2)
Today, we released Update 2 of Team Explorer Everywhere. You can read details on Will’s blog post. I’ve been amazed lately how many people don’t know about Team Explorer Everywhere. We’ve had it for a couple of years now. It’s a really nice solution for Java/Eclipse users to use Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online. It includes an Eclipse plugin and a command line both of which run on Windows, Mac or Linux. I know quite a few customers who use it and like it but it continues to surprise me that, more often than not, when I mention using TFS on ...
SAFe with Team Foundation Server
Greg Boer posted a very detailed article on how to use the Scaled Agile Framework with TFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/09/11/scaled-agile-framework-using-tfs-to-support-epics-release-trains-and-multiple-backlogs-whitepaper.aspx Check it out, Brian
Visual Studio in Gartner’s Integrated Quality Suites report
Gartner recently released this year’s update to their Integrated Quality Suites report. This is the next version of the report I blogged about last year. We’ve worked hard over the last year to continue to improve our testing tools offering – for developers, testers and end users. We’ve made our testing experiences available via a web browser, reduced licensing requirements, improved customizability and more. It’s great to see that, once again, Gartner has placed us in the leader quadrant in their 2014 Integrated Quality Suites report after evaluating out integrated ...
Visual Studio Online Update – Sept 4th
We’ve recently started bring some larger Microsoft teams into VS Online. That has been a very enlightening experience. It has particularly highlighted issues with fit and finish for high bandwidth activities like bug triage, performance and scale issues with larger data sets, etc. This sprint (sprint 70), deploying today, we’ve delivered a large number of smallish improvements based on what we’ve learned. I think this pattern will continue for the next couple of sprints as we get everyone “settled in” to using VS Online in heavy daily use. **IMPORTANT** This deploym...