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...