Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Team Foundation Service Update – May 13
Yesterday, we deployed an update to Team Foundation Service. You can read the release notes to see the improvements. The improvements aren’t major but there’s a few nice things – Some updates to UI styling with a greater use of color, some navigation improvements that include the ability to see the task board for all sprints (rather than just the current), and support for multiple Git repos per Team Project. Less prominent, but we’ve also made a bunch of changes to our authentication code. We’re working to better support people who use multiple Microsoft Accounts (L...
Some thoughts on a comment about VS 2012.3
Yesterday, I got a thoughtful comment from Dean on my post about Update 3. I sat down to write a response this morning and it turned into a but of a novel (in fact, the blog says it’s too long to post as a comment ). So I’ve turned it into a post. Here was Dean’s comment: Brian, I looked at the list of fixes, you weren't kidding when you said small. Are those just the major ones (crashing)? There are a whole lot of things logged on Connect that when added together really stifle productivity (many involving the editor with intellisense, syntax highlighting, etc.). I get nervous at this point in a VS life...
TFS 2012.2 Power Tools update available
Yesterday we released our update to the TFS 2012 Power Tools to work with VS/TFS 2012.2 (Update 2). Yes, I see the irony in announcing this the day after announcing the first “go-live” Update 3 CTP It took us longer than we had hoped to get the Power Tools ready. However, we’ve made a key change to mitigate this issue in the future. Our Power Tools setup has traditionally had a block to prevent it from working with the next version of VS (which is why the Power Tools from Update 1 wouldn’t work with Update 2). This is a bit of a hold-over from before we started doing the regular update...
Visual Studio 2012.3 (Update 3) “go-live” CTP is now available
I know it seems like 2012.2 just released (at least it does to me) but we’re already well into our schedule for 2012.3. Today, we released the updates for both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. This is the first “go-live” release in the 2012.3 line of CTPs – this means that we’ve tested it to the point that we think you can install it in your production environment (we have in ours) and get help with any significant issues you encounter. Our go-live process found 8 or 10 TFS bugs for Update 2. We were able to fix those for the final build and ensure ev...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS 2012.2) ISOs available
I’ve had a healthy discussion with some of you on this post and we’ve received quite a lot of feedback on Soma’s blog and other places. Based on this feedback we’ve produced ISOs for Visual Studio Update 2 and decided that for these "”larger” updates, we’ll continue to do so in the future. You can read more about it on the Visual Studio blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/05/03/announcing-availability-of-isos-for-visual-studio-updates.aspx Brian
Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 2
I missed announcing the availability of Team Explorer Everywhere Update 2. We released the update the first week of April. You can get it either by: Mostly our Update 2 for Team Explorer Everywhere contains bug fixes and small feature improvements. Here’s a list of the improvements you will find… Let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks Brian
Updated TFS 2010 MSSCCI Provider
Last week we released an update to the TFS 2010 MSSCCI provider. The primary motivator for this release was to enable it to work with VS 2005. This now enables you to connect to TFS 2012 using VS 2005, particularly from Windows XP. The support for VS 2005 was the only enhancement to this update of the 2010 MSSCCI provider. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio Tools for Git Update available
Yesterday, we released a major update to our Visual Studio Tools for Git. While still nowhere near done, we feel like we’ve crossed a significant threshold of completeness and usability. If you’re already using them or have tried them and didn’t feel they were ready, I encourage you to give this update a go. You can install the latest drop here: https://aka.ms/git4vs It will require that you have Visual Studio 2012 Update 2. The most compelling improvements include: Additional improvements are: As I never like talking...
Sprint 45 service issues
If you are a regular user of our Team Foundation Service - particularly during peak times, you've probably noticed that it hasn't been running as seamlessly as usual. Our recent issues started with our sprint 45 deployment that I wrote about here and foreshadowed here. In this post I want to give you some insights to what happened and what we've done about it. The team has been working long and hard since the deployment and I really appreciate the dedication and tenacity. As our service has evolved, we've begun to expand the breadth of the services we are trying to offer. We are also worki...