Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Oh my – some dashboard candy that is life changing
A month or so ago we opened a Visual Studio Team Services instance in Canada and yesterday it occurred to me to wonder how that was going. I sent mail to someone who "owns" that scenario and after a little back and forth I had the answer. He then asked me if I wanted to see that data on a regular basis for all our instances and I said no, that wasn't necessary but that I'd like to track the growth of new regions for, at least, a few months after we launch them so I can understand how successful they are and what the uptake is. A few minutes later, he responded with a link and said I could use that to track it....
VSTS Update – Oct 30
This week we started our sprint 125 deployment. You can read the release notes for details. I won't comment too much on the new capabilities this sprint. There's a bunch of nice stuff but not a lot that is earth shaking. Our focus for the last sprint or two has been on some things we are going to unveil at our Connect(); conference in about 2 weeks (Nov 15 - 17). There's a small in-person component to the conference but a much larger virtual component available to anyone. I hope you will join us and learn about all the new developer focused stuff Microsoft has been working on recently. I'll be giving a D...
Team Foundation Server 2018 and SQL Server
About 6 weeks ago, I wrote a post announcing the availability of TFS 2018 RC1. In the comments, there ensued a sizeable conversation about the requirement for SQL Server 2016 or later (rather than also supporting SQL Server 2014). It was good to get the feedback. I read it carefully and we discussed it within our team. I wanted to wrap up that conversation in a very open way with the conclusion we've reached. We have decided to leave the requirement as it is (SQL Server 2016 or later) but will make some changes in our approach going forward. Why require SQL 2016? We decided to leave the requirement b...
VSTS Update – Oct 9
This week we are deploying our sprint 124 work. You can get all the details in our release notes. I'm running late this sprint so I'm going to keep my summary short. The biggest change this release is in the work items and code search experiences. We've significantly reworked the filtering UI to make it more intuitive and to provide more screen real estate for the results. I like it a lot better. I hope you do too. Other than that, there are a pretty large number of smaller things. Lots of really nice little improvements. One of my favorites (because I've been asking for it for a long time :)) is the...
TFS 2018 RC2 is available
Today we shipped the second release candidate for Team Foundation Server 2018. If all goes well, this should be the final release candidate. We'll make sure that all the issues you report are addressed and we'll ship the final version in a couple of months. From the release notes, you can see TFS 2018 has tons of new features. RC2 adds to that list with a bunch more improvements. At this point TFS 2018 is feature complete. We have a few dozen bugs that we know about and we are still working on. Add that to what you all find and that represents the work we have left to do to finish up. TFS 2018 RC2, of c...
TFS 2017 Update 3 RC is available
Today we released the Release Candidate for Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 3. Following the pattern of all of our Update 3 releases, TFS 2017 Update 3 is a small release, focused on bug fixes - mostly a roll up of fixes for issues that we've uncovered as increasing numbers of customers have adopted the TFS 2017 wave of releases. In all, Update 3 has a few dozen bug fixes (see the release notes for details). Because of its narrow scope we anticipate that this RC will be the only Release Candidate and will strive to ship the final release within a month or so. Update 3 will likely be the final Update in t...
VSTS in Canada
Today we launched our latest Visual Studio Team Services instance in the Canada Central region. This adds to our instances in the United States, Europe, Brazil, Australia, and India. I've had numerous conversations with customers who really wanted to have a VSTS account on Canadian soil and Canada was by far the most requested region for a new VSTS instance (and the 17th most popular request all up) on Visual Studio Team Services User Voice. The Canada region, like our other regions honors our data sovereignty policies of keeping all applicable customer data in the chosen region. When you create a new acco...
VSTS Update – Sept 15
This week we are deploying our sprint 123 work. Check out the release notes. There are a few things I want to highlight... New queries hub - We are on a journey to rework how some key elements of our navigation/data model work. We are changing the role of "Team" and favorites in the navigation because we found that it wasn't working for people as well as we had originally thought. The new queries hub reflects many of those changes (that you will see show up across many hubs) where there is a directory page and a favorites page. Particularly, in the new queries hub, this gives you much more room to s...
Techbash 2017 – Oct 4-6
Checkout TechBash in the northeast US to catch the latest on modern development practices. Our very own Donovan Brown is going to be one of the speakers - doing his Zero to DevOps talk. Brian