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