Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Application Insights extension for Visual Studio Update – May 12
Today we shipped an update (version 1.3) of our plugin for Visual Studio 2013 that makes working with Application Insights from Visual Studio really easy. Improvements include: If you have any of the Preview releases, you can get the update several ways, including: If you don’t already have the tools, you can download the latest version here: As always, let us know what you think. Brian
VS 2013 Update 2 and other TechEd news
Today at TechEd in Houston, we announced the final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. Remember that Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 released about a month ago. You can get the Visual Studio update from the VS updates service in the IDE or look in the “Additional software and updates” section in the VS download page. We also had a ton of other “preview” announcements, including: I encourage you to check out Soma’s blog for more info on the first four and my post for more on the last one. Brian
A new API for Visual Studio Online
The “big” news that I announced at TechEd this week was a new API for accessing Visual Studio Online (and, in a future release, Team Foundation Server). This new API is based on REST, OAUTH, Json and Service Hooks – all standard web technologies broadly supported in the industry. The API is still currently in preview while we take feedback and refine it. The reason for the new API is we wanted to make it dramatically easier to integrate VS Online with other web based tools and to access VS Online from any mobile device – whether they are 3rd party commercial tools or custom ones you are building. Because we...
MSDN Magazine article on Application Insights
Chuck Sterling did a nice article on using Application Insights in the latest MSDN Magazine issue: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn683794.aspx Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – May 1st
This week, we are deploying our sprint 64 work. You’ll notice that there’s no update on the release notes page. We decided to skip the release notes because there wasn’t really anything new to tell you about. Why? A couple of reasons – we released a bunch of stuff at Build less than a month ago, we have a bunch of work piled up for TechEd week after next and we’ve been working on a bunch of infrastructure work. In fact, if you read the paragraph above carefully, you’ll notice that I said “This week, we are deploying our sprint 64 work”. ...
How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes
Someone forwarded me a link to a blog post that put a smile on my face today. I enjoyed reading how VS Online was such a natural journey for this person. I’d like to think Azure would be a great choice for hosting the app, but I’ll be happy that VSO is a satisfying starting point. Read it yourself… http://theagilecoder.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/how-visual-studio-online-won-me-over-in-under-90-minutes/ Brian
Creating installers with Visual Studio
Some years ago we discontinued support for creating installer projects in Visual Studio and directed people to InstallShield for that functionality. There were a number of reasons for that decision that I won’t detail here. However, there was vocal feedback from many of our users that they were very unhappy with that decision. I’m happy to tell you that yesterday, we released a preview of a new extension that will enable creating installers from VS 2013. I expect this extension will evolve and ultimately be included in a future version of VS. You can read more about it and find...
Is Microsoft abandoning TFVC in favor of Git?
No. This is an example of the power of social media. I had planned to ignore it but I’ve had enough requests for “official confirmation” that I guess I have to say something :). Last week someone tweeted “Microsoft phasing out the TFS version control repository and moving to Git. Unofficially confirmed at a TFS presentation” It caught on and created a minor retweet storm. It’s simply not accurate. I’ve been told it was the result of a misunderstanding generated in a hallway conversation between one of our MVPs and a customer at a presentation on TFS. Mis...
Visual Studio Online Update – Apr 8th
You probably didn’t notice that we did our sprint 63 deployment last week. I didn’t blog about it because there wasn’t much to say. We announced a whole bunch of new stuff at Build the week before and there wasn’t much new in sprint 63 beyond consolidating on the Build feature set and preparing for our next event – TechEd in early May. I suspect next sprint’s deployment will also be light as it’s the last deployment before TechEd and most of the work will be preparing for those announcements. I hope to see you at TechEd and, if not, I’ll see ...