Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) released
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 full list of new features in the Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 RTM release notes and bug fixes in the Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 KB article. You can also watch a video about the release. I’ve blogged about the features before but I’ll reiterate that some of ...
A white frog?
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 inside it, I found a frog. It took me a minute to recognize it as a frog because it was so white it didn’t look much like a frog. I know frogs can change colors to match their surroundings but white? I’ve seen documentaries of incredible color changing animals but those are exot...
Explanation of July 18th outage
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’s small consolation to those who were affected. My main goal from any outage that we have is to learn from it. With that learning, I want to make our service better and also share it so, maybe, other people can avoid similar errors. What happened? The root cause ...
The rest of the story (about sand)
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 story… We’ve identified the underlying issue. The customer had an unusually large number of Team Projects in their account and some of our code paths were not scaling well, resulting in slower than expected response times. We have debugged it, coded a f...
Visual Studio Online Update – July 21
Today we began deployment of our sprint 68 work. There’s a bunch of really good stuff there. I say “begun” because deployment is a multi day event now as we roll it out across instances. Everyone should have the updates by tomorrow (Tue) afternoon. You can read the release notes to get details. Licensing You’ll see that one part of the licensing changes I described a couple of weeks ago are now live – addition of Test Hub access to the Visual Studio Online Advanced license. The remaining stakeholder licensing changes are still tracking to go live in mid-August. Stay tuned for more. Azure Active Directory...
Upcoming VS Online Licensing Changes
Through the fall and spring, we transitioned VS Online from Preview to General Availability. That process included changes to branding, the SLA, the announcement of pricing, the end of the early adopter program and more. We’ve been working closely with customers to understand where the friction is and what we can do to make adopting VS Online as easy as possible. This is a continuing process and includes discussions about product functionality, compliance and privacy, pricing and licensing, etc. This is a journey and we’ll keep taking feedback and adjusting. Today I want to tal...
Visual Studio “14” CTP 2 Available
I’m not going to make too big a deal about this because there’s going to be tons of them between now and when VS “14” ships. But we shipped another CTP today and you can learn more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/07/08/visual-studio-14-ctp-2-available.aspx We’re continuing the practice of making Azure VM templates available to make it really easy to try out the CTPs. We are starting to show some nice new features that are worth learning about. I think the lightbulb feature is promising, for instance. For reasons I explained in my last post...
TFS Adoption at Microsoft – July 2014
Years ago, I used to do monthly updates on TFS adoption at Microsoft. Eventually, the numbers got so astronomical that it just seemed silly so I stopped doing them. It’s been long enough and there’s some changes happening that I figured it was worth updating you all on where we are. First of all, adoption has continued to grow steadily year over year. We’ve continued to onboard more teams and to deepen the feature set teams are using. Any major change in the ALM solution of an organization of our size and complexity is journey. Let’s start with some stats: As of tod...
TFS Upgrade Improvements in TFS 2013.3
I’ve talked about this before but something happened today that got me thinking about it again. One of the necessary components of the rapid release cycle we are on for VS and TFS is an easy and seamless upgrade process. All through the 2012 Update cycle (.1, .2, .3) we worked on making the TFS Upgrade process easier and more reliable – mostly focusing on the upgrade leaving your server configuration exactly how it was. What caught my eye today was a mail from a customer titled: RE: [ TFS2013 ] Feedback - Upgrade to 2013.2 RC does not keep IIS settings required for Kerberos It was a respon...