Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
VS & TFS 2013 Update 4 CTP 1 is available
I don’t know about you but it’s kind of hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we are already on the road to delivering Visual Studio 2013.4 and Team Foundation Server 2013.4. Update 3 wasn’t that long ago. Today we are delivering Update 4 CTP (Community Technology Preview) 1. As always, there will be a couple of CTPs – roughly 3 weeks apart, then a release candidate and a final release. So, the final release of Update 4 is still a ways off – Oct/Nov timeframe, but if you are interested in seeing it develop, the CTPs give you a good way to follow it. For TFS functionality, particularly early in the...
How to purchase VS Online
Brian Keller interviewed James Rice (he's on our business team) for Channel 9 about how to purchase Visual Studio Online. This may clear up any uncertainty you have. https://aka.ms/HowToBuyVSO Brian
Stakeholder license is live
About 6 weeks ago, I announced a plan to make some licensing changes to VS Online and Team Foundation Server that would make it easier for more people to participate in the development process. A few weeks ago, we did part 1 by enabling Test Hub access for VS Online Advanced licenses. Today we have completed step 2 by enabling the new Stakeholder license allowing an unlimited # of people in each account significant access to the work item tracking and Agile planning capabilities, at no charge. You can read my news announcement here: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-aug-27-vso. The fin...
Sending email to a Team Room
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.aspx Brian
Retrospective on the Aug 14th VS Online outage
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 UTC. This duration and severity makes this one of the worst incidents we’ve ever had on VS Online. We feel terrible about it and continue to be committed to doing everything we can to prevent outages. I’m sorry for the problems it caused. The te...
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
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 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 enough, how I would orchestrate it and where I would get the ice. I decided to do it on the farm (notice the cows behind me) and to have my kids help me. When I first told them that I needed their help, they moaned in exasperation at having to “help dad again”. When I told them, they wou...
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 18th
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
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 previews of TFS “14” at this point. Visual Studio Online is still your best way to check out the latest TFS improvements. Please submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE. Brian
VS Online outage last week
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 everything that’s been done. I need to spend some time talking with the team but I expect to publish a lengthy retrospective in the next few days. Stay tuned for more. At this point, I think enough has been done that we won’t see a recurrence of the issu...