Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) RC
Today we are releasing Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3. You’ll find a complete list of download links in the release notes. This is a “go-live” release and is expected to be the last preview before Update 3 is released. It will be supported in production, can be used to upgrade production environments and will support upgrades to the final version when it is available. We expect the final release to be within the next month or two. There is quite a lot of stuff in VS 2013 Update 3. You can read about a lot of the detail on the Visual Studio blog or in the rele...
Visual Studio Online Update – July 1
This week we are deploying our sprint 67 updates. We've started on a set of small changes to the Agile Project Management experience and you'll see the first of them in this sprint's release notes: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-07-01-vso. Of course, we continue moving forward in other areas as well but I hope these will improve your experience. Busy week for me catching up from my week at the beach last week so I'm going to keep this post short and sweet :) Brian
Are customers a bag of sand?
I sometimes use an analogy to a bag of sand. I use it to refer to treating something in the aggregate. Each grain of sand can be inspected for mineral content, density, porosity, size, color, etc. but usually we just talk about how much of it there is. In software people sometimes use a similar technique to deal with customers, resources (oh, I mean people ), schedules, etc. Treating things in the aggregate is sometimes necessary but never forget what you are losing in doing so. Today I am excited. Maybe sometimes I’m excited by small things, but, none-the-less, I am excited. Some months ago, I wrote a p...
The effect of Updates
There was a question on one of our internal aliases today about version to version improvements in our test capabilities. One of the program managers in that area wrote a response that really caught my eye. Primarily because it seems like an awesome demonstration of the effectiveness of our “Updates” model. It’s a pretty cool, constant stream of value. Below is an excerpt from his mail that includes links to information on each of the new capabilities that have been released.VS 2012 (Microsoft Test Manager) - RTM: VS 2012 VS Update 1: ...
Use of SQL 2014 with TFS 2013
We’ve certified TFS 2013 (and its subsequent updates) to work with SQL 2014. However, there’s a hitch. Because TFS 2013 shipped before SQL, the license than grants the right to use it with SQL Server only allows SQL Server 2012. Starting July 1st, we will be adding SQL Server 2014 to the list of license grants for TFS 2013. That won’t, apply to earlier versions of TFS though – we haven’t even tested those with SQL 2014. Anyway, hopefully this will make your life a little easier if you want to use SQL 2014. Of course, you can keep using SQL 2012 if you li...
Visual Studio Online Update – June 10
It’s time for our sprint 66 deployment already! Over the next couple of days the update will be rolling out across accounts. The big news in this update is Pull Requests for Git repos. Pull requests are a workflow often used with Git whereby a developer makes some changes in a private branch. They then submit a “pull request” with is essentially a request for changes checked into that branch to be merged into another branch by the “owner” (or a committer in Git speak) of the target branch. That workflow enables a code review experience with back and forth discussions of the changes, refinements if the change...
VS/TFS 2013.3 CTP 2 is now available
Today we released the second preview (CTP) of VS/TFS 2013 Update 3. You can download it here. That I know of, there’s not much in the way of new features over and above what I listed in CTP1. The changes are mostly bugs fixed and features refined. I’ll remind you that CTPs are not “go live” and are only provided for “tire kicking”. I believe our next CTP is going to be “go live”, I’ll let you know for sure when it releases. Brian
Team Foundation Server on Azure IaaS Guidance
Over the last year, I’ve run across numerous customers who are looking for cloud benefits but aren’t ready to go to VS Online – for any number of reasons. I asked the Ranger team to put together some guidance on helping people make this decision and then best practices should the decision be to go with TFS on Azure VMs. They just released a preview of the guidance. It looks pretty thorough to me. You can check it out on Willy’s blog post. Feedback welcome as always, Brian
Visual Studio “14” CTP available as an Azure VM
This is so cool. Yesterday we uploaded the VS 14 CTP we released the other day as a VM in the Azure VM gallery. In the time that it took me to drink my morning cup of hot chocolate (I don’t drink coffee), I was able to spin up the VM, start up VS, connect to my VSO account (roaming settings made that even easier), sync my project locally and build my app. Very cool! Hopefully we can start doing this with every pre-release to make it easier than every to check out the new stuff with no risk and little time investment. Brian