Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
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...