Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Giving feedback
Six months ago I wrote a post on Taking Feedback. Several people asked me to write a follow up on giving feedback. Amazing how time flies and somehow I just haven’t gotten around to it – so I’m doing it now. Here's a key snippet from the Taking Feedback post if you don't want to go read the whole thing... At some level, all feedback is valid. It is the perception of another person based on some interaction with us. As such it’s important that we listen, understand and think about how we can improve. Yet, not all feedback is to be taken as given – meaning the person giving the feedback may have heard somet...
All good things…
After more than 23 years at Microsoft, I’ve decided it’s time for me to take a break. Starting March 12th 2018, I’ll be taking a leave of absence for a year. Deciding to do this has been one of the most gut-wrenching decisions of my life. As someone who has largely defined myself by the work I’ve done, it’s incredibly hard to imagine life without going to work and working 10 hours every day. But, after a few years of debate with my wife, we’ve decided that it’s time to take a break and dedicate more time to home and family for a while. I have no fear of having nothing to do. I have learned over the past 10 yea...
VSTS Update – Mar 5
This week we began rolling out the sprint 131 updates. You can get the details in the release notes. There are some good things in this sprint payload (a good start at a new Work items hub, Azure DevOps projects support for VMs, improved GitHub integration, release badges and more). At the same time, this isn't the most value packed sprint. The reason is that we have some really big new things that will start coming to light in the next few sprints and much of the team has been busy working on those things. Stay tuned for great things that are coming. Brian
A good incident postmortem
I wanted to call your attention to a good incident postmortem done by Taylor Lafrinere this week. Taylor sits in my team room and, for a week, I saw him bent over his keyboard, often with two or three people staring over his shoulders trying to figure out what had caused this incident and what we needed to do to prevent it in the future. This is the kind of tenacity you have to have to, in the long term, run a highly available service. Only if you really understand the root cause and build mitigations and resiliency will you get there. It's a bit long and detailed but it's a good read. This is also a goo...
TFS Security updates
On Wednesday, we released a roll up of fixes for security vulnerabilities for several versions of Team Foundation Server. There are no new features in this update. Most of the vulnerabilities are related to cross site scripting (XSS), some of which were customer reported. The others include an improperly encoded API, a service endpoint editing experience which exposes a previously configured password, and a regex denial of service vulnerability in our web portal. We recommend customers install these updates. These fixes are included in the recently released Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. The release on We...
VSTS and TFS roadmap update
This week we updated the roadmap (Feature Timeline) for Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server. Check it out to see many of the significant improvements we are working on/planning. If you have feedback or suggestions for other improvements that are important to you, our User Voice forum is the best place to provide it. When we first envisioned the feature timeline idea, the thinking was to update it quarterly. However, over time, it turned out that didn't work well with our planning rhythm - that involves cross team backlog reviews every 3 sprints - or every 9 weeks. It made sense to do roa...
TFS 2018.1 RTM is available
Today we released the final build of Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. I've shared some key links in this post.
Goats up high
Let me start with a little background. Every year, we have new goats born on the farm - generally in March/April. Last year, we had about 10 or so. They live in the field with their moms until breeding season - ~October. During breeding season, we have to remove the young goats from the adult herd so they aren't accidentally bred - they are too young at that point. We don't have a great fenced area to put them right now so we put them in a large stall in the barn. All of that happened this year as usual. The other piece of information you need to know is that goats establish a dominance hierarchy and t...
TFS 2018 Update 1 RC is available
Today we released the release candidate for Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 1. I've shared some important links in this post.
Merging conflicts in the browser
One of the cool things about having VSTS used across all of Microsoft is that when there's some useful missing feature, one of the many teams using it might fill the gap and we get to harvest it and make it available to all VSTS customers. Exactly that has just happened. I've written several times about GVFS and the adoption of Git by our Windows team (Actually WDG - Windows and Devices Group). It's a big organization managing a lot of teams, branches and releases at the same time. Because of this they have a lot of code flowing around and need to merging the various streams of development. To help with th...
Twitter sentiment as a release gate
I'm really excited to talk about a new Twitter sentiment release gate extension in the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) marketplace today. Before I say more, let me step back and give some context... Any responsible DevOps practice uses techniques to limit the damage done by bugs that get deployed into production. One of the common techniques is to break up a production environment into a set of separate instances of an app and then configure deployments to only update one instance at a time, with a waiting period between them. During that waiting period, you watch for any signs (telemetry, customer compl...
A VSTS Release Gate with ServiceNow
Tarun has written a great post on creating a VSTS Release Gate that will gate deployments on approvals registered in ServiceNow. This is a great example of how you can use the extensibility of Release Gates to automate and integrate your release pipeline. Check it out! Brian
VSTS Update – Nov 28
This week we will be deploying our sprint 126 work. This deployment is probably one of the most complicated in a while. Quite a lot of it actually rolled out at our Connect(); event the week before Thanksgiving and then Thanksgiving week stalled the completion of the deployments so we are just getting back to it this week. All the ruckus around Connect(); and Thanksgiving has caused the sprint 126 deployment to run up against the sprint 127 deployment. The sprint 127 deployment will begin to hit public rings within a week. Also, to be quite honest, the rush to get all of our new capabilities deployed and ...
Connect(); announcements
We're announcing a bunch of new things at Connect(); this week. It's an exciting time. Connect(); is an annual developer event where we focus particularly on improving the overall experience for developers. We've queued up a lot of good news and I wanted to share a few highlights - particularly from the DevOps space that I'm deeply engaged in. Team Foundation Server 2018 final release I'm excited to announce that we released Team Foundation Server 2018 this week. We've been hard at work on it since we released TFS 2017 Update 2 back in July. TFS 2018 is a major update to Team Foundation Server and has a to...
DevOps at Microsoft – lots of videos
My team is responsible for many of the engineering tools we use at Microsoft (affectionately called the One Engineering System or 1ES - paralleling Satya's "One Microsoft" mantra). As part of that responsibility we get to interact deeply with teams across the company and learn from what they are doing. We try to take the best ideas and harvest them for use in our own team and also share them across the company. We also deliver the same broad set of DevOps tooling to a wide array of external customers. As part of that responsibility we get to interact with customers of a myriad of sizes, in every industry. ...
DevOps @ Connect(); 2017
I am excited…There will be lots of news…at Microsoft Connect(); 2017 happening Wednesday Nov 15th in New York City. Please join the live stream starting at 10:00 AM EST for Scott Guthrie’s keynote, where he will showcase lots of new innovations across Azure, .NET, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services and more. At 3:00 PM EST, I am going to double-click on the DevOps news and dive deeper into the latest updates to Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services. Click here to drop a reminder in your calendar. Brian
Visual Studio Team Services in Hong Kong
Today we opened a new VSTS instance in Hong Kong - the Azure "East Asia" region. This adds to our instances in US, Europe, Brazil, India and Australia, giving us reasonably short distance access to every part of the world - except Africa. We will continue to build out local support in new regions and make sure we have capacity around the globe. You can read more details about the new instance and how to get started with it on our DevOps blog. Brian
Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 3 available
Today we released the final build of TFS 2017 Update 3. This release follows the release candidate and addresses all the customer feedback we have gotten and all the issues we have found in extensive testing. If you are on TFS 2017 or are upgrading to it, this is the release I would recommend for you. As I've mentioned before, TFS 2017 Update 3 is not a major feature release. For a while now (since Update 2), all our feature work has been rolling into TFS 2018 which already has an RC available. TFS 2017 Update 3 is, mostly, a bug fix release, with a roll up of fixes for customer repor...
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
TFS 2018 RC1 is available
Team Foundation Server 2018 RC1 is now available for download. This is the first available build for what we have been calling TFS V.next. And, as you can tell from the title of this post, the official name will be TFS 2018. Here's all the important links: There's a lot I want to say about this release... Like all of our Release Candidates, this is a "go-live" release, meaning that it has been tested and is ready to be used in a production environment. At the same time, it's not done and there's a much higher chance you'll hit a bug than with a more final release. However, we've b...
VSTS Update – Aug 28
This week we began rolling out our sprint 122 update for Visual Studio Team Services. Check out the release notes for details. There are a couple of things I want to call out. Work item rules - Work Item rules are the "headliner" for this sprint. For years and years, the way to create work item rules was by editing an XML file or using the Power Tool that was a pretty direct projection of the XML. This represents the beginning of the end of that. Now we have a new, first class rules authoring experience in the VSTS web UI. The rules are simple yet powerful. The new rules system will only be available fo...
Taking feedback
I'm going to try something very non-traditional for my blog. I don't know if it's a good idea or not but we'll give it a go and if everyone hates it, I'll find a different vehicle. I've had a career of roughly 30 years now and I've been in countless situations from developer in a small startup, founder of a startup, dev in a large company, and now Vice President of a large team in a large company (and everything in between). Over my career, I have been managed by many people and I have managed many people. I have tried hard to observe and learn from everyone around me but, even more importantly, observe myself, ...
Over 500 extensions in the VSTS/TFS marketplace
In November of 2015, almost 2 years ago, we launched the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) Marketplace to further our goals to build an open and active ecosystem around VSTS and Team Foundation Server. It's been a truly amazing thing to watch. I've been humbled by how much passion and energy there has been to build and share extensions that make your development experience better. This week, we passed 500 public extensions in the marketplace and we have a pretty steady rate of 20-30 new ones per month. Demand for extensions has also been very strong with more than 100,000 installations. The marketplace ha...
VSTS Update – Aug 4
This week we are deploying our sprint 121 work for Visual Studio Team Services. There's a lot of good stuff and you can read the release notes for details. Probably the biggest thing is the public preview of our new Wiki feature. We're already using it heavily and I really hope you are going to like it. Plenty of work left to do but it's already darned functional. To preemptively answer the question I know I'm going to get... These changes will first show up on premises in TFS v.Next or one of its Updates. The TFS 2017 Updates ship has sailed and all significant new feature work is going into v.Next. Yo...
TFS 2017 Update 2 RTM
Today we released the final version of Team Foundation Server 2017.2. Thank you to everyone who installed one of the two release candidates over the past few months and helped us ensure that this is a high quality release. This post lists some important links and info about this release.
VSTS Update – July 14
This week we are deploying our sprint 120 payload for Visual Studio Team Services. Check out the release notes for all the detail. The big news of this sprint is the new visual release definition editor that allows you to see the flow of your release through environments. In the coming sprints we'll be adding views that visualize in-progress releases in a similar way. This deployment also brings a raft of further pull request improvements. We've got plenty more in the queue so expect PRs to keep getting love. Most of this work will land in TFS v.next. The window for TFS 2017.2 is closed - it will be ...
Perf results on scaling Git on VSTS with GVFS
A little over a month ago, I gave an update on our progress of moving the Windows team to Git in the largest Git repo on the planet. At the time, I described the scale of the Windows Git repo (over 3.5M files and ~4,000 engineers), the current performance results and set of improvements that were just rolling out that we called "O(modified)". The O(modified) improvements significantly improve performance by changing many Git commands to be time proportional to the set of files you've changed rather than the set you've checked out. Now, ~5 weeks later, we've rolled out the O(modified) changes across the major...
A Wiki preview on VSTS
Back in February, I announced our plan to release a fairly full featured Wiki for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS). I also announced that we were purchasing the Wiki extension that was then in the marketplace. Since then, we've left the Wiki extension in the marketplace pretty much alone and worked to bring in the code and get it ready as a first class VSTS feature. Today, we launched the first preview of our new Wiki feature. You can read details in the official Wiki announcement. The "old" extension in the marketplace is now deprecated. The announcement I referenced has ...
How we approach testing VSTS to enable continuous delivery
I like to write, from time to time about our experiences, successes, failures and learnings from delivering Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), a large scale service, on a cloud delivery cadence. My most recent post reflected on how cool it is to be able to deliver customer fixes within a day or two. And I've written many times about our practice of delivering all our work to production every sprint (or, in some cases, even more often). Usually my posts are sparked by something I see happen. Today I got an email about progress on our efforts towards reliable tests and it made me think about sharing it. W...
TFS 2017 Update 2 RC2 is available
Today we shipped the second release candidate for TFS 2017.2. This post shares some info about this release.
Let’s make some hay!
Spring is hay season and it puts a significant strain on my managing the balance between work and farm. For the past several weeks, I've been stealing away every spare minute I can to cut, rake, bale and haul hay. I've hayed about 75 acres and that yields one heck of a lot of hay. I'm almost done - just a few dozen more rolls to move from the fields to the barn (assuming I can find more space in the barn :)). I thought I'd share a picture to give a bit of a feel. This is one of my fields - about 25 acres. Each roll you see (and you can't see all of them) is about 1,000 pounds. You might notice that...
What does an Agile/DevOps organization look like?
I want to share an experience that highlights why I am so proud of the organization I work in. The experience is expressed in the form of an email thread that I had this week. Times/timezones are a little whacky because there were 3 - the customer's, mine and the engineer's. But the whole thread, from my perspective, started on Monday afternoon and ended by Tues night (and I was out of office on Monday afternoon or it likely would have been faster). I've written the thread backwards from most email clients so it is in chronological order and I've scrubbed all names, except mine, to protect the innocent :) ...
TFS 2017 Update 2 RC1 is now available
Yesterday, we released the first release candidate for TFS 2017 Update 2 (TFS 2017.2). This is a "go-live" release and is ready to be used in production environments. We've already installed it on 2 of our ~50 production TFS servers and it's looking solid. If you look at the release notes, you'll see that Update 2 has a *TON* of new stuff in it - improving almost every aspect of the product. As with all our Updates, it should be a seamless upgrade - no breaking changes, no changed pre-reqs, just a better product. We'll be shipping an RC2 within a month or so. Please get us any feed...
Team Services Update – June 1, 2017
Sheesh, it's another huge update this sprint. I expected a bit of a lull after all the work we put out along with the Build conference but things don't seem to be slowing down much (or at least they've picked back up with a vengeance). Check out the release notes for details. There's so many exciting things in this sprint and I'll comment on a few: Check it out, Brian
TFS/Team Services Roadmap update
Today we published our next quarterly installment to our roadmap. Check it out! Brian
Evolving TFS/Team Services build automation capabilities
***UPDATE 7/7/2018*** https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releasenotes/tfs2018-update2 You can now upgrade to TFS 2018 Update 2 and continue to connect your XAML controllers and run XAML builds. When we removed support for XAML build in TFS 2018 RTW and Update 1, some of you could not upgrade due to having legacy XAML builds, and we want to unblock you. Although TFS 2018 Update 2 supports XAML builds for your legacy builds, XAML build is deprecated and there will be no further investment, so we highly recommend converting to a newer build definition format. See the Evolving TFS/Team Services build a...
The largest Git repo on the planet
It's been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called "Git Virtual File System". As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder and the working directory. Rather than download the entire repo and checkout all the files, it dynamically downloads only the portions you need based on what you use. A lot has happened and I wanted to give you an update. Three months ago, GVFS was still a dream. I don't mean it didn't exist - we had a concre...
Team Services Update – May 11, 2017
As you may know, this week is the //Build conference. Along side that event, we are announcing a ton of VS Team Services enhancements, including rolling out our sprint 117 upgrade. Some of the changes are available immediately (because they were previously deployed and only required a feature flag to be flipped) and others will roll out over the next week or so as the 117 deployment reaches all of our scale units across the world. You can read all the details in our Team Services release notes. The first thing you are likely to notice is WOW, that's a lot of stuff. I want to highlight a few things that I...
Two bulls meet
You may have noticed I wasn't very responsive during much of April. That's because I took an extended "Farmcation" for about 3 weeks. I just returned to work on Monday and should be a bit more responsive now. I won't bore you with all the details but I wanted to share one thing. Cows are cool animals in many ways. Sometimes they frustrate the crud out of me because they can be so dumb but usually they are calm, friendly, curious, timid animals. Mostly that's true about bulls but bulls can be very scary. They are such big powerful animals that it boggles the mind. Bulls can also be more unpredictable than mo...
TFS 2015.4 released
Yesterday, we released TFS 2015 Update 4. This will likely be the last release in the TFS 2015 line. TFS 2017 shipped almost 6 months ago and we are already hard at work on TFS 2017 Update 2. This TFS 2015 Update 4 release just contains fixes for commonly reported customer issues - about 30 in total. Read the release notes for more details. Brian
Team Explorer for TFS 2017
When we shipped TFS 2017 and Visual Studio 2017, we didn't provide a "Team Explorer" like solution. Historically our Team Explorer installer has been available for customers that want a rich client to access version control and some work item tracking features in TFS or VS Team Services. We didn't release it because we needed to create a new version of it based on the new Visual Studio installer technology that was introduced in VS 2017 and we just didn't have time to do that before we released. Along with the release of VS 2017.1 today, we are now releasing a Team Explorer installer. Please le...
Shutting down CodePlex
Almost 11 years after we created CodePlex, it’s time to say goodbye. We launched CodePlex in 2006 because we, like others in the industry, saw a need for a great place to share software. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of amazing options come and go but at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there. We migrated too. As many of you know, Microsoft has invested in Visual Studio Team Services as our “One Engineering System” for proprietary projects, and we’ve exposed many of our key open source projects on GitHub (Visual Studio Code, TypeSc...
Team Services Update – Mar 29 2017
This week we begin rolling out our sprint 115 work. You can read the release notes for details. As usual, this is a forewarning of the changes, it could take up to 2 weeks before all the changes are visible in your account. The update should go live in the first public accounts today. Overall, there's not any single thing that stands out for me in this release. A lot of good stuff but nothing revolutionary. There are also a couple of themes driving work we are doing right now that I'd like to talk about. Thanks and feedback is always welcome, Brian
Cows can be so silly
Last week, we had some visitors from Redmond visiting us in North Carolina. I invited a few of them out to my house for dinner - they were interested in seeing this farm that I talk about from time to time. After we got to my house I herded everyone into my car to drive up to the barn. As we got to the top of the hill, I could tell something wasn't right. I saw a pile of hay and a bunch of cows (yearlings) but no hay ring. The person sitting next to me in the car, apparently, could see by the look on my face that something was wrong and asked me about it. I told them I wasn't sure but this isn't the way it's...
Open sourcing the MSTest Test Framework
A couple of months ago I blogged about open sourcing the VS Test platform. In that post, I talked about the numerous test frameworks that it supports, on of the most popular ones being MSTest. I also foreshadowed our plan to also open source MSTest V2. Today I'm happy to announce that we have open sourced MSTest V2 under the MIT license. This open source announcement means that the community now has a fully supported, fully open source, fully cross-platform implementation of the MSTest test framework with which to write tests targeting .NET Framework, .NET Core and ASP.NET Core on Windows, Linux, and Mac. He...
TFS 2015 Update 4 Preview
I know this comes close on the heels of shipping TFS 2017 Update 1, but we are working on another Update to TFS 2015. For those who are up for it, I encourage you to upgrade to TFS 2017 Update 1, however, if there are reasons you really want to stay on 2015 a little longer, Update 4 might be useful to you. Update 4 only contains bug fixes. It has about 25 bug fixes, all or most of which, have been reported by customers. They were all selected because they seemed likely enough and problematic enough to warrant issuing a proactive fix. I really believe this is the last Update for the TFS 2015 pr...
Team Services Update – Mar 8, 2017
This week we are deploying our sprint 114 work. Check out the release notes to read the details. As usual, it will take a couple of weeks for the changes to roll out across all accounts. Here's a CliffsNotes version of some of the highlights of this sprint: I hope you enjoy the new improvements and I look forward to hearing your feedback... Brian
Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 Available
Sorry, I had a farm day yesterday and am a little late on the announcement... Yesterday we announced the release of both Visual Studio 2017 and TFS 2017 Update 1. I'll focus on TFS and you can read Julia's post on VS. ***UPDATE Mar 9*** The problems with upgrades from TFS versions before TFS 2015 have been fixed and the images have been republished. If you get a new download, it will work upgrading any supported version of TFS. Other TFS related 2017 downloads: Please checkout the release notes to see all the great stuff that’s in Update 1. We’re thrilled to have been able ...
Team Services/TFS Roadmap update
Last week, we published an update to our roadmap (otherwise known as "Features timeline" :)). If you're curious about what we are working on and when it is coming, I encourage you to go check it out. This timeline is intended to give a rough idea what we are planning to deliver in the cloud over the next 6 months and when those things will land in on-premises TFS. Some of them are self explanatory and some have linked blog posts or UserVoice items to provide a little more context. I'm still waiting for a couple of blog posts to get published but they should be done soon. If there's something you don't underst...
TFS 2017 Management Pack
The System Center Management Pack for TFS 2017 is now available. I apologize this took longer than usual. It will, of course, also work with the imminent TFS 2017 Update 1 release. Please let us know if you have any feedback. Brian
Team Services Update – Feb 15
This week we are beginning the deployment of our sprint 113 improvements. You can read the release notes for details. Among other things, there's a bunch of nice improvements to the Pull Request experience - we continue to refine and evolve it. We also did a "V2" overhaul of the package management UI. We think it's more responsive and simpler. We certainly appreciate any feedback you have. For now it is an "opt-in" experience. Eventually, it will become the default experience. A note on release notes... The way me manage release notes continues to evolve. Several months ago, we changed our process to post r...
TFS 2017 Update 1 RC2
Today we released the final release candidate for TFS 2017.1. This update contains a few new features and a lot of bug fixes. To my knowledge, we have fixed all the bugs that were reported from RC1. There are a small handful of bugs left to be fixed and we will be ready to ship the final version of Update 1. We recently announced that VS 2017 and TFS 2017.1 will be released on March 7th. Most of the new features in RC 2 are small but nice. You can read the release notes for details (look for "New in RC2"). Probably the most frequently requested new addition is breaking up of the Git repository adm...
A Wiki for Team Services and TFS
One of the big areas of investment for us recently is "social" experiences. I'm using a fairly broad definition of that term, including a focus on "me" and my stuff and capabilities that improve collaboration across my team, project, organization. You've already seen lots of pieces that support this general direction: All of these are steps on a journey to an improved collaboration experience. As part of our work, we concluded we need to have a pretty full-featured Wiki experience to enable all the collaboration experiences we feel are needed. Fortunately, one of our partners was already...
More on GVFS
After watching a couple of days of GVFS conversation, I want to add a few things. What problems are we solving? GVFS (and the related Git optimizations) really solves 4 distinct problems: There are other partial solutions to some of these problems - like LFS, sparse checkouts, etc. We've tackled all of these problems in an elegant and seamless way. It turns out #2 is solved purely on the server - it doesn't require GVFS and will work with any Git client. #1, #3 and #4 are addressed by GVFS. GVFS really is just Git One of the other things I've seen in the discussions is how we are turning Git...
TFS 2017 Process Template Editor is available
I know a bunch of people have been asking for it, now you can get it. The TFS 2017 Process Template Editor (which, btw, is an extension to VS 2017) is now available. You can install it from the free process template editor extension in the Visual Studio marketplace. Let us know if you have any issues. Brian
Scaling Git (and some back story)
A couple of years ago, Microsoft made the decision to begin a multi-year investment in revitalizing our engineering system across the company. We are a big company with tons of teams - each with their own products, priorities, processes and tools. There are some "common" tools but also a lot of diversity - with VERY MANY internally developed one-off tools (by team I kind of mean division - thousands of engineers). There are a lot of downsides to this: We set out on an effort we call the "One Engineering System" or "1ES". Just yesterday we had a 1ES day where thousands of engineers gathered ...
VS Team Services Update – Jan 25
We have begun the process of deploying our sprint 112 work into production. You will see the improvements show up in your account over the next week. You can read the release notes for all the details in this deployment. A few things worth highlighting... This provides your first peek at our new Enterprise Agile "Delivery Plans" feature. To get it, you actually need to go to the marketplace and install it into your account. This feature is designed to enable you to look across teams and see how work is aligned. This is still a very early preview and we have lots of plans to continue to evolve it but there's ...
TFS 2017 Update 1 RC available
Today we released the Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 Release Candidate. This release can be used for a fresh install or to upgrade any supported previous version. Here's a chart showing the recommended upgrade paths from various TFS versions (you can substitute TFS 2017.1 in the rightmost column). The upgrade from any of the more recent versions should be smooth but upgrades from 2017 should be particularly easy. This is a "go-live" release and can be used in production environments, will support upgrades to RTM and you can get support. This release is English only. We'll provide the localiz...
Open sourcing the VS Test platform
Yesterday we released our unit test execution infrastructure as an open source project. You'll also find an open source project with the documentation. VSTest is a very extensible unit test execution framework. The base engine, discovers tests and runs them. It can parallelize across cores, provides process isolation and can integrate with Visual Studio. It has extensibility for different test frameworks, code coverage, test impact analysis, data collection, test result reporting and much more. To give you a little context on what I'm talking about I've put together an architecture diagram. The pieces we ope...
VS Team Services Update – Jan 6
Next week we will be rolling out our sprint 110 and 111 updated (we didn't do a 110 deployment due to the holidays). You can check out the release notes for details. Please bear with us - these changes are going to roll out a bit slower than usual. As I write this, we are waiting for a major snow storm to hit North Carolina and we are expecting a pretty interrupted work schedule into early next week. As such most people probably won't have access to these changes until mid next week (~Jan 11th). When you do get them, you'll find there's quite a lot of new stuff. The thing I'm most excited to hear your feedba...
Happy holidays 2016
Today is my last day in the office for the year. I just want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who reads my blog and engages on TFS and VS Team Services. It's great working with all of you. Overall, it's been a good year. We shipped TFS 2015 Update 2 and 3 and TFS 2017. We continued our tradition of substantial Team Services updates every sprint. Overall service stability improved over the year (knock on wood), though we certainly had a few rough patches and learned how to improve from them. As I reflect over it, I'm proud of what we have accomplished and I hope you all like it. Some of my favor...
VS Team Services Update – Nov 28
This week we are deploying our sprint 109 payload. You can read the release notes for details. There's a few things I'm particularly excited about. Build task versioning - We had a live site incident a few months ago because we rolled out an update to a build task on our hosted pools and it broke pretty much everyone's builds. That caused me to go dig in a bit to understand how we were managing validation and rollout of build tasks. What I learned is that we really just didn't have a sufficient mechanism to manage this. With this deployment, we are rolling out a new build task versioning capability that enabl...
DevOps at Connect();
A little late on this, but the video of my presentation (with Jamie Cool) is on Channel9 now: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Connect/2016?sort=status&direction=desc&c=Brian-Harry&term= I've been saying for a couple of year that TFS and Team Services are a great DevOps solution for your whole team - regardless of the technology or platforms they work on. I decided to finally put my money where my mouth is and do a big talk where the center of it is a DevOps story for a Java app running on Linux, deployed to a Docker container. There's a few other cool demos too. Check it out. Brian
TFS/Team Services Q4 Roadmap update
A few days ago we published our Q4 update to the TFS/Team Services roadmap. We should have done it 6 weeks ago but, Connect(); in mid-November had us really busy and it just fell through the cracks. Sorry about that. We should be updating it again in mid-January. As a reminder, everything on here is just our best estimates and things change. We try to give about a 6 month time horizon so that you know what we are working on/planning now. Beyond that, it really is just a backlog review exercise with no real ability to predict much concretely. I'm working on getting a few blog posts written to drill into some ...
News from Connect(); 2016
Today, at the Connect(); event in New York, we are announcing a whole bunch of cool new stuff. The news at Connect(); is broad so I'm going to focus on the TFS and Team Services related news. TFS 2017 RTM One of the biggest pieces of news is that we RTM'd TFS 2017. That's exciting because it unlocks a bunch of enhancements that we've made to Team Services for our on-premises TFS customers. New things in TFS 2017 include: Here are some handy links: Package Management GA In addition to the release of Package Management with NuGet support we updated Package Mana...
Connect(); event today
Check out the Connect(); event today. Live stream Scott's keynote and view on demand tons of other content - including my session on DevOps. https://connectevent.microsoft.com/ Brian
VS Team Services Update – Nov 7
This week we are rolling out our sprint 108 work to Team Services. You can read the release notes for details. It's another comparatively "light" sprint. It's the last sprint that should be significantly affected by our work to wrap up shipping TFS 15. We're pretty much done, have incorporated the feedback we got from RC2 and feel we are about ready. Looking forward to getting TFS 15 shipped. One of the biggest things we've delivered this sprint is integration with the new Microsoft Teams collaboration tool. We've enabled chat integration and hosting of our Kanban board in a team context. It's still preview...
VS Team Services Update – Oct 12
Before I get to talking about this update let me talk about a change in the way we are announcing updates... It takes a while for an update to roll out across the entire service. That is by design and it is part of our strategy to control the damage from any bugs we miss in the testing process. Our deployment process is currently divided into 5 "rings". The first (we call ring 0) is our own Team Services instance - the one the Team Services team uses to build Team Services. The second is a small public instance with external customers on it and the rings grow to more and more public instances. When we deploy ...
Code search and Exploratory Testing GA
Today, we are releasing the official "V1" releases of our two most popular VS Team Services extensions: Both are now out of preview. Code Search Code search enables you to search across all of your repositories (both TFVC and Git) in all of your projects. It supports simple full text search on any text file and semantic search in C#, VB, C, C++ and Java, enabling you to look for specific code element types (like class definitions) or filter out "noise" (like comments). Code search is available to everyone with a Team Services "Basic" license - including the 5 free Basic licenses in every account. To en...
One more farm story for this week
Sorry for the back to back farm stories but I was relating the Fire! story to someone the other day and remembered another story I hadn't shared. As a cattle farmer, I go through a lot of hay - about 300,000 lbs per winter. Spring and late Summer are the seasons for cutting, baling and storing hay. In the past I've had to buy a lot of hay because I didn't have enough land to make enough. A little over a year ago I bought another 35 acres of hay fields and this year I was able to make all the hay I needed. The new hay fields are about 6 miles from my "main farm" where I keep the cows and store the hay. In Augus...
Team Services Update – Sept 28
This week we are rolling out our sprint 106 work. Here are the release notes. By now, the update has made it out to most customers and it should finish by the end of the week. Overall, sprint 106 was a modest sprint. It has lots of nice, relatively small, improvements and nothing particularly earth shattering. Probably the biggest thing is a new capability to import repos into Team Services - from anywhere Team Services can access a repo. A lot of the effort over the past couple of sprints has gone into getting TFS 15 ready and, I think, that's showing a bit in this sprint. With RC2 out, I'm already starting...
Fire!
When you have a farm like I do, with a lot of pastures, a lot of fence lines and a lot of trees, you inevitably spend a lot of time clearing dead trees, fallen limbs, etc. from your fences and fields. It's a never ending job. Sometimes I collect the wood for firewood (I heat my house with that in the winter). Sometimes I just throw it back in the woods to rot. Sometimes I collect it up into a pile and burn it. Over the past 7 or 8 years, I have had hundreds of fires and burnt countless tons of debris. Three or four years ago I decided to clear a bunch of pine trees out of one of my pastures - they were kind ...
Team Foundation Server "15" RC 2 available
Today we released RC2 of TFS "15". The key links are here: You can check out the release notes for details of what's new. The release notes are a union of everything new in TFS 15 but you can identify changes since RC1 by looking for items tagged "New in TFS "15" RC2". As you can tell by the length of the release notes - many, many pages, there is a *ton* of new stuff in TFS 15. Among my favorite enhancements since RC1 are: This release is fully go-live and supported. You can upgrade from RC1, TFS 2015 with any update, TFS 2013 with any update and TFS 2012. You will, of course, a...
Team Services Update – Sept 2
Yes, I'm a bit late on this one. I was traveling to India and Israel in early Sept and didn't have a change to post about this. A little over a week ago we deployed the sprint 105 work to Team Services. Check out the release notes for details. We continued our journey this sprint to bring full process customization to Team Services with the ability to add custom work item types. Eventually this will lead to the full replacement of the Power Tools Process Template Editor with the new web based experience in TFS on-prem too. One of my favorite improvements this sprint is the new work item history experience. Th...
Paid extensions in the Visual Studio marketplace
It's hard to believe it but it's been almost a year since we introduced the Visual Studio Marketplace. It provides a single point of entry for finding extensions for Visual Studio, VS Team Services and VS Code - and since then hundreds upon hundreds of new extensions have been published. From day one, our vision was to enable the marketplace to be, well, a marketplace - meaning that part of its purpose is to provide a venue for extension authors to sell their creations. While I expect the vast majority of extensions will continue to be free, I expect to see an increasing number of high value, high quality exte...
New navigation for Team Services
In my blog post announcing TFS 15 RC1, I mentioned that we are working on a new navigation UI. In a somewhat unusual turn of events, it showed up in an on premises preview before it showed up in the cloud. Today we enabled the new navigation experience in Team Services, making it really easy for anyone to give it a try. This new experience is VERY much a work in progress. We know lots of issues remain and are working on them but it's time for us to start getting some meaningful feedback outside our own 4 walls. To minimize disruption, we've disabled it by default for every Team Services user. You must take ex...
Team Services Update – Aug 17
I missed a few updates while I was out over the summer but, hopefully, now I'm back on my normal cadence. This week, we are deploying our sprint 104 work to VS Team Services. It looks to me like it's a new record on number of items (defined by number of lines in the release notes) released in a sprint. You can read the release notes for all the details. A few things I want to comment on... I mentioned in a previous post that we are in the middle of some UI updates. One of the big areas of investment here is in pull requests and you can really see that work coming to life in this deployment. There's a long lis...
Pre-reqs for Team Foundation Server 15
A couple of aspects of this have come up on the post where I announced the TFS 15 RC1 and I thought it was worth a more explicit call out. First some context. We have 2 release "types" for TFS - major releases (TFS 2013, TFS 2015, TFS 15, etc.) and Updates (TFS 2015 Update 1, TFS 2015 Update 2, ...). We think about them very differently and have different promises around them. While nothing I say here should be taken too much as an absolute, they are the principles we try to operate by. Updates are intended to be "no-brainers". We work very hard in Updates not to break anything or change anything that might d...
TFS "15" RC1 is available
Today we released Team Foundation Server 15 Release Candidate 1. This is a "go-live" release, fit for production use and supported by our support team. You can find all the details on the following links: It's called RC1 because, yes, there will be an RC2. I don't expect an RC3 but that will depend on the feedback that we get. This release is "mostly" feature complete. It includes almost all of the major new features that we have shipped on VS Team Services and makes them available for on-premises TFS users - features like code search and package management. It has long standing top requests - li...
What I missed while I was relaxing this summer
I missed blogging about a ton of stuff that happened in late June and most of July while I was out. I'm not going to try to recap is all. You can find lots of it on the Visual Studio ALM blog or in the Team Services release notes. I do want to highlight a few things though. Hopefully, now that I'm back, I'll be able to keep up with all the news :) Brian
Where in the world is Brian?
I apologize for being away for so long. It's been a weird summer. I was out of the office for almost a month and have spent the last week furiously trying to catch up. So I've been absent from my blog for a while now. I'll fill you in on some of the details. Italy This year is my parent's 50th anniversary. My brother and I (well actually our wives) decided to take them on a trip to celebrate. We packed up my family (my wife and I + 4 kids) and my brother's family (he and his wife and 2 kids) and our parents and went to Italy. All told we were gone about 10 days (2 of which were just flying). We spent time...
Visual Studio Team Services Community Updates
I’m excited to see the recent surge in community activities around Team Services. Many meetups are taking place around the world in June/July where you can go and talk to Team Services users and fans in your area about some of the new features we’ve released recently and get some Team Services swag as well. You can also meet members of the engineering team in a few of these. The Team Services user community is increasingly engaging with each other and with us on Stackoverflow and Quora. We’re also getting a lot of great feature requests via our UserVoice site and via “Send a Smile” within Team Services. We’ve bee...
Java Tools Challenge results
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we are committed to making VS Team Services a great solution for all developers – for any application on any platform. 3 months ago we kicked off the Java Tools Challenge, sponsored by the Visual Studio Partner Program, and the Visual Studio Marketplace which was a longer term virtual hackathon designed to bring awareness to our Java solutions and engage the Java community to build working and published tools and apps. The Challenge was an opportunity for Java developers to explore the extensibility of Visual Studio Team Services as well as make use of some of our solution...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 3 RC is available
Today we released the release candidate for TFS 2015 Update 3. Update 3 is a modest release with only a few features and bug fixes for top reported issues. The features in TFS 2015 Update 3 include: We fixed a lot of bugs. About 140 in total. I spent about an hour curating the bug list and below are my results... I still have to go through the bugs in our Release Management and Test areas. If I don't get to that soon, I'll make sure we get them for our final Update 3 release. ***UPDATE June 8th *** I've added the rest of the bug fixes now. As you can see, there are quite a few. ...
Team Services Update – June 1
I'm a bit late this sprint - was a busy week last week. Last week we finished deploying our sprint 100 work. Yes, sprint 100. That means we've been doing a Scrum (or Scrum like) development process for 300 weeks. And for most of that time, actually releasing at the end of every sprint. Whew, that's over 5 and a half years. 100 sprints is a significant milestone. You can read about the updates in the Team Services release notes. There's quite a lot of new stuff but, among my favorite are: Brian
Video course: Continuous Delivery with the Windows Stack
Check out this new video course on automated deployments with Windows, Azure and Visual Studio by Marcel and Rene. I've known both of them for many years and have a great deal of respect for them. You can be sure it will be an awesome video with lots of good insights. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio Team Services is available in Brazil
Today we launched our Team Services instance in our Azure data center located in Brazil. This adds to instances in the US, Europe, Australia and India. When you create a new account from https://visualstudio.com we default your Geo to the data center closest to you. Customers in South American countries will now notice that Brazil is the default selection. As always, you can override the selection by choosing any Geo from the list – Brazil is open to everyone. If you have an existing Team Services account and you would like to move it to the new Brazil region, you can do that by contacting support. Next up, I ...
Team Services update – May 9
We are in the process of wrapping up the deployment of our sprint 99 deliverables. You can read the Team Services release notes here. There's a ton of new stuff in this sprint update but I'll just comment on a few. Let's start with one of the oldest surviving UserVoice items - a checkbox control. As you can see it was originally created in 2011. We've added the control but there's still some work to do. We've update the web UI to support it but the rich clients (like Team Explorer in Visual Studio) don't yet support it. That's coming. Aaron is going to be publishing a blog post on the ALM blog with details...
TFS 2015 Update 2.1 is available
We have released Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2.1. The KB article has a full list of included bugs fixed (updated from the list I posted on my blog a couple of weeks ago). I haven't done a full cross reference but I listed 25 bug fixes in my post and the KB article includes 28 so I'm assuming we added 3 more fixes since my post. You can install Update 2.1 on top of Update 2 or upgrade directly to Update 2.1 from previous versions (Update 1, TFS 2015 RTM, TFS 2013 and any of its Updates, TFS 2012 and any of its Updates, TFS 2010). Localized versions of the KB article, etc. are in the works and shoul...
Update on TFS 2015 Update 2.1
Hmm, it's been a few days of reflection. I don't think I expected my post on the bugs we were fixing in Update 2.1 to generate so many comments about other bugs that people are hitting. Let me share some questions that have been on my mind and my thoughts on them... Why did I get so many bugs reported as comments on my blog? In the end, my blog isn't the place I want people reporting bugs. It's high cost for me (I'm just overhead because I route them to the right person to look at them). It's not a great experience for you - you don't have a great way to track updates. And it's not a great experience for our...
Team Services in India
Today, we opened up an instance of Visual Studio Team Services in India (Chennai). This builds on the instances we already have in the US, Europe and Australia and is the next step in our journey to making instances available all over the world. You can create an account in India by just choosing the India region during the Team Services account creation process. If you have an existing account that you want to move to the India region, you can contact support to have them do that for you. There are some things to think about when creating an account in the India region: 1) India is a relatively new region in A...
Heads up: TFS 2015.2.1 coming
By now, I suspect, everyone is pretty used to our cadence for shipping Team Foundation Server. We ship a "major" release every year or so and then we ship "Updates" about once a quarter. We just shipped TFS 2015 Update 2 a few weeks ago (otherwise known as TFS 2015.2). We've been watching the feedback on that release closely and we've seen more bugs reported than I'm comfortable with. Every release has some bugs and we work to fix them in the subsequent Update (and provide hot fixes on demand) but this had enough that I'm uncomfortable making people "live with them" for a few months. There aren't really cata...
VS Team Services Update – April 13
This week we are deploying our sprint 98 work to Visual Studio Team Services. You can read the release notes for details of what's included. From time to time, I like to cross reference the work we are releasing with UserVoice to make sure we are actually making progress on the top requests from our users. It's good to see that we knocked off 3 long standing requests with hundreds of votes each this sprint. In addition to those, this sprint includes a bunch of other cool things. A couple I've heard a lot or requests for lately: Follow work item - the ability to easily flag/unflag an item so you get change n...
Team Services and TFS Roadmap update – Apr 2016
Today, we refreshed the roadmap for Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server. We've retired the items that were scheduled for Q1/Update 2, updated the items scheduled for Q2 and added the plan for Q3. We completed a significant majority of the things we planned to. A few things did not complete in Q1 and have been rescheduled for Q2. The only really big thing was: Git SSH support - We almost got it done but had some performance issues to work out we expect to have it available in Team Services in the next few weeks and in TFS 2015 Update 3. The rest of the long list that we had planned for Q1 and...
VS2015 Update 2 and TFS 2015 Update 2 have shipped
Yesterday, at the //Build/ conference, we announced the final release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2. You can learn more at the following links: We also released an early preview of Visual Studio “15”. We will not be releasing a preview of TFS “15” at this time. List with the 2015 release cycle, the best way to see what’s coming in TFS is to explore Visual Studio Team Services. We expect to release a preview of TFS “15” sometime this summer. TFS 2015 Update 2 has a lot of major improvements to almost every area of the product. Some of the most prominent ones inc...
Introducing Application Insights Analytics
Last month, in a post, I wrote about a VS Team Services outage, I mentioned (and showed some results from) a new tool we've been working on that we internally call "Kusto". We've now made a preview of Kusto publicly available as "Application Insights Analytics". Kusto is a phenomenal tool. I can't say enough good stuff about it. I can gush about it, without boast, because I can take almost no credit for it. Yes it's on my team but the folks who have done this have done an astonishing job and all I've done is watched. Kusto was already an incubation project when I inherited the team a couple of years ago and ...
Team Services extension for VS Code
Today we shipped a VS Code extension for working with VS Team Services. The new extension includes status bar indicators and a list of VC Code commands for common operations. You can read more on our blog post. Brian
YouTube channel for Team Services sprint videos
Some of our MVPs have put together a YouTube channel for VS Team Services sprint videos. It's very cool. Check it out. Brian
Ratings and reviews in the VS Marketplace
As of this morning, we now have ratings and reviews in the VS Marketplace! This will allow you to comment on your favorite (or least favorite) extensions and to see what other people are saying when choosing an extension. You can see a 5 star rating on each tile and at the bottom of each extension details page, you will see a list of reviews with comments. You, of course, have the ability to write your own. To limit spam and other abuse we require reviewers to authenticate with a Microsoft Account or Azure Active Directory account. Further, to the right of each review, you can flag offensive or spam reviews. ...
SOC compliance certification for VS Team Services
We take the protection of customer data very seriously and work hard to ensure your data is safe and that we comply with expected policies in all the regions in which we operate. Earlier this month we took another important step towards meeting the compliance needs of our customers by completing the Service Organization Controls certifications (SOC1 and SOC2) for Visual Studio Team Services. These audits evaluated the effectiveness of our internal controls impacting data security, service availability, confidentiality, and processing integrity. This report covers all of our generally available services at the ti...
10th anniversary of Team Foundation Server
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the day we shipped the first version of TFS - TFS 2005. It doesn't seem that long ago but we sure have come a long way. The other day I recorded a Radio TFS interview with Martin Woodward and Greg Duncan. Check it out if you are interested. I have to admit I haven't listened to it. I never listen to my own interviews - it just feels creepy :) I sure had a lot of fun doing it though. Brian
VS Team Services Update – March 3
We just completed our sprint 96 deployment and everyone should now have all the new capabilities. You can read more about what's new in the VS Team Services Release notes. This was a particularly plentiful sprint - with updates across most of the product - Agile planning, testing, Git, package management, gated checking support for TFVC in build.vnext, IntelliJ, and release management. Certainly the gated checkin support was very highly requested and it's great to see that go live. Get test results integration into release management is really nice. Squash merge on pull requests has also been a hot item with ...
Microsoft joins the Eclipse Foundation
This morning at EclipseCon, we announced that we are joining the Eclipse Foundation to further our goals of helping developers build applications regardless of the technology stack choices they make. At the same time, we announced the new open source project for Team Explorer Everywhere to enable anyone to contribute to creating a great Eclipse experience for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services. Read more about it in Peter Bright's article. This adds to a great deal of engagement already with the OSS community, including: our numerous Application Insights SDKs, our IntelliJ plugin for TFS and...
TFS 2015 RC2 and VS 2015 Update 2 RC are available
Today we released release candidate 2 of TFS 2015 Update 2 and the release candidate of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. As usual I'll mostly comment on TFS and TFS related features and let the VS blog cover broader VS topics. In RC1 of TFS, we already released a ton of new compelling capabilities - like: RC2 brings a bunch more new stuff, including: Lots of good stuff. Of course, we also took all the feedback we got from RC1 and fixed all the bugs - thank you for all of the bug reports. Like RC1, this is a go-live release. You can upgrade directly to it from any p...
HockeyApp available through the Visual Studio marketplace
HockeyApp is a fantastic tool for managing mobile devops. It includes capabilities to publish apps to a select group of “beta testers”, to collect feedback from those testers and to gather and analyze crash reports. It works incredibly well for iOS, Android and Windows UWP apps. As of today, HockeyApp can also be purchased in the Visual Studio Marketplace via and Azure subscription. HockeyApp also has a free plan to get started with a few apps. I encourage you to check it out. Brian
Book on Continuous Deployment
Another good book recently hit the virtual shelves - this one on Continuous Deployment with TFS and VS Team Services. The book covers both the principles and practices around continuous delivery, as well as hands on guidance. Check it out... USA - http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Visual-Studio-2015/dp/1484212738 UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1484212738 Brian
A new book on Team Foundation Server 2015
One of our MVPs, Tarun Arora just published a book on TFS 2015. It covers TFS up to TFS 2015 Update 2. Check it out... http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1784391050. Brian
Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 RC 1 is available
Today we released TFS 2015 Update 2 RC 1 and VS 2015 Update 2 CTP1. I'm going to talk about TFS here and you can go to the Visual Studio blog to learn more about VS. This release of TFS is a "go-live" release candidate. We will support customers choosing to install it in a production environment. All the links you should need to learn about it and get it are here: Most of the features labeled Update 2 and described on our Features timeline are in this release. The one feature that we thought was going to be in Update 2 but I now know will not make it is SSH support for Git. We know that's a very hi...
Visual Studio Team Services Java Tools Challenge
We are committed to making VS Team Services a great solution for all developers – for any application on any platform. For several years now, we’ve had a concerted effort to build a great solution for Java developers with an Eclipse plugin, a cross platform command line, an IntelliJ plugin, a cross platform build agent and so much more. We’ve also been working hard to integrate popular Java tools like Maven, JUnit test results importing, JaCoCo and Cobertura, SonarQube and the list goes on. With the recent introduction of our Visual Studio Marketplace we are reemphasizing how open and extensible VSTS is and how...
A bit more on the Feb 3 and 4 incidents
Please read my post from yesterday first. Unfortunately I had a family commitment and had to leave early Friday afternoon before the post was complete. I asked someone on my team to finish it and he did an excellent job and I'm grateful. There are a few things I would yet like to add to the discussion. First I want to emphasize point #4 from the second incident. And note, I described the incidents in order of "worst" incident first. Actually, the second incident happened the day before the first one. That blip out to the right of the graph in the second incident was actually an occurrence of the very same ...
VS Team Services incidents on Feb 3 & 4
We had two serious availability incidents in the past 2 days. I'm incredibly sorry for the problems that these have caused. Increasingly we are bringing on more and more customers who rely on this service day in and day out and any significant interruption is entirely unacceptable. We know it. We live it. We breath it and, in the last 2 days, we have failed twice. We take this responsibility very seriously and continue to work to ensure such things do not happen. Both of these incidents were service wide incidents that affect large numbers of customers and critical scenarios. Worldwide outage causing log...
Package Management now available in Europe and Australia
When we first released the Package Management preview in November, it was only available in the US - If your VS Team Services account was in some region other than the US, installing the Package Management extension would fail. This week, we deployed Package Management instances in Australia and Europe (which are the only other two regions in which we have Team Services instances). So, as of this week, you can install the Package Management extension in any VSTS account and your Package Management instance will automatically be hosted in the same region as the VSTS account. Give it a try and let us know what...
Update Blog software
For months the team has been working on migrating our msdn blogs off of the "old" blogging system we used onto WordPress. In the last few days, my blog was migrated and is now running on WordPress. The system we had been using had gotten pretty out of date and clunky. I haven't used WordPress a lot but it generally has a good reputation and I'm looking forward to learning it and hope I'm really going to like it. Given some of the complaints I've gotten about the blogging software I've gotten over the past year, I hope you are going to see it as an improvement too. The new url is http://blogs.msdn.microsoft.co...
VS Team Services Update – Jan 25th
This week we are deploying the changes from sprints 93 and 94 (they spanned Christmas/New Years so we combined them into a single deployment. You can read the release notes for all the details.As usual, as I write this, the updates have not yet made it to all tenants but they will over the next day or two.This deployment has an unusually large list of improvements in it. I particularly like the test reporting improvements that continues the build + test + release management investment that makes 1 + 1 + 1 = 5. But there’s a ton of new stuff across the product.Also, keep an eye on the roadm...
Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap update
Today we are making a major update to our “Features Timeline” for TFS and VSTS. To remind you, the Features Timeline provides an indication of some of the bigger, higher demand things we are working on and when we think they will be delivered – both on premises in TFS and in the cloud in VSTS (formerly VS Online). A few caveats… It doesn’t represent everything we are doing - just some of the most highly demanded things. We'll continue to provide detailed release notes with every deployment/release. As with any prediction of the future some things may not turn out as we imagine. Right now the approach we’re ...
Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap update
Today we are making a major update to our “Features Timeline” for TFS and VSTS. To remind you, the Features Timeline provides an indication of some of the bigger, higher demand things we are working on and when we think they will be delivered – both on premises in TFS and in the cloud in VSTS (formerly VS Online).A few caveats… Right now the approach we’re taking with this is to update the roadmap about every 3 months and to project about 6 months ahead. There are other forums – blog posts, conference presentations, sales engagements, etc. where we provide h...
Team Explorer Everywhere 14.0.2 released
We recently released a small update to Team Explorer Everywhere – a cross platform command line and Eclipse plug-in for working Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services.You can download it here: Improvements include: Brian
Is your stomach bigger than your eyes?
For the past several months, friends have been bugging me to write another farm post – it’s been quite a while. The problem is that I haven’t been able to think of anything terribly interesting. Most farm work does make for a good blog post – chores, feeding, cutting hay, repairing fences, … Just not great content for an interesting post. Well today I had an experience that I thought was worth sharing. It’s Wed Dec 23rd and I’m off work. I’ve been doing a lot of farm work but, in the last couple of days, it has been raining like crazy – over 4 inches, I think. My fields are like huge grassy ponds and t...
VS 2015 Update 1 and TFS 2015 Update 1 are available
Today we shipped the final releases of Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 1. Here are the release notes: There were very few changes between the last release candidates and this final release – just a hand full of bug fixes. Check out the release notes for all the new stuff in this update – there’s a lot. You can install directly over a pre-release of this update (both VS and TFS) and it will update your installation. For TFS, you can also in-place upgrade previous versions (2013, 2012 and 2010) seamlessly. VS will install side by side with previous versions. Pl...
News from Connect(); 2015
Today is our annual Fall developer Connect(); event in New York. I’m here talking about a ton of new stuff that we’re doing to help developers adopt agile DevOps practices. Normally I would write a detailed post with screenshots and descriptions highlighting the news. However, this time, I’m going to take a different approach. There’s so much stuff to talk about that I can’t write that post – I’d spend days on it and you wouldn’t want to read it :) Instead, I’m going to write a directory of news.Over the next day or two, as blog p...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Management Pack is available
It’s been a painfully and embarrassingly long time coming but the SCOM Management Pack for TFS 2015 is finally available. Give it a spin and let us know if you have any feedback.Download TFS 2015 Management PackBrian
VS 2015 Update 1 RC & TFS 2015 Update 1 RC2 Released
We just released our final “pre-release” of Update 1 for Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio 2015. Lots of useful links are available here: You’ll find the installation links at the top of the release notes pages.As I was looking over things (and finding a few issues with the release notes page :)) to write this post, I was just blown away by how much stuff is included in Update 1. We just shipped 2015 and we already have a *ton* of great new improvements for Update 1. I strongly encourage you to check it out.It’s a bit too early to tell but I exp...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 30
As usual, you can read the release notes for this update on visualstudio.com. One of the most popular improvements released this sprint are our new dashboards. We’ve been dogfooding them internally for a few sprints now and some of my feature teams have put together some very nice dashboards. There are a number of tile types to choose from and you can add custom tile types to show whatever you like. Like most of the stuff we do in the cloud, this is just the beginning and there is lots more to do. Dashboards will evolve rapidly for several more sprints. Expect them to get better and better (like adding th...
Agile at Microsoft
Here's a nice Forbes article on Agile at Microsoft...http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/10/27/surprise-microsoft-is-agile/Brian
TFS Office Integration Installer
One of the things I forgot to mention in my post about TFS 2015 Update 1 RC is that we have also shipped a preview of our new TFS Office Integration Installer (ISO image). This new installer addresses a couple of scenarios: The PowerPoint storyboarding tool is a really nice way to mock up user experiences quickly and easily. You can leverage the PowerPoint skills you already have to build nice walk throughs of user flows before you invest in building them. In building TFS and VSO, we use is all the time. Here’s an example PowerPoint mockup from one of our walk-throughs of our new dashboarding fea...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 8th
Another post I missed last week was an announcement about our sprint 89 deployment for VS Online. You can read the release notes for details.Probably the biggest thing is support for Active Directory group support for managing permissions. This as been a very common request from our larger customers in VSO so they don’t need to maintain shadow groups in VSO and AAD.Another very notable thing is the preview of a new work item form. We are trying to improve the layout to make it “cleaner”, more extensible (setting us up for a good process customization story on the service) and r...
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 1 pre-release available
I’m a bit late to this party because we released them about a week ago. I generally try to sync my blog posts but we had a death in the family last week and I just didn’t have the time to deal with blogging.The Visual Studio preview is named “CTP 1” and you can read more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/10/08/visual-studio-2015-update-1-ctp.aspxThe Team Foundation Server preview is named “RC 1”. The reason for the difference is that we’ve learned over the years with TFS that unless we provide a “go-live” promise (sup...
VS Online Update – Sept 18
Sorry for being so late on this one. The last couple of weeks have been very hectic for me and I’ve mostly had to ignore my blog.Last week we finished rolling out our sprint 88 work. You can read about the details in the VS Online release notes.As has become the pattern over the past 6 months, this sprint, we rolled out a bunch more improvements to our Agile planning tools. The cards became even richer with on card sub-tasks. Queryability of kanban column metadata and more.Sprint 89 is already right around the corner. Stay tuned for info on the next round of updates in about a ...
September pricing and licensing changes
I want to update you all on the pricing and licensing changes we’ve been working on over the past year.VS Online Basic usersThe new, less expensive, tiered pricing model I announced a couple of months ago goes into effect Sept 1st (today). In addition, we are finalizing the licensing documents to include an on-prem TFS CAL with your VS Online purchases, making it easy for you to use on-prem, cloud or both. That will also go into effect in Sept.A changing philosophyBefore I explain some other changes that are coming, let me step back for a minute and talk about how we are changing the way we thin...
VS Online/TFS Feature timeline – the UserVoice version
As a follow up to my post yesterday on the Feature timeline refresh, I took a few minutes this morning to walk through our UserVoice site and summarize how the work we are planning over the next several months relates. This is a different granularity cut (because it’s based on UV suggestions) that what I published yesterday. I’m not promising that I caught every single one. And I’m not promising that everyone I’ve listed here will get done this fall (my crystal ball isn’t perfect). But, based on what I know now, this is a pretty good approximation of the plan. I stopped when I got down to UV items with les...
Features timeline refresh
With the TFS 2015 release behind us and a lot of planning for our next phase of work completed, it’s time to do a major refresh of our Visual Studio Online Features Timeline. If you aren’t familiar with this page, I encourage you to check it out. It not only gives you a peek ahead to things we’re working on, it also contains a log of the work we deliver every sprint. Lastly, it roughly maps when the VS Online features show up in an on-premises TFS release.A little commentary on this update… Hopefully you find this useful. Let me know if you have ques...
VS 2012 Update 5 has been released
This week we released the final build of VS 2012 Update 5. You can get it on the Visual Studio downloads page. There are only a few changes in it. You can find them in the VS 2012 Update 5 KB article.Brian
TFS 2015 Installation guidance
At least once or twice a week, I’m getting questions about where the TFS 2015 installation guidance is. We’re not doing well with search engines on that apparently. We’re going to see if we can do better but, in the mean time, here’s the link just in case you stumble across my blog :)Installing Team Foundation Server 2015Brian
TFS 2015 Power Tools are available
Today we released the TFS 2015 Power Tools that accompany VS 2015 and TFS 2015. The landing page that link points to includes lots of info about compatibility, changes, etc.Sorry it took a bit longer to get these out than we expected.Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 26th
This week we are rolling out our sprint 87 work. Nothing earth shattering this sprint but some nice project management improvements. Also we’ve added first class SonarQube support now with custom tasks for executing SonarQube and publishing the results for your build. You can read more on this week’s VSO release notes.Brian
SmartOffice4TFS and inteGREAT4TFS available for Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN subscribers
Managing requirements is an incredibly important part of the software development process for everyone. Different teams approach the problem very differently – from very lightweight/informal ways to very formal and documented ways. The needs of your business and the culture of your organization will determine what’s right for you.For years, we’ve worked with partners to provide great requirements management capabilities for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online. eDevTech provides a suite of tools that provide solutions spanning from relatively informal ways of managin...
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 7th
This week we are rolling out our Sprint 86 work. You can read details on the VSO release notes. Included is the next set of work to improve our Agile planning experiences and availability of a NuGet package for our TFS/VSO SDK. The NuGet package is a big step forward in making it easier to work with. You no longer have to mess with the complexity of getting an MSI installed. You can just copy the SDK files and you are good to go. Your app can be self contained and not have to worry about pre-reqs.The NuGet Package with work with TFS today and the Agile improvements will come to...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Final Release
Today we released the final version of Team Foundation Server 2015. TFS 2015 is a major step forward, with tons of improvements throughout the development process but with special emphasis on DevOps capabilities. Here are all of the TFS 2015 related downloads. Look under Visual Studio 2015 for things like Test Professional, under Team Foundation Server 2015 for TFS, Project Server, etc. and under Tools for Visual Studio 2015 for Release Management, Test Agents, etc. You can, of course, get TFS 2015 through your MSDN subscriber downloads and other places you normally acquire Microsoft softwar...
Included CALs and Tiered Pricing
I have to say that when I wrote my post last week on TFS and VSO related licensing and packaging changes, I didn’t think I’d be writing another one quite so soon. But I found out that we’re disclosing the next set of changes this week to help people plan, even though they don’t go into effect for another month. This isn’t some random path we are on. We have a reasonably clear picture of where we’re headed and we have quite a number of changes we are making on that journey. Please don’t ask me to describe the destination quite yet because I’m not re...
Self forming teams at scale
I want to share with you all a strange thing that we do. It’s unorthodox but has been very successful for us. Teams change. People come. People go. People move around. Reorgs happen. This is a fact of life, particularly in any large organization, and something managers spend a fair amount of time on – recruiting, re-recruiting, managing, developing, etc. Many years ago (I want to say around 2008), we had a reorg to do. In general, we do them every couple of years, usually associated with some big milestone/inflection, and use them to rebalance, apply talent to the new problems, fund new projects, etc...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 5 RC Available
As part of the 2015 wave of releases, in addition to the 2015 products and a 2013 Update 5, we are also releasing a VS 2012 Update 5 (not one for TFS 2012 though). This Update includes a few bug fixes. The most notable, from my perspective, are some changes to make using VS 2012 with a TFS or VS Online Team Project that gets renamed. This update will handle some of the local reaction work, like workspace updates, automatically rather than relying on manual fix-ups. You can find information on the release candidate here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=615776 I don’t have a date for ...
Licensing and packaging changes for TFS 2015
Over the past year, we have been working to simplify licensing for Team Foundation Server and make things as straight forward as possible for customers to adopt it. This has included changes like the introduction of the Stakeholder plan for broad access to work items within the organization, simplifications to release management to eliminate per deployment environment billing, reductions in cloud load testing prices and more. You’ll find some previous posts here: Today I want to tell you about another set of changes we are making that I think will move us yet another step forward. All of thes...
Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Released
Today, we released Visual Studio 2015, .NET 4.6, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 5. As I announced in a post a few weeks ago, Team Foundation Server 2015 is going to take just a bit longer (more on this in a minute), but you can get RC2 now if you like and it will work just fine with VS 2015 (and other versions too). We’re having an online event today to talk about this wave of releases if you want to learn more. I won’t repeat all of the great content on the Visual Studio blog post or on Soma’s post. Check those out for lots more info on what&rsquo...
Visual Studio Online Update – July 17
I told you a week or so ago it would come quickly :) We’re deploying our Sprint 85 work now. As always, it will take a few days for it to make it across the entirety of the service. You can find the details on the new capabilities in the release notes. I think you’ll be pleased to see a whole bunch of new Agile planning improvements. One of the “small” changes to the card styling feature macro support. Greg gave one example in the release notes. I thought I’d share a few more that someone sent around in an internal email to spark your thinking on how you might creatively use these. The Sprint 86...
Update on Team Foundation Server RC2
I wrote a post about a week ago announcing TFS 2015 RC2. Today, we released downloads for the rest of the languages, along with release notes. All the information in my previous post is still accurate and the links all point to the updated downloads. Brian
TFS 2015 Compatibility
As the release of TFS 2015 has approached, I’ve gotten a lot of compatibility questions. We were a little slow documenting the story but we have it now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/TFS/administer/requirements The short story is the TFS 2015 compat matrix is about the same at the TFS 2013 one was – we didn’t make big changes in that respect. There’s a few tweaks that I’d still like to see in the document but it’s close. If you find anything missing, let us know. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – July 7
I’m a bit late on this post. It’s been a busy week of travel. Last week we began deploying our sprint 84 release. Because of the logistics around finalizing our TFS 2015 release, it was delayed a bit. Sprint 83 is actually the last sprint that went into TFS 2015 RTM and we wanted to keep it live on the service longer while we iterated on the remaining bug fixes. But as of last week we moved forward. We’re now trying to “catch back up” and the sprint 85 deployment should be starting later this week. I’ll post again when I have something useful...
Team Foundation Server 2015 RC2 available
Today we released Release Candidate 2 of Team Foundation Server 2015. I believe this release is VERY close to the final bits we will ship. I’d encourage people to try out upgrades on production backups, pre-production environments and, production environments. We will support you regardless of the path you choose. Download: TFS 2015 RC2 Be aware that this TFS RC2 cannot be installed on the same machine as VS 2015 RC. It can be accessed by the VS RC just fine, but not installed on the same machine – this has to do with some versioning issues on some files that are shared between...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2015 RTM
We have released Team Explorer Everywhere 2015. It’s available on the Download Center and on the Eclipse Marketplace. Soma announced that VS 2015 will release on July 20th so stay tuned. This isn’t a particularly big release but it has some very welcome enhancements: Build.vnext and Team Project Rename are, of course, only available when using VS Online or TFS 2015. Please give us any feedback you have. Thanks, Brian
Team Foundation Server and VS Online adoption at Microsoft
Someone asked me in a blog comment recently to post an update on internal adoption – the last one was almost a year ago. I’m going to keep it reasonably short. The best summary is adoption continues to grow. TFS on-prem is growing slowly because it’s already huge. VS Online usage is growing more rapidly but is still far smaller than TFS on-prem. Here’s the latest TFS on-prem summary from our IT team that runs the production TFS servers: Here’s a month by month trend of VS Online adoption by major organization. The numbers look a little larger than they really are because adoption is still early and p...
Visual Studio Online Update – June 3rd
***PLEASE READ*** Ahh, my fortune for “delayed publish” in Live Writer. I was trying to grab screenshots for this and accidentally hit publish a day too early. The release notes won’t be published until tomorrow (June 3rd). I’m sorry for the inconvenience but with the number of people who get email notifications of my blog post, there’s no pulling it back, so I’ll just leave it up there. Today, we begin the process of rolling out our sprint 83 results. You can read the release notes to see the highlights of the new features. The kanban and task boards are making great progress towards having all the fea...
Visual Studio Online Update – May 15th
This week we are deploying our sprint 82 work for VS Online. This is a very BIG deployment – lot’s of stuff. You can read the release notes. First and foremost Build.VNext is here! It is now in Public Preview and everyone can try it. We also now have a hosted build pool so you don’t have to install a local build agent on Windows if you don’t want to. If you want to build on Linux or the MacOS, you will still need to setup up local agent for now. Since I offered a early peek at Build.VNext on my blog a month or so ago, I’ve been inundated with people requ...
A fun project for customer connection
Last week the VS Code team came to us saying that they really wanted a great experience getting bug reports from customers. Microsoft Connect just isn’t a pleasant experience. They looked at UserVoice and it’s great for suggestions but not optimized for bugs. We decided to pull a few people from across the VS Online team together and do a 3 day Hack-a-thon to see what we could put together. I’ve been blown away by what they accomplished. They shipped an increment at the end of each day – sometimes more than once, and delivered a fully functional experience at the en...
VS Online hosted in Australia
Today, we are expanding our VS Online footprint to include an instance in Australia. This adds to the several instances we have in the US and the one we have in Europe. It is part of our drive to make VS Online available to everyone, in a geography you are comfortable with and with performance you are happy with. Australia East is the Sydney/New South Wales data center. VS Online has logic to auto-select your region based on the IP address you are signing up from. It tries to default you to the “best” region for you. You can, of course, override it by choosing any of the regions from the list. The Au...
VS Online & Power BI
I briefly described our new Power BI integration for VS Online in my //Build/ post last week. I didn’t however provide any details on how to use it. Jeff Levinson has written a very detailed walk through that explains many of the concepts and shows you how to get connected. Check out his VS Online Power BI tutorial.Brian
A Real Madrid story
Real Madrid is one of the biggest and most successful sports franchises in the world. Over the past several months we’ve been working with them to build some digital experiences to provide their fans the best possible experience. As part of that, they wanted to have a great way to understand how their mobile/cloud experiences were working for their customers. Our Application Insights team has been working with them to instrument all aspects of their application – mobile devices, backend services, etc. to give a 360 degree view of the customer experience – reliability, performan...
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server at Build 2015
It’s conference season – //Build/ is this week and Ignite is next week. As you might expect, we have a TON of stuff to share so I’ll get right to it. Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2015 Release Candidate This week released the release candidates for both VS 2015 and TFS 2015. Both are “go-live” releases and are reliable enough to be used in production environments. At the same time, neither are finished so we know there are some remaining issues that we plan to fix between now and the final release. Useful links: Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2013 Upda...
VS Online Update – April 27th
This week we are rolling out our Sprint 81 work. 3 instances have been updated so far and the remaining 3 will update over the next couple of days – so, as usual, you may not see the changes immediately. This update comes close on the heels of the last one. We just finished the sprint 80 update only a week ago. It was delayed because of the huge changes to support team project rename. Starting with this sprint, we should be back on a normal schedule. There are some VERY nice changes in this deployment. You can read the release notes. Our #1 support request right now is people w...
First TFS 2015 RC production upgrade I know of
I got the first customer report of a production upgrade to the TFS 2015 release candidate today. Understand, we haven’t released it yet but we gave an early copy to our MVPs to give us final feedback on. One of our MVPs reported that he upgraded a customer with a 9GB team project collection (not terribly large, obviously), and that it took 11 minutes. I was happy to hear that it was both successful and reasonably fast. This release has a lot of database changes to support Team Project rename and other things so, for large databases, we expect the upgrade times will be significant. To...
Team Project Rename available on VS Online
Today we enabled Team Project rename on all VS Online accounts. Team Project rename is our #1 User Voice request, by far and the longest standing customer complaint. 6,156 votes and 178 comments later, it’s here (both on VSO – today and in the TFS 2015 RC – available shortly). I know it’s been a long time coming and I appreciate everyone who has been both patient and persistent. I really hope this will address all the pent up demand and all the mis-named projects out there :) You can try it by navigating to your project in the VSO web experience, then hit the settings icon on the upper right. There are ...
TFVC & Git support
I got a question on a blog post about differences in TFVC and Git support in TFS and VS Online. Here’s a link to the question for context: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2015/03/12/the-future-of-team-foundation-version-control.aspx#10608301 I can’t answer in a comment with reasonable formatting so I’ll answer in a post. One thing you can check out is an MSDN topic on the subject here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181368.aspx. There’s some useful information there but I feel like that page is trying to do too many things at once – explain some of the ...
VS Online Update – April 10th
We are deploying our sprint 80 results this week. You can read the release notes on visualstudio.com. There are some very nice improvements for both the Agile tooling and Git. This is an unusual deployment. First it's delayed a week and second it's going to take a couple of weeks before all the instances of VS Online are updated. As I write this, only the internal "Canary" and European instances have been updated. Today we are starting 2 US instances. Later this week we hope to start the largest instance - and we expect that will take 4 days to upgrade. Why so stra...
Ever want to create bugs from email?
Someone recently posted an open source copy of a popular internal tool called Mail2Bug. https://github.com/microsoft/mail2bug It will automatically create bugs from an email and then keep the bug up to date with any further conversation that happens on the email thread. It works for both VS Online and TFS but requires that you use Exchange (or O365). Check it out... Brian
The future of Team Foundation Version control
I've written about this before but it keeps coming back. From time to time I get the question "Is TFVC dead?" I guess I have to just keep answering it. No, it is not. We added support for Git in TFS 2013 so that we'd support the best centralized version control system and the best dvcs in the industry. We've been investing heavily in Git because there's a ton of work to do to bring it up to parity with what we can do with TFVC. I think people get confused for a number or reasons. We talk about our progress on Git a lot. The industry talks about Git a lot. And, if yo...
Visual Studio Online Update – Mar 10
Sorry for being a little late to the party this week. We are rolling out our sprint 79 build to VS Online build this week. You can read more about it here: https://www.visualstudio.com/news/2015-mar-10-vso. I haven't said anything about it explicitly but a while back we made the decision to increase our focus on burning down our UserVoice priority list. This week we delivered the #3 item on the list with 2,203 votes. Of course, we are also working on the #1 and #2 items. But, that's one very popular item delivered and 2,203 votes released to vote on something else :) As Aaron notes in the release notes, ...
VS 2015 CTP6 and TFS 2015 CTP1 shipped today
Today we shipped Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 and TFS 2015 CTP1. You can download both here: Download Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP You can also read the release notes to learn more about them: Please submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE. I know many people have been waiting a long time to see the first CTP of TFS 2015. I’ve even had quite a few people unsure of whether or not to believe that we actually intended to ship it :). We did. But, I keep telling people, that if you...
Visual Studio Online Update – Feb 18
Yesterday we began our sprint 78 VS Online deployment. You can check out the release notes here: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2015-feb-18-vso. there are a few nice improvements. It will likely take 4 or 5 days to upgrade all accounts so don’t be surprised if you don’t see the changes in your account right away. I also encourage you to check out our Features Timeline. We’ve made some updated recently, including some Agile/Kanban items, a Build.vnext entry, added a timeframe for Team project rename and more. Brian
Code Search on VS Online
In November, at our Connect(); event, I gave a sneak peek at a few features/services coming to VS Online, and ultimately Team Foundation Server. Among the things I demoed was a new source code search feature. I’m happy to say that the next step in that journey is upon us. Today, we announced a “limited preview” of our new Code Search capability. Limited preview means that not everyone will get access – you have request it and we will only enable a certain number of accounts. The feature is still early but it’s now at the point that it is very useful – we have been using it internally for more than a month an...
New page on VS Online Agile Tooling
We’re in the process of trying to significantly upgrade the content on our Visual Studio website. We’re starting with the pages that describe what VS Online is and why you might want to use it. The first new page is on Agile Tools. In parallel, we are also working to add some more educational/best practices content. I’m looking forward to seeing the site get better and better.Brian
Licensing changes – User acceptance testing and Agile planning
This is next in a series of licensing and feature changes that I laid out in December. With this, I think all of the cloud changes (and more) that I described have been made. Some of the on-prem changes will be available as we release more on-prem updates. User acceptance testing As of this week, you will no longer need a VS Online Advanced license to do user acceptance testing with Visual Studio Online. You will still need one to create and manage test plans but if you just need to execute tests, report results, file bugs, etc, then you only need a VS Online Basic license. Agile planning This w...
Hiring for VS Online and Team Foundation Server
Microsoft has an extensive recruiting effort. But we recently decided to try something new to try to find more people who might want to help build VS Online and Team Foundation Server. We added a Jobs page to visualstudio.com. It has a little info on what we do and links to job postings on the Microsoft careers site and some information about who we are. We've got quite a few positions open right now and are hoping to fill them as quickly as we can. This is a bit of an experiment. If it works well, we will probably expand it to include other parts of Visual Studio. Brian
Journey to cloud
Transforming a sizeable development organization from "classic" development practices to Agile cloud development is something I talk about a lot. Bhavik Shah, who used to work on our team, left Microsoft to go to business school and now works a Mckinsey, recently wrote an article on that transformation process. Buck Hodges, one of our Engineering Directors worked with Bhavik and others on it. It's a nice read: https://tmt.mckinsey.com/ The link is a link to the Mckinsey home page - I don't have a perma-link to the article. It's on the front page as I write this. The article is titled "From...
Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 is available
Today released CTP 5 of Visual Studio 2015. This is not a “go-live” build but is getting close to functionally complete. If you’re curious what’s coming in VS 2015, check it out. Once again, we did not release a TFS preview with this VS CTP, however, this is the last time. Our next VS 2015 preview will also include a preview of TFS 2015. So, if you’ve been wondering where it is, you won’t have to wait too much longer. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio Online ISO 27001 Certification and European Model Clauses
In December, we hit an important milestone for Visual Studio Online. We received ISO 27001 certification and added the European Model Clauses to our service terms. We take protection of customer data very seriously and work hard to ensure your data is safe and that we comply with expected policies in all the regions in which we operate. These two milestones are important steps on a journey of increasing our guarantees and documenting our adherence to our policies. Here’s a nice image of our certification document (blushing with pride :))… You can find the documentation on our inclusion of European ...
Build & Load Test pricing changes are in effect
The changes to the VS Online build and load testing services that I described a few weeks ago are now complete. This represents a substantial reduction in price for both services. We’ve also removed the 10 user limit of Visual Studio Online Professional subscriptions. The slider goes up to 100 now. You can contact support if you need more than that. You can see the latest VS Online Pricing on the pricing page. Last, but not least, the change to remove the per-processor charges for Team Foundation Server on-premises release management capability has also been removed. The rest of the changes...
Git vulnerability with .gitconfig
Today the Git community disclosed an issue in Git that, in the worst case, could allow a developer’s machine to be taken over. This is an issue that manifests across much of the Git ecosystem and is not unique to Microsoft’s Git implementation or to Windows. I’ll describe the problem and the steps we’ve taken to ensure our customers using Git repositories are protected against this issue. First, I want to thank the Hg (Mercurial) community for their help. An analogous issue was discovered in Hg. They took the time to look at Git and discovered that the same issue ex...
Improved Welcome/Wiki experience
I mentioned this in my post on the sprint 75 deployment and I wanted to include a video but it wasn’t ready. Now it is and I want to share it. Keep in mind that the deployment is still in progress so it may not be available in your account yet. The deployment should be done by tomorrow (Friday). https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/briankel/Lightweight-Web-Editing-with-Markdown-Files-in-Visual-Studio-Online I’m just tickled at how nicely this experience is turning out. I hope you like it too. Of course, all of this will show up in TFS 2015 too. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 17
This week we are deploying our sprint 75 results. You can read details on the VS Online release notes. For whatever confluence of reasons, a lot of things came together in this sprint an there’s a ton of new stuff that I think you will like. One of my personal favorites is the updated Wiki/Welcome page experience. It’s now incredibly easy to create and update Wiki pages using markdown in VS Online. I encourage you to check it out. This is the last deployment of this year. In fact, we’ll be honoring our tradition of skipping the deployment that overlaps heavily with ...
A new Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server Features Timeline
We are always working on ways to communicate more effectively with customers about what we have done, what people like and don’t like, what they want, what we’re planning, etc. A year or so ago we added a Features Timeline page to our News section of visualstudio.com as one step in that journey. The news section, for VS Online particularly, announces the new features that we’ve deployed each sprint. The Features Timeline then maps those new features to the on-premises TFS release you can find them in. Here’s an example snippet: At the same time, it’s all backward looking – stuff we’ve already done an...
Microsoft acquires HockeyApp
I’m excited to announce our acquisition of HockeyApp – the next step in our journey to turn Application Insights into the best tool in the world for helping you get insight into your applications. With HockeyApp we add great support for mobile devices, allowing you see more of your application and helping you answer: 1) Is my application available/reliable? 2) Is my application performing? 3) Is my application succeeding – allowing my users to accomplish what they intend and delivering on my business goals? HockeyApp brings a fantastic solution for: And HockeyApp provides fantastic support fo...
More pricing and licensing changes coming
Earlier this year, we started a process of reviewing our pricing and licensing for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online. Our intent was to review all of the customer feedback we’ve received to look for changes that would simplify purchasing and make it more affordable for teams to include everyone in the broader organization who needs to interact with the development team. I previewed the first set of changes in July which included a new Stakeholder license that enables people outside the “development team” to track progress, make suggestions, file bugs, etc. This means th...
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 2nd
This week we are rolling out the sprint 74 updates to VS Online. You can read details about the features on the service news page. There’s nothing huge here. After the larger announcements we made at Connect(); in November, we’re back to iterating on and improving capabilities more incrementally. For large organizations, my favorite improvement is the new identity control. As it evolved, I kept asking the team to try to make it work like address resolution in Outlook works – I like it a lot. It’s not quite the same because we don’t have a local copy of the add...
Outage on Monday Nov-24
Just Friday, the week before, I was speaking to Buck about the incident we had the previous week and expressing a strong desire to avoid another incident anytime soon. We agreed to postpone the VS Online deployment so that we didn’t have to rush it in a short holiday week and we could ensure that everyone needed was on hand in case something went wrong. Then I woke up Monday morning to see that we were in the middle of an incident. It started at 7:00 UTC (11:06 Sunday night, PST). By the time I got online at about 11:30 UTC, the team had been engaged for hours and were working diligently o...
Special Offers from Visual Studio Partners
Last week at our Connect(); event in New York City, we made some big announcements regarding our ecosystem from a developer as well as a partner point of view. In addition to those announcements, I wanted to call your attention to special offers for MSDN subscribers from some of our top Visual Studio partners. You can also check out this short video on Channel 9 to learn more about the partner ecosystem and these great offers. These offers are live on the MSDN Special offers page and include: We just added another partner offer with Team Companion Bridge the gap between stakeholders and d...
Incident response
We had an incident on VS Online yesterday, starting at 1 AM UTC (5:00 PM PST). The incident was caused by an underlying Azure storage incident affecting many stamps in several regions. I don’t know the root cause of that yet but I’m sure I’ll find out. I want to start by apologizing for the incident. No incident is good or acceptable. I know it disrupted important work happening for our customers and we take that very seriously. At the same time, they happen. Nothing you can do can ever 100% prevent them. As a result, how you respond to them is as important as the work you do to prevent them. I wante...
News from Connect();
This week we had our “Connect();” developer event in New York. We made a ton of announcements. You’ll find a bunch on Soma’s blog, the Visual Studio blog, the Visual Studio ALM blog and in the release notes. At the highest level, we announced: I also previewed some features that will be coming to VS Online & TFS in the not too distant future. We did *not* release a preview of TFS 2015 today – not because we aren’t working on it but rather because we’ve found that shipping these capabilities to VS Online is by far the fastest way to provide you with a preview of what is coming ...
Connect(); is today
Our Connect(); event for developers is today. I’m in New York getting ready for a few presentations I’m giving. It’s going to be a busy day because we have a lot of stuff to tell you about – some of it, I think, pretty exciting and unexpected. If you’ve got time, I encourage you to tune into the live stream – it starts at 10:00am eastern time (the times on the website appear to be Pacific time). Looking forward to chatting with you today. I’ll try to keep up with blog comments, etc today. It’s a pretty busy day so I may not be prompt wi...
VS Online Data Protection
It’s not uncommon that I get questions about data security and privacy in Visual Studio Online. It’s something we take very seriously, design for, test for and focus on. Jeff Beehler, who runs our compliance team, did a talk at TechEd Europe this week on our data protection approach. As he worked to put together his presentation, he also put together a VS Online Data Protection document to share the information even more broadly. You’ll find it hosted along with other key service documents (like our service level agreement) on the VS Online support page. In addition to working ...
Super simple load test trial experience
In order to make it super easy for anyone to get a tiny taste of what the VS Online load test experience is about, we added a new web based experience a few days ago. ***UPDATE 10/29/2014 12:30PM EDT*** - When I wrote this, I wasn't aware that it is only available to VS Online customers licensed with an MSDN Ultimate subscription. We're having a conversation about whether or not we want to leave it that way but that's the status for now. If you go to your account home page on any VS Online account, you’ll see a new top level tab. If you click on it you’ll get a page that allows you to run a very sim...
TechEd Europe 2014 News
Today, in the keynote for TechEd Europe, we announced several cool new things… VS Online European data center We now have a VS Online instance in the Azure “West Europe” data center and it is open for business. You can read more about it in my separate post. VS Online REST APIs and Service Hooks RTM This spring, at TechEd in the US, we announced a new extensibility approach for VS Online, and ultimately for TFS too, based on REST, OAuth and Service Hooks. Today, we announced that the V1.0 of these APIs are now final. That’s not to say, by any stretch, that we are done with the APIs completely but rather th...
Visual Studio Online is in Europe!
Today we opened up our shiny, new VS Online instance in the Azure “West Europe” region, which is located in the Netherlands. This is a big step and is the first of many more to come in making VS Online a truly global service. I’ve been getting requests for over a year to provide the ability to host data in different regions – for some it’s about the comfort of having their data on “home soil”. For others it’s about reduced latency to access the service. Whatever your reason, Europe is now an option for you. You can get started today by going to http://visualstudio.com and creating a new account. The accou...
Visual Studio and TFS 2013.4 (Update 4) Release Candidate
It’s time! The Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013.4 and Team Foundation Server 2013.4 is here. I’ve written some posts about the CTPs along the way. But I’ll give a high-level recap of the ALM improvements and talk about a few of the new things showing up in this RC. Work item tracking and Agile project management improvements – This update includes a ton of “smallish” improvements to work item tracking. Things like trend charts, area path search, better embedded url support, performance improvements, full screen support and more. No single thing is likely to blow your socks off but, in t...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 14th
Today we began releasing our Sprint 72 build on VS Online. You can read the release notes on the site. As usual, it will take a couple of days for the changes to propagate across all accounts. This sprint was a pretty light sprint. We released the “Test artifacts as work items” changes, previously made available in TFS 2013.3, that enable customization (eventually), auditing, permissioning, querying, etc. We also introduced a small new feature to enabling copying formatted query results to the clipboard. The truth is we spent much of this sprint making progress on some of the f...
Visual Studio Online Update – Sept 23th
This week we are releasing our sprint 71 work on VS Online. You can read more about the changes on the news page. In the past, we’ve struggled with how to “time” the publishing of release notes with the deployment of the software. As we get more and more instances (we have 4 now and will be adding a 5th one soon), it becomes increasingly hard to get any timing right. Starting this sprint we are going to publish the release notes when the upgrade for the first public instance starts. That means the release notes will always be available a little before the features a...
Visual Studio and TFS 2013.4 CTP2 is available
Today we released the second CTP (community technology preview) of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and TFS 2013 Update 4. You can read about the VS changes on the Visual Studio blog. You can download the CTP. Or you can check out the release notes. Also here’s the link to the blog post I wrote on CTP1. TFS improvements in this CTP include: The addition of support for stakeholder licensing is certainly the largest change in this CTP. You can read more about stakeholder licensing. And you can go to the “Access Levels” tab in the TFS web access s...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2013.2 (Update 2)
Today, we released Update 2 of Team Explorer Everywhere. You can read details on Will’s blog post. I’ve been amazed lately how many people don’t know about Team Explorer Everywhere. We’ve had it for a couple of years now. It’s a really nice solution for Java/Eclipse users to use Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online. It includes an Eclipse plugin and a command line both of which run on Windows, Mac or Linux. I know quite a few customers who use it and like it but it continues to surprise me that, more often than not, when I mention using TFS on ...
SAFe with Team Foundation Server
Greg Boer posted a very detailed article on how to use the Scaled Agile Framework with TFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/09/11/scaled-agile-framework-using-tfs-to-support-epics-release-trains-and-multiple-backlogs-whitepaper.aspx Check it out, Brian
Visual Studio in Gartner’s Integrated Quality Suites report
Gartner recently released this year’s update to their Integrated Quality Suites report. This is the next version of the report I blogged about last year. We’ve worked hard over the last year to continue to improve our testing tools offering – for developers, testers and end users. We’ve made our testing experiences available via a web browser, reduced licensing requirements, improved customizability and more. It’s great to see that, once again, Gartner has placed us in the leader quadrant in their 2014 Integrated Quality Suites report after evaluating out integrated ...
Visual Studio Online Update – Sept 4th
We’ve recently started bring some larger Microsoft teams into VS Online. That has been a very enlightening experience. It has particularly highlighted issues with fit and finish for high bandwidth activities like bug triage, performance and scale issues with larger data sets, etc. This sprint (sprint 70), deploying today, we’ve delivered a large number of smallish improvements based on what we’ve learned. I think this pattern will continue for the next couple of sprints as we get everyone “settled in” to using VS Online in heavy daily use. **IMPORTANT** This deploym...
VS & TFS 2013 Update 4 CTP 1 is available
I don’t know about you but it’s kind of hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we are already on the road to delivering Visual Studio 2013.4 and Team Foundation Server 2013.4. Update 3 wasn’t that long ago. Today we are delivering Update 4 CTP (Community Technology Preview) 1. As always, there will be a couple of CTPs – roughly 3 weeks apart, then a release candidate and a final release. So, the final release of Update 4 is still a ways off – Oct/Nov timeframe, but if you are interested in seeing it develop, the CTPs give you a good way to follow it. For TFS functionality, particularly early in the...
How to purchase VS Online
Brian Keller interviewed James Rice (he's on our business team) for Channel 9 about how to purchase Visual Studio Online. This may clear up any uncertainty you have. https://aka.ms/HowToBuyVSO Brian
Stakeholder license is live
About 6 weeks ago, I announced a plan to make some licensing changes to VS Online and Team Foundation Server that would make it easier for more people to participate in the development process. A few weeks ago, we did part 1 by enabling Test Hub access for VS Online Advanced licenses. Today we have completed step 2 by enabling the new Stakeholder license allowing an unlimited # of people in each account significant access to the work item tracking and Agile planning capabilities, at no charge. You can read my news announcement here: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-aug-27-vso. The fin...
Sending email to a Team Room
Here's a very cool way to use our new VS Online extensibility (that will be available in TFS V.Next) to enable sending an email to a Team Room. Our new REST, OAuth and Service Hooks support can be used in countless creative ways. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/slange/archive/2014/08/26/send-email-to-a-team-room-with-vso-service-hooks-and-zapier.aspx Brian
Retrospective on the Aug 14th VS Online outage
We had a pretty serious outage last Thursday all told it was a little over 5 hours. The symptoms were that performance was so bad that the service was basically unavailable for most people (though there was some intermittent access as various mitigation steps were taken). It started around 14:00 UTC and ended a little before 19:30 UTC. This duration and severity makes this one of the worst incidents we’ve ever had on VS Online. We feel terrible about it and continue to be committed to doing everything we can to prevent outages. I’m sorry for the problems it caused. The te...
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
Well, today was my turn to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This morning I was tagged by both Adam Cogan and Scott Guthrie. Tempting as it is though, I’m not doing it twice I don’t know if it’s typical, but Adam challenged me to complete the task within 24 hours. I spent today thinking about how I would get home early enough, how I would orchestrate it and where I would get the ice. I decided to do it on the farm (notice the cows behind me) and to have my kids help me. When I first told them that I needed their help, they moaned in exasperation at having to “help dad again”. When I told them, they wou...
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 18th
Yesterday I rolled out the release notes for our sprint 69 deployment. Check out the updates! P.S. the outage we had last Thursday was *not* caused by the rollout of updates (or, at best only tangentially so). I’m hoping to get the outage retrospective written up tomorrow. Brian
Visual Studio “14” CTP 3 available
Today we released CTP of our next major Visual Studio release. You can look in the release notes to see what is in it. You can also read about the highlights on John’s post. There’s no startling new improvements in this CTP but lots of nice, smaller, things. Just a reminder, we aren’t shipping CTP previews of TFS “14” at this point. Visual Studio Online is still your best way to check out the latest TFS improvements. Please submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE. Brian
VS Online outage last week
Let me start by apologizing for the pretty horrific outage we had last week. I’ve been silent on it because I was on a “last family vacation” in Europe before my oldest son goes off to college. Buck Hodges and others have been working hard on it. I’ve been reading up on everything that happened and everything that’s been done. I need to spend some time talking with the team but I expect to publish a lengthy retrospective in the next few days. Stay tuned for more. At this point, I think enough has been done that we won’t see a recurrence of the issu...
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...
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
The first Visual Studio “14” CTP
Today we released the first Visual Studio “V.Next” Community Technology Preview. You can read more about it on Soma’s blog post. Don’t confuse this with my announcement of the VS 2013 Update 3 CTP that I announced 4 days ago. We are doing development on the next major version of Visual Studio in parallel with Updates to Visual Studio 2013. You can expect to see continued Update and V.Next releases in the next several months. For the TFS community, I want to explain that we did NOT ship a CTP of Team Foundation Server V.Next at this time. Because we can deliver...
Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3 CTP1 (VS 2013.3.1 if you wish)
Better late than never, I guess. Sorry for being so late blogging about this; it’s been a crazy week. About a week ago we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 – Community Technology Preview 1. That's a mouthful. Just a bit of orientation. This is a VERY early preview of Update 3 – heck, we just shipped Update 2 at TechEd about 2 weeks ago. It is not intended for use in production environments. I’m not expecting everyone to run out an install it but, if you are really interested in what’s in it, it’s a good opportunity to track the progress. We will likely be shipping a few CTPs before...
Wookiki – A Windows store app for keeping an eye on builds on VS Online
Check out Wookiki… It’s a Windows 8.1 store app for keeping up to date on build statuses on Visual Studio Online – it has push notifications, live tiles and more. A previous version had been built with the OData solution for TFS that Brian Keller put together a couple of years ago. Now it’s been ported to work with the new Open APIs that we announced earlier this month. Here’s a short video of the previous version if you want to see what it does. Brian
Real time collaboration with VS Anywhere
The VS Anywhere guys have been continuing to improve their real time developer collaboration capabilities by adding a web experience along side their VS add-in. They’ve also taken advantage of our new VS Online Open APIs to do so cool VS Online integration. They’ll be doing a web cast on it in a couple of weeks and I encourage you to check it out. Session title Interactive Code Reviews with Visual Studio Online and VS Anywhere · Date: Thursday, June 12th, 10:00am PST · Registration link: https://aka.ms/VIS44PALReg · Description: When a software devel...
Visual Studio Online Update – May 20th
This week we are deploying our sprint 65 work. You can read the release notes here: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2014-may-20-vso The really big news is that we’ve completed the next step in the journey to fully supporting Active Directory integration through Azure Active Directory. You can now create a new VS Online account through any of the paths we offer and connect the new account to Azure Active Directory in the process. The news post has a bunch more detail, tutorials, etc. This has been one of the top service requests for a while now. In fact, there are two highly voted Uservoic...
Useful stuff on the VS Online Open APIs
I’m just sharing interesting stuff I run across that relates to the new open apis for VS Online that we announced. Here’s a blog post someone wrote on configuring and using UserVoice with VS Online: http://roadtoalm.com/2014/05/15/integrate-uservoice-with-visual-studio-online-using-servicehooks/ Clemens, one of our MVPs, wrote a post about a tool his Sogeti team wrote to give visibility into resources his team is consuming. It includes both Azure resources (like running VMs) and VS Online resources (like cloud builds): http://www.clemensreijnen.nl/post/2014/05/12/Integrate-Azure-Visual-Studio-On...
Tasktop: Another tool in your toolbox for integrating VSOnline/TFS
For many years now Tasktop has been bridging the divide among various systems for tracking work/tasks. This week they announced some new support for Visual Studio Online along with our new open API announcements. Check out this blog post they wrote on what they can do: http://tasktop.com/blog/news/tasktop-sync-integrates-visual-studio-online-with-popular-devops-tools Brian
Migrating On Premises TFS to VS Online
One of the questions I’ve frequently gotten from customers considering Visual Studio Online is “How do I migrate my on-premises TFS data to VS Online?” Until now that’s been a tough one to answer. In general you’ve had to cobble together a solution by checking in the latest version of your source code, maybe using Excel to ferry across the latest version of most of your work item fields, etc. In short, I’ve generally told people – Use VS Online for new projects. The one exception is that, because Git is a distributed version control system, you can add a...
Zendesk integration with VS Online
Yesterday, I announced a new set of open APIs for VS Online and a bunch of integrations that have already been built. One of them was support for Zendesk. Here’s a very detailed blog post on how to install/configure it: http://www.bfcamara.com/post/85562983333/vso-zendesk-integration Brian
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 ...
New Azure Portal Overview
Brian Keller did a very nice blog post on how you can use the new Azure portal to create a super cool devops dashboard: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2014/04/10/building-your-dream-devops-dashboard-with-the-new-azure-preview-portal.aspxBrian
Visual Studio Online Integration in the Azure portal
Today, at Build, we unveiled a new Azure Portal experience we are building. I want to give you some insights into the work that VS Online team is doing to help with it. I’m not on the Azure team and am no expert on how they’d like to describe to the world, so please take any comments I make here about the new Azure portal as my perspective on it and not necessarily an official one. Bill Staples first presented to me almost a year ago an idea of creating a new portal experience for Azure designed to be an optimal experience for DevOps. It would provide everything a DevOps team needs to do modern cloud based ...
Visual Studio Online “General Availability”
Today is a monumental day for VS Online. It’s the culmination of a long journey from a glimmer of an idea to prototype, private preview, limited preview, public preview, “go-live” and now, finally General Availability. VS Online is ready and open for business. I’ve written a fair amount about the transition in the service release notes getting posted today so I don’t want to repeat all of that. Read them and if you have questions, please feel free to ask. I want to take a few minutes to reflect on something else. It’s been really amazing to watch the gro...
Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server Release Notes
For well over a year now, we’ve been posting release notes for Visual Studio Online roughly every 3 weeks describing the enhancements we deploy each sprint. In our last redesign of the visualstudio.com site, we added a similar news feed for the on-premises products but haven’t updated it very often or provided a ton of detail. Starting with VS 2013 Update 2, we are going to try out publishing VS & TFS release notes on that news feed, providing you one place to go to keep up with the latest capabilities both in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online. Check out the VS 2013 Update 2 relea...
TFS 2013.2 (Update 2) Released
And VS 2013.2 RC released… OK, this is weird, I admit, so I’ll explain. Today we officially released the final version of TFS 2013 Update 2 and we released a Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. It’s weird that we RTMed TFS Update to but only RCed VS Update 2. We generally work hard to RTM them at the same time. This time we couldn’t. The reason had to do with some hard dates with regard to VS Online and on-premises TFS compatibility with it. If you read my blog, then you likely know that we are approaching the end of the Early Adopter program and transition to standard commercial terms. ...
Visual Studio Online Update – Mar 18th
Wow, this post is late. It’s been a pretty tough month for me personally. Probably the highlight was an ice storm that hit central North Carolina and crushed us. My house was without power for 4 days. The whole area looked like a war zone. There were trees down everywhere. Roads were impassable. It took me 2 days just to clear my driveway so we could get cars in and out. I took off an entire week plus to work on clean up. I’ve logged more hours with a chainsaw in the past month than, I think, most people do in a lifetime. Even now, I&r...
VS/TFS 2013.2 CTP 2 available
Last week we released the next CTP for VS 2013.2 and TFS 2013.2 (aka Update 2). Unfortunately, I was unable to find the time to blog about it because I was in Europe speaking at a conference and visiting customers. So, I’m correcting the error now For TFS, at least, this is a “go-live” release, meaning you can get support and we will enable upgrades from this CTP to the final RTM. In fact this TFS CTP is actually labeled a Release Candidate (RC). It’s a bit weird to have a CTP of VS and an RC of TFS but there are some good reasons for it having to do with the staging of this TFS update, the Gene...
Visual Studio Online Update – Feb 28
Today we finished the deployment for sprint 61. You can read the service news to see what’s new. A lot more new code was deployed than is apparent. We’re gearing up for some big announcements in April and May – expect to hear more in that timeframe. Overall this deployment went reasonably well. Much better than the issues we had late last fall but not quite as well as last sprint. Overall we’re on the right track and I think it will keep getting better and better. And, if you have an early adoption account, you should see that the extension I described last week is now effective. Here’s mine, as of to...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2013 Update 1 available
You can download Team Explorer Everywhere 2013 Update 1 (version 12.0.1) from the Download Center or install the TFS plug-in for Eclipse from directly within your Eclipse IDE (update site URL: http://dl.microsoft.com/eclipse/tfs). Improvements in Update 1 include… Build support for Java projects in Git (and more) The VS Online service blog describes new capabilities we just delivered on the service for building Java projects managed in Git. TEE Update 1 provides the client tools necessary to utilize these new features. Here is a summary of what is now possible on the service when using TEE Update 1: ...
VS Online early adopter program extended to May 7, 2014
***UPDATED*** June 2014 - The early adopter program ended in may and the data export capability described below expired on May 20th. I know this is the second time I am doing this but I believe it is the last. For a refresher for those who don’t remember what the early adopter program is, let me explain. We released the public preview of VS Online in November. At that time, we introduced our business terms, in a preview form – including free access for up to 5 users. You can read more about your options for purchasing VS Online on the Visual Studio Online overview page. We had promised the throngs of peop...
Visual Studio Online Update – Feb 10
Yesterday, we completed our sprint 60 deployment. With it comes two new features: Exporting test plans as HTML documents and a permission to control who can create new work item tags. You can read more about the new features on the service release notes here: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2014-feb-10-vso. As you may know, since ~Oct, we’ve had a run of “bad” deployments that caused unacceptable down time. Due to this we made a number of changes. One was to move our deployments to weekends to reduce the number of people that any unexpected interruptions affect. This was the second deployment to happen o...
Application Insights Visual Studio Add-in preview
In the fall, we introduced a preview of a new VS Online service called “Application Insights” that enables you to instrument your app to ensure that it is available, performing and successful. It combines APM capabilities with usage analysis, aimed at developers to help them create the best possible apps. Yesterday, we released a preview of a new Visual Studio add-in that makes getting started with Application Insights so easy that everyone should do it without even thinking about it. Install the add-in below and get started right away. The add-in will automatically by-pass the invitation code process neces...
VS/TFS 2013.2 (Update 2) CTP Released
Today, fast on the heels of Update 1, we released the first CTP of VS/TFS 2013 Update 2. Although Update 1 was a pretty small release, Update 2 is much larger. This CTP is *not* feature complete and it is *not* “go-live”. It is an opportunity for you to get a peek at some of the things we are planning to release in Update 2. The next CTP (at least of TFS) will be feature complete and “go-live”. In this post, I’m going to talk mostly about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) related improvements coming in Update 2. For the most part, we focused on continuing to “round out” features t...
SCOM Management Pack for TFS 2013 Available
OK, that took much longer than it should have – way too much red tape for this, unfortunately, but the management pack for TFS 2013 is now available. I’ve been getting emails, blog comments and other forms of queries for months asking about it and it’s finally here. You can download it here: TFS 2013 management pack It works with either System Center 2007 or 2012. You can also get the TFS 2012 management pack if you need it instead. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – Jan 22
Today, our sprint 59 deployment to VS Online went live. There’s several new features and improvements that have been highly requested. All of the significant ones are in the general area of work management. Since we introduced tagging as a lightweight work item “customization” approach, people who’ve tried it have had some consistent requests. One of the top ones was support for querying on tags (we only supported filtering initially). That feature was just rolled out to VSO as part of this deployment – give it a try. Other requests include the ability to work with tags in the VS IDE (rather than just in ...
VS 2013.1 (Update 1) is available
In a previous post on the subject, I explained that this is a pretty small update focused primarily on getting VS 2013 working better with versions of IE prior to IE 10. I also explained that there would be no update to TFS available for Update 1. You can get Update 1 through numerous channels, including the VS Update facility built into Visual Studio (you will get a notification), from MSDN subscriber downloads or from the Microsoft download center here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=301714 Other useful links include: KB Article: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=331377 Release Management upd...
A Pile of Puppies
We have two Great Pyrenees dogs (a male and a female) who guard our goats and keep the coyotes away. When we got them, we decided that we would breed them (they are not related) at least once. Almost 3 weeks ago, Artemis’s litter of puppies was born. It’s been fun to watch. My wife (the vet in the family) happened to walk in just as Artemis was starting so she stayed and watched the whole thing. The puppies started so small – small guinea pigs and have been growing fast. They sleep a lot. And their eyes just started opening about a week ago. Yesterday, I was out in the barn checking on everything and to...
Load Testing Webinar
On Thursday, Jan 23rd, Chuck Sterling and Manas Maheshwari will be presenting a Webinar on using VS Ultimate along with VS Online to get started with load testing quickly and easily. You can register to attend here. I honestly can’t imagine how anyone could consider shipping any web site or service that’s part of some important business function without incorporating load testing into their development regimen. Load testing helps you uncover bugs, deadlocks and race conditions that only happen under load, helps you find performance and scale bottle necks that drag the app down in peak hour...
ALM Days 2014 in Dusseldorf
Sam Guckenheimer and I will be traveling to Germany next month to participate in the German ALM Days event Feb 24 – 26. We’ll be talking a lot about engineering on a cloud cadence among other things. If you are interested/able, we’d love to see you there. Of course, I think, all of the conference, except my part, will be in German . Brian
What are “Off-times”?
I got called out in email, I think reasonably appropriately, for using the term “off-times” when referring to choosing a better time to do our sprintly upgrades. In a 24x7 continuous service world, there really is no such thing as a “good” time to have a problem. I’ve written in the past about the extensive lengths to which we’ve gone to ensure that our full upgrade process is “online” and we pretty much never, ever have to take the whole service down for anything. However, there are bad times and worse times to have a problem. We have designed our current upgrade schedule to make sure we have developers av...
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 11
Today we did our last deployment of 2013 (Sprint 57). You can read about it here: http://visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2013-dec-11-vso Our next deployment would normally fall very close to the Christmas holiday and to avoid that, we’ll be skipping the Sprint 58 deployment and just rolling all of that work into the Sprint 59 deployment in mid January. We have worked very hard to ensure that this deployment goes more smoothly than the one we did in mid-November. Overall, it went much better but wasn’t incident free. We had a hiccup on Tue during the beginning of the rollout. We kno...
Visual Studio 2013.1 RC is Available
We are doing a pretty quick turn of the crank on VS 2013 Update 1. Originally we were thinking our first Update would take a little longer but for a variety of reasons (most prominently the feedback about VS supporting versions of IE before IE 10), we decided to do a quick initial Update focused on just some key bug fixes. Our first significant “feature Update” is still planned for the first half of 2014. You can download the RC here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41204 You can read the KB article (including the list of fixes) here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb...
Load Testing VSOnline/TFS
Ed Glas, Bill Barnett and Jiange Sun published a detailed write up of their experiences load testing VSOnline/TFS. It’s a good read because they go into a lot of the reasons for the things they do and also talk about things they’ve tried that didn’t work. They’ve now moved almost all of their load testing to the VS Online load testing service and had great results with it. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/edglas/archive/2013/11/27/load-testing-visual-studio-online.aspx Check it out, Brian
Another silly post about clothes
And an embarrassing moment. I’ve gotten some teasing about wearing a tie at the French Visual Studio 2013 launch event in Paris this week. There are some pictures of me floating around online. It’s certainly a rare occurrence. I don’t wear a tie more than a couple of times a year. I brought it on this trip “just in case”, expecting I wouldn’t actually wear it. But… I felt pretty bad about the night before so I decided to err on the side of formality for the event. Here’s the story… Sunday was, in many ways, a typical day on the ...
Visual Studio 2013 Demo VM available
Brian Keller has released the RTM version of his incredibly useful demo VM. He loads just about everything you could want to demo onto it and makes it easy to see how anything in VS or TFS works. Read more: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2013/08/02/visual-studio-2013-application-lifecycle-management-virtual-machine-and-hands-on-labs-demo-scripts.aspx Brian
Visual Studio Surveys
We are running a couple of surveys on Visual Studio to collect feedback for our next release cycle. We’d appreciate any feedback you have. Here are the links to the surveys on the VS blog. Thanks, Brian
A Rough Patch
Either I’m going to get increasingly good at apologizing to fewer and fewer people or we’re going to get better at this. I vote for the later. We’ve had some issues with the service over the past week and a half. I feel terrible about it and I can’t apologize enough. It’s the biggest incident we’ve had since the instability created by our service refactoring in the March/April timeframe. I know it’s not much consolation but I can assure you that we have taken the issue very seriously and there are a fair number of people on my team who haven’t gotten much sleep recently. The incident started the morning...
How much data can you put on VSOnline?
I don’t get asked that question too often but I do occasionally and, as the service matures, I know I’ll get asked it more and more so it’s been on my mind. I was looking at some data yesterday about some of our largest tenants. No, I wasn’t looking at any of their IP (I can’t) but I was looking at some meta-data to understand usage patterns so we can plan ahead to make sure the service provides a good experience as tenants grow. So far, no customer has hit any limit on how much they can store in VSOnline but there are limits and I keep wondering how to help people unders...
Application Insights going fast
Overall, tire kicking on Application Insights is going well and the invitation codes continue to get used up pretty quickly. We’ve now got many hundreds of accounts enabled so I’m probably going to slow down a bit on handing out invitation codes. But… Here’s another one for another opportunity: VSInsights258441337 Brian
SmartOffice4TFS
A couple of weeks ago one of our great partners, eDev Technologies (makers of InteGREAT – an excellent formal requirements management tool for TFS), released a new set of tools called SmartOffice4TFS. Whereas InteGREAT is a pretty comprehensive requirements suite, SmartOffice4TFS is intended for teams with a less formal process but who still need to be able to manage requirements as documents. SmartOffice4TFS helps bridge the gap between the work that the development team is managing in TFS and stakeholders/customers/vendors/etc. that need a document. To make SmartOffice4TFS even more attractive, eDev Techno...
Another Application Insights invitation code
Well, the last one was exhausted in a few hours. It’s great to see there are plenty of people who want to take an early peek. Here’s another one to unblock the next group of people… VSInsights3413009183 Brian
Application Insights invitation
In the launch keynote on Wed, I announced, and Nicole demoed a new service on VS Online called Application Insights. I also announced that it is in “limited preview” – meaning it’s an invitation only service for now. It’s early and we want to grow it slowly so that we can incorporate feedback early, getting fresh eyes along the way. The most dependable way to get an invite is to create a VS Online account, then click on the Try Application Insights tile and request an invitation code by clicking on “Add me to waiting list”… We’ll try to get invite codes out at a reasonable pace but it’s just going...
Launching Visual Studio 2013
Today, I am in New York at the launch of Visual Studio 2013 speaking with a local audience and broadcasting around the world. In many ways it’s a celebration of the blood, sweat and tears we put into VS 2013. At the same time, it’s a bit anti-climactic because VS 2013 has been in preview for months and released for weeks. For me, there’s nothing really new to say about it because hundreds of thousands of people have it and are using it daily. So the fun part is talking about all of the stuff that we’ve been working on that isn’t part of VS 2013 – and there’s a ton of it. The Cloud First, we all know the clo...
Listen to your service – it is talking to you
We had a nasty enough service incident on Friday that I can’t let it pass without commenting on it. If you follow my blog or the service, then you know we were doing a deployment on Friday. The natural assumption, both inside and outside Microsoft, was that it was caused by the deployment. It wasn’t, but more on that in a minute. We received notable Twitter traffic, blog comments and emails both about this incident and the pattern of incidents. I’m going to tackle both topics (at least lightly) here. First, people are justified to be upset about Friday’s incident. The service was mostly down for about 3 ...
Team Foundation Service Update – Nov 8
Because of the big launch we’re doing next week, we updated TFService with the sprint 56 deployment a little early. We deployed a couple of nice improvements today – making our charting feature easier to share and improving our load testing service. You can read more about the changes in the release notes. Next week is going to be a big week. I’ll be in New York participating in our VS/TFS 2013 launch. As part of that, I’ll be making a bunch of new announcements and enabling a new set of features on the service. You can participate online at http://events.visu...
TFS Git support for Continuous Delivery to Azure Web Sites and Services
A little over a year ago we unveiled a continuous delivery feature for TFS –> Azure, allowing you to configure the TFS build pipeline to automatically deploy to running Azure applications. In the intervening time, we added Git support to TFS but getting Git integrated into all of our scenarios is a journey. This week we released the next small step on that journey: TFS Git –> Azure continuous delivery using Team Foundation Service. Scott wrote up a nice overview of the scenario on his blog so, rather than replicate it, I’ll just refer you there. It starts about half way d...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2013 is Available
Among the deluge of Visual Studio 2013 releases in October, we shipped the 2013 release of Team Explorer Everywhere – updating the experience for team members working in Eclipse and/or on non-Windows environments. Team Explorer Everywhere includes an Eclipse plug-in, a cross-platform command line client, and a Java SDK for building custom tools that access TFS. In addition to a good number of bug fixes, the 2013 release significantly improves the Team Explorer experience and adds new capabilities to both the Team Foundation Version Control and Git version control experiences. You can download Team Explorer...
Visual Studio 2012 tools for Git RTM
We released the first drop of our Visual Studio tools for Git about a year ago as a plugin for VS 2012. Our ultimate goal was to release them as part of VS 2013 RTM (and we did). At the same time, we wanted to iterate quickly on VS 2012 because we could get a lot more feedback and because there’s always an adoption curve for a new VS release and supporting 2012 allows us to deliver for more customers. A couple of days ago, we released the “final” build of the Git tooling for VS 2012. You can get the latest build on the Visual Studio Gallery: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.micr...
Team Rooms in Visual Studio
In TFS 2013, we introduced a new feature called “Team Rooms” that keep a record of things that happen in your team – checkins, work item updates, build failures, code reviews, etc. And you can have conversations about the activity directly in the team room. This keeps a durable record of what’s happening in the team and makes it easy for people to catch up if they’ve been out or to ask a question about something. In 2013, Team Rooms only appear in the TFS web UI. From the day we previewed it, we started getting questions about enabling team rooms in Visual Studio. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to do t...
Team Foundation Service Update – Oct 21
If you check out the news post yesterday, you’ll see that the big change in this sprint’s deployment was to the project and account home pages. Quite honestly the account home page was mostly useless and not very visually appealing. One of the big things we focused on with these updates was improving the getting started experience. One change we made was a new “Create your first project” panel on the account home page (where you land immediately after creating an account) to try to make it crystal clear what the next step to do anything useful is. After you’ve created a project, the create your fist pro...
Visual Studio 2013 RTM Available
In the wee hours of the morning this morning, we made the final versions of Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server 2013 and .NET 4.51 available. You can download the trials and related products and MSDN subscribers can download the licensed product from the subscriber portal. You can learn more about what’s new in VS 2013 here. Windows 8.1 is also available today. It’s quick and easy to upgrade from the store so get it soon. On November 13th, we’ll be hosting the Visual Studio 2013 launch. At launch, we’ll be highlighting the breadth and depth of new features an...
Brian Keller’s 5 reasons for Team Foundation Service
Brian created a great little video on why he likes Team Foundation Service. I figured I’d share it… https://vimeo.com/microsoftvisualstudio/review/74686407/42c694668d Brian
How do you measure quality of a service?
Since we started down the path of building an online service a couple of years ago, I have learned a lot. One of the things I’ve learned a lot about is measuring the health of a service. I don’t pretend to have the only solution to the problem so I’m happy to have anyone with a differing opinion chime in. For the purpose of this post, I’m defining the “quality of a service” as the degree to which it is available and responsive. The problem The “traditional way” of tackling this problem is what’s called “synthetic transactions”. In this approach, you create a “test agent” that is going to make some request...
Running a high scale TFS server
Grant Holliday, recently wrote a post on managing TFS servers. Grant has a colorful history. I first met him when he joined the Team Foundation Server MVP program. He was so knowledgeable and helpful that I eventually offered him a position on my team to help us manage internal adoption of TFS (over 45,000 people today). He was a Program Manager for a few years but decided to move back home to Australia. He moved to work in MCS and Premier support, helping customers with ALM practices and TFS. 6 months or so ago, I reached out to Grant again and asked if he’d be willing t...
VS 2012.4 and TFS 2012.4 RC 4 is available
Yesterday we released the final release candidate for Update 4 for VS 2012 and TFS 2012. We’re on track to release the final versions in a month or so. I encourage you to try them out and let us know if there are any last minute issues we need to fix. One thing to keep in mind – If you install TFS 2012.4 RC4, you will have to upgrade to the final TFS 2012.4 release before upgrading to TFS 2013. There is no upgrade path from the Update 4 RC –> 2013 RTM (other than by installing Update 4 RTM first). You can find the full list of fixes in Update 4 in the KB article ref...
Hosting GPLv3 Projects on CodePlex
I’ve been a bit quiet here recently about what’s been going on with CodePlex. I don’t blog every time we do a release otherwise I’d be blogging about the site every week, but we made a change today that I thought was worth mentioning – the GPLv3 license has been added to the list of open source licenses available when creating a new open source project on CodePlex. On CodePlex we’ve always asked you to specify what license you are releasing your source code under before you publish a project. It’s important that whenever you publish code on the internet and you want that code to be freely used by people that...
Team Foundation Service Update – Sept 30
Today we deployed our sprint 54 release. All of the “new” stuff you’ll find in this sprint are refinements of existing features: Check out the release notes for more. This sprint was also really our last TFS 2013 sprint. As you know our release is scheduled for Oct 18th and we are pretty much done. We are still fixing a last few bug fixes that have been reported on the Release Candidate but we are really down to 2 or 3 fixes a week. The majority of the team has shifted focus to Update 1 and you should start to see the velocity pick up in a sprint or two. Thanks, Brian
TFS 2013 Power Tools are available
I apologize for the long wait. But, the TFS 2013 Power Tools are finally available. There’s no new features in this release but there are a fair number of bug fixes and the Power Tools have all been updated to work with VS 2013 and TFS 2013. Also, the version checking has been changed so that these Power Tools will also work with VS 2013 Updates – so you don’t have to wait for a new version of the Power Tools for every VS Update. And, of course, these will work with VS 2013 RTM. We are not planning another Power Tools Update for RTM unless people find significant is...
What is a Product Owner?
Adam Cogan, one of our TFS MVPs, had his company put together a short animated video on the role of the product owner. I thought it was pretty cool so I figured I’d share it. It’s only a few minutes. It’s worth checking out… http://tv.ssw.com/what-is-a-product-owner Brian
Visual Studio 2012.4 RC 3 Available
Every few weeks I’ve been posting about new pre-releases for VS/TFS 2012 Update 4. Yesterday we released another one – RC 3. Important links: Among other things, the KB article contains a list of fixes in Update 4. At this point we are starting to get towards the end of the Update 4 cycle and I’d encourage you to install this build and try it out if you intend to test Update 4 before it ships. I think there might be one more RC build before we are done but there won’t really be time to take much feedback from that final RC and react to it. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio 2013 & TFS 2013 RC is available
Today we released the Release Candidate for the VS 2013 suite of products. This is a “go-live” production worthy version and will likely be the last publicly available build before we RTM. I strongly encourage you to try it out and let us know if you find any blocking issues. The clock is ticking and time is running out for us to make any more changes before the product ships. I’m not going to write about it extensively since there will be so many other people who do. Instead, I’ll mostly provide you links to other places you can read more. Along with...
Team Foundation Service Update – Sept 9
Today we deployed our sprint 53 work to Team Foundation Service and posted the release notes about the changes. When I wrote last sprint’s release notes, I alluded to “one more nice big new feature”. While “big” is in the eye of the beholder, I forgot there are actually 2 “big” new features. Work Item Charting The one I was referring to last sprint was “work item charting”. Reporting has always been a cornerstone of TFS. It enables transparency in the development process. It brings together diverse data about your team’s work and allows you to mine that information for insight. Our current reporting imple...
Expanding Windows Azure MSDN Benefit
We are expanding the Windows Azure MSDN benefit to two additional subscription levels: MSDN Platforms and Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN. MSDN Platforms subscribers will receive a $100 monthly credit, while Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN subscribers will receive a $50 credit per month. Plus, subscribers will receive a $200 USD Windows Azure credit the first month they use their Windows Azure MSDN benefit, The benefit will work the same way as for other MSDN subscription levels: And don’t forget the Aston Martin contest that Scott Guthrie announced at TechEd. MSDN sub...
VS/TFS 2012.4 (Update 4) RC 2 is available
Three weeks ago I announced that there will, in fact, be a fourth update to VS/TFS 2012. It’s going to be a very small update – really not much more than key bug fixes. It’s going to ship sometime toward the end of the year and, between now and then, we will be releasing as series of “Release Candidates”. Normally we’d only have 1 or 2 release candidates for a release but, in this case, we are going to have several. Today, we released the second release candidate. You can download it here. And you can learn more about it, including what bug fixes it includes, in the KB article. I don’t expect a lot of pe...
Team Foundation Service Update – Aug 19
Today we are deploying the results of our Sprint 52 work. I wrote the release notes this sprint and you can check them out on the news page, so I’ll keep that short. Right now, our focus is on wrapping up all our TFS 2013 feature work – incorporating feedback, fixing the last set of bugs, signing of on our release criteria, etc. At the same time, we are starting to plan our post-2013 work. Now is a good time to make sure the UserVoice site is up to date. Over the past year, we’ve been publishing news along with our service deployments. Along the way, one of the thin...
Feedback on the refreshed Microsoft Developer Network
First, thanks for all the feedback, even if some of it is a bit brutal. Sorry for not getting back a bit sooner. I had planned to it Monday but came down with a pretty nasty cold this weekend. However, I’ve been reading all the feedback carefully and digesting it. Let me distill the feedback that I heard in order of strength and I would appreciate you letting me know if I captured it correctly: Let me start by explaining where I am coming from with the new design… It should be no secret that Microsoft is trying to help people learn how to build Windows Store applications....
The Improved Microsoft Developer Network
Today we launched the new Microsoft Developer Network site. As I've mentioned before, my team is responsible for much of the infrastructure and experience for MSDN. I’m very proud of what we have and at the same time see opportunities for improvement. There are two primary use modes for the MSDN web site. The biggest one is search. You want to know what the CommentRegex class is and its properties? Just Bing “CommentRegex” and your top results will be the MSDN pages for the class reference. Lots and lots of people experience MSDN this way. However, there’s another way. You might, for instance, be new...
VS 2012.4 (Update 4) will exist!
Sometime this spring, though for the life of me I can’t find it, I wrote a blog post where I said I thought Update 3 (VS/TFS 2012.3) would be the last update in the VS/TFS 2012 update line. I often say that nothing that is said about the future is more than a guess with varying levels of confidence. So, it turns out that I was wrong. A month or two ago we decided that we were going to need to do a 2012.4 release. The primary motivation is addressing compatibility and migration/round-tripping issues between VS 2012 and VS 2013 and the various platform releases to make adoption of VS 2013 as smooth as possibl...
One year of news!
It wasn’t until after I posted my “news” post this morning and I was perusing our news site that I realized that the first news post was almost exactly 1 year ago on August 6th 2012. These are precisely the kinds of things that sneak up on you unawares. Who could have guessed that we’ve been doing this for a year now? It seems like it was just yesterday. It’s been a busy year. I spent a little time reviewing the news posts from the past year and figured I’d summarize some of the “highlights”. This is, of course, just a sampling. Ev...
Visual Studio 2012 tools for Git (0.9.5.0) are available
Today we released an update to our Visual Studio 2012 tools for Git. We’ve been iterating on these since the first release in February and each release gets more complete, easier to use and better performance. Of course that same tooling (though it’s a bit older release than 0.9.5.0) is included in the VS 2013 preview and more recent version will be included in the VS 2013 RTM. Here’s an excerpt from the release notes on what’s new in this release. Check it out and let us know what you think. Brian
Team Foundation Service Update – July 29
Today we are deploying our sprint 51 build. You will soon be able to read the release notes here. Today’s deployment is what I’d like a lot of deployments to be like – nothing particularly big but a bunch of nice improvements. Probably the biggest thing is the next installment on my promise of an enterprise class Git solution – branch permissions, enabling control over who has the right to create, delete and modify branches on the central repo. Lots of other things to – like the ability to delete a team room, get Git notifications in a team room and lots more....
Kids!
We are gradually working our way into goats. Last year we bought a dairy goat and she had 2 kids. This year we bought 2 meat goats (Kiko breed) and one of them, “Pretty Girl” just had 3 kids. I thought I’d share some pictures. They are very cute. Here’s a picture from soon after they were born. And here’s a picture of my daughter and her friend holding them. While I’m at it, here’s a picture of this year’s pigs. They are still pretty small they’ll get a few times bigger before all is said and done. Just a brief interlude but I figured I share a few pictures of the goings on ...
Visual Studio a leader in software quality suites
Visual Studio has always been a great tool for developers. In 2010, as we continued to expand the breadth of our Application Lifecycle Management suite, we made our first foray into tooling specifically for testers with Visual Studio Test Professional. Thus started a journey to really incorporate testers into the application lifecycle, enabling teams to deliver higher quality software faster. In our 2012 wave of products we expanded our testing offering beyond traditional test case management, manual testing, automation, etc with a new set of tooling aimed at helping Agile teams move their testing pra...
REST API for Team Rooms
I had someone ask about this so I decided to go ahead and post something. Below is the contents of a Word doc that describes our REST API for working with Team Rooms. It should work both on Team Foundation Service and on a public preview of TFS 2013. Please let me know if you have any feedback on the doc. This is a very early preview and we’ll launch it officially later this year. It’s also incomplete but it’s a start. Hopefully it will give you what you need to know to do basic Team Room extensions. Ultimately we’ll follow up with samples and more but r...
Team Foundation Service Update – July 9
Last week we completed sprint 50 and, today, the changes went live on the service. You can read more of the details of what’s new on the service news feed. One of the things I’ve had to get used to with a service is the notion of publishing features that aren’t nearly finished. In all my years of working on software I had developed a notion of what “done enough” was to ship a product. That notion was somewhat based on the development model we used and somewhat based on the deployment model. The result of it was that I have always had a pretty high bar for &ldq...
InRelease Acquisition is complete
At TechEd, in early June, I announced our agreement to acquire InRelease – a release management product built specifically for Team Foundation Server by InCycle Software. Since then, we’ve received tons of requests for more information, demos, etc. Unfortunately, we’ve only been able to point people at InCycle because the acquisition was not final. I’m happy to say that about a week ago we closed the acquisition and InRelease is now a part of Microsoft. That doesn’t mean we can start selling it right away. There are a number of things that have to happen in or...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update available
During the excitement of the releases last week is that we also shipped a new version of Team Explorer Everywhere – our Eclipse and Cross-Platform client for Team Foundation Server. This is officially part of the TFS 2012 wave of products, meaning that it’s equivalent to Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 3 though it’s also fully supported against TFS 2013 Preview, the hosted service and TFS 2010. We had a few important bug fixes and updates that we wanted to get into the “RTM” version of TEE rather than having them in a “Preview” labeled build which was the...
A few more Visual Studio 2013 Preview features
I recently announced the availability of the Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 previews. There are a couple of new features available with this preview that I’d like to talk a bit more about. Cloud Load Testing Now that the Preview is available, you can try out our new cloud load testing experience. We’ve been using it on the TFS team for the past couple of months and have run close to 100 load test runs. We’ve been incredibly happy with how much more friction free the experience is. You’ll need a Team Foundation Service account to use the cloud load testing but you don’t have to use the ac...
Visual Studio 2013 Preview is available
Today at the Build conference, we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Preview and Team Foundation Server 2013 Preview. You can download them here. You can also read my blog post from Tech Ed for a bunch of info on the new ALM features. You can also check out Soma’s blog for more on what’s in this release. This is a “go-live” preview meaning, if you are comfortable upgrading production systems, we will support you. I do expect there are some bugs but we’ve been using it in our production environment for months and have had a handful of “pre-p...
Visual Studio 2012.3 is released
Today we officially released Visual Studio 2012.3 and Team Foundation Server 2012.3. All in all, these are small releases, mostly containing high priority bug fixes and a few changes to improve the compatibility/interop story with VS 2013. You can read all about it in the KB article or download it here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=290979. Of course you can also just use the Visual Studio Update manager to get the Visual Studio improvements. Thanks, Brian
An update on the forums refresh
As with any significant change, there is a period of “burn in” the tune it. I want to thank everyone who has already provided feedback and ask that you please keep it coming. We’ve already released an update with some improvements for the “easy stuff” and the team has created a backlog for the next sprint to address some of the bigger things. Here’s a list of the things we’ve done to address feedback already in the deployment we did yesterday afternoon: We’ll continue to work on improving it based on the feedback. Thanks for your hel...
Enterprise grade Git
In my Visual Studio 2013 post from TechEd a couple of weeks ago, I made a very innocuous comment about including Git support in our TFS 2013 preview that will ship next week (at the Build conference). I wanted to take a few minutes to expand upon it. We first introduced Git support as a VS 2012 VSIX for Visual Studio and server side support in Team Foundation Service in Feb 2013. Since then, we’ve been updating both regularly – every 3-6 weeks. At the announcement, I also said that Git support would be “included in the next major release”. At the time, I couldn’t sa...
Team Foundation Service Update – June 19
Today we updated the service with our sprint 49 work. You can read the details of the significant improvements on the news blog. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a comparatively small update. We released so much on Jun 3rd for TechEd, there’s just not a lot of new stuff to show :) Two areas worth mentioning are Agile Portfolio Management. We are on a journey and we announced the beginning of it at TechEd. You should expect that every sprint we will improve it. This sprint is no different. Next sprint should have more and on and on for many months into the f...
A refresh of our forums
We’ve just completed and launched a new version of the Microsoft forums. We’ve worked really hard to substantially improve the experience both for people looking for answers and those providing them. We started by making it easier to find what you are looking for. Instead of navigating categories to find those that might be relevant, we’ve started with search as the entry. You can search directly from the root and get results immediately. The categories show up on the right hand side allowing you to filter your results. We’ve also reformatted the page to provide more space for your content and added p...
Excuse me sir, your cow is stuck in the mud
I try to share some of the funnier and stranger stories from my life. Unfortunately, I don’t always remember to share them. I’m working from home today because I’ve got an all day phone call with people in Redmond. As I was sitting and waiting for my meeting to start this morning, the phone rang. It was the camp adjacent to our farm. The voice on the phone informed me that one of my cows was stuck in the mud. Well, it’s been raining a lot (2-3 inches of rain for tropical storm Andrea and more rain again today). Further, I just moved the cows, first thing this morning into another field that has a sizea...
VS 2013 round tripping
In VS 2012, we introduced the notion of “round-tripping”. This meant the ability for VS 2012 to load and save VS 2010 compatible solutions/projects. That was a huge customer ask and I’ve heard a lot of feedback since then that customers rely on it. At TechEd this week, I was asked what the story with 2013 would be. Specifically, with the move to a more rapid cadence, I heard that this feature is more important than ever. In fact, some of the customers I spoke with wanted to make sure that not only could VS 2013 support round tripping with VS 2012 but it could also support...
Visual Studio 2013
Hold on to your seat, this is going to be a long one… Today at TechEd, I announced Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 and many of the Application Lifecycle Management features that they include. Today, we enabled some of those features on Team Foundation Service for you to try out immediately and I announced that a preview of VS 2013 and TFS 2013 will be available at the Build conference later this month. It’s an exciting time now that we can start talking more openly about what’s coming in our next major release. As usual, there’s so much I will only be able to just skim the surface with th...
Team Foundation Service Update – May 28
Sorry for being a little late with this but I’ve been traveling this week and it’s thrown me off. On Tues May 28th, we deployed our Sprint 48 build to Team Foundation Service. It was quite gratifying to see the deployment go incredibly smoothly given that the last few sprints have been a bit rough. I’d like to think we’re “back to normal” and that going forward our sprint deployments will be easy, seamless and quick again. You can read about the new capabilities in this deployment on the Team Foundation Service news article. One update to that news arti...
Visual Studio 2012.3 RC2 available
We are getting close to shipping Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012.3 (Update 3). This week we shipped Release Candidate 2 (RC2). We’re down to fixing just the last few bugs and if you are thinking up upgrading to Update 3, now would be a good time to give it a try and let us know if there are any last minute issues we need to fix. As I’ve mentioned before, this release is primarily just bug fixes but there are quite a few and some pretty valuable ones. You can see a full list by reading the KB article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2835600 You can download Update 3...
Support on Team Foundation Service
Update: Um, egg on face. When I first posted this, it ended up having the email thread with the customer attached. I updated it to remove it as quickly as possible but I sincerely apologize. I got an email from a customer a couple of days ago asking about issues he was having with Team Foundation Service. After looping in our internal support team, he asked if that was a route he could use directly. I took the time to write up some thoughts on support and thought it would be interesting to share them in a post (having been embellished slightly) . Here are the thoughts… Unfortunately, you won’t be abl...
New Windows Dev Center release
Yesterday we launched a new Windows Dev Center. You might ask “Why are you telling us about that, Brian?” Well, the answer is that my team is responsible for MSDN and much of the infrastructure behind it. We partner very closely with the Windows team team produce an awesome Windows Dev Center. Yesterday was the culmination of months of work to really overhaul the dev center and make it serve our customers even better. Here’s a list of some of the key improvements in the dev center… Check it out… Brian
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...