Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

Over 500 extensions in the VSTS/TFS marketplace

August 16, 2017 Aug 16, 2017 08/16/17
Brian Harry
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 ...

VSTS Update – Aug 4

August 8, 2017 Aug 8, 2017 08/8/17
Brian Harry
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'...

TFS 2017 Update 2 RTM

July 24, 2017 Jul 24, 2017 07/24/17
Brian Harry
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

July 18, 2017 Jul 18, 2017 07/18/17
Brian Harry
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-...

Perf results on scaling Git on VSTS with GVFS

July 6, 2017 Jul 6, 2017 07/6/17
Brian Harry
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...

A Wiki preview on VSTS

July 6, 2017 Jul 6, 2017 07/6/17
Brian Harry
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 ...

How we approach testing VSTS to enable continuous delivery

June 28, 2017 Jun 28, 2017 06/28/17
Brian Harry
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 ...

Let’s make some hay!

June 8, 2017 Jun 8, 2017 06/8/17
Brian Harry
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 ...

What does an Agile/DevOps organization look like?

June 8, 2017 Jun 8, 2017 06/8/17
Brian Harry
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 ...