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