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...
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
Scaling Git (and some back story)
A couple of years ago, Microsoft made the decision to begin a multi-year investment in revitalizing our engineering system across the company. We are a big company with tons of teams - each with their own products, priorities, processes and tools. There are some "common" tools but also a lot of diversity - with VERY MANY internally developed one-off tools (by team I kind of mean division - thousands of engineers). There are a lot of downsides to this: We set out on an effort we call the "One Engineering System" or "1ES". Just yesterday we had a 1ES day where thousands of engineers gathered ...
VS Team Services Update – Jan 25
We have begun the process of deploying our sprint 112 work into production. You will see the improvements show up in your account over the next week. You can read the release notes for all the details in this deployment. A few things worth highlighting... This provides your first peek at our new Enterprise Agile "Delivery Plans" feature. To get it, you actually need to go to the marketplace and install it into your account. This feature is designed to enable you to look across teams and see how work is aligned. This is still a very early preview and we have lots of plans to continue to evolve it but there's ...
TFS 2017 Update 1 RC available
Today we released the Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 Release Candidate. This release can be used for a fresh install or to upgrade any supported previous version. Here's a chart showing the recommended upgrade paths from various TFS versions (you can substitute TFS 2017.1 in the rightmost column). The upgrade from any of the more recent versions should be smooth but upgrades from 2017 should be particularly easy. This is a "go-live" release and can be used in production environments, will support upgrades to RTM and you can get support. This release is English only. We'll provide the localiz...
Open sourcing the VS Test platform
Yesterday we released our unit test execution infrastructure as an open source project. You'll also find an open source project with the documentation. VSTest is a very extensible unit test execution framework. The base engine, discovers tests and runs them. It can parallelize across cores, provides process isolation and can integrate with Visual Studio. It has extensibility for different test frameworks, code coverage, test impact analysis, data collection, test result reporting and much more. To give you a little context on what I'm talking about I've put together an architecture diagram. The pieces we ope...
VS Team Services Update – Jan 6
Next week we will be rolling out our sprint 110 and 111 updated (we didn't do a 110 deployment due to the holidays). You can check out the release notes for details. Please bear with us - these changes are going to roll out a bit slower than usual. As I write this, we are waiting for a major snow storm to hit North Carolina and we are expecting a pretty interrupted work schedule into early next week. As such most people probably won't have access to these changes until mid next week (~Jan 11th). When you do get them, you'll find there's quite a lot of new stuff. The thing I'm most excited to hear your feedba...
Happy holidays 2016
Today is my last day in the office for the year. I just want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who reads my blog and engages on TFS and VS Team Services. It's great working with all of you. Overall, it's been a good year. We shipped TFS 2015 Update 2 and 3 and TFS 2017. We continued our tradition of substantial Team Services updates every sprint. Overall service stability improved over the year (knock on wood), though we certainly had a few rough patches and learned how to improve from them. As I reflect over it, I'm proud of what we have accomplished and I hope you all like it. Some of my favor...
VS Team Services Update – Nov 28
This week we are deploying our sprint 109 payload. You can read the release notes for details. There's a few things I'm particularly excited about. Build task versioning - We had a live site incident a few months ago because we rolled out an update to a build task on our hosted pools and it broke pretty much everyone's builds. That caused me to go dig in a bit to understand how we were managing validation and rollout of build tasks. What I learned is that we really just didn't have a sufficient mechanism to manage this. With this deployment, we are rolling out a new build task versioning capability that enabl...
DevOps at Connect();
A little late on this, but the video of my presentation (with Jamie Cool) is on Channel9 now: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Connect/2016?sort=status&direction=desc&c=Brian-Harry&term= I've been saying for a couple of year that TFS and Team Services are a great DevOps solution for your whole team - regardless of the technology or platforms they work on. I decided to finally put my money where my mouth is and do a big talk where the center of it is a DevOps story for a Java app running on Linux, deployed to a Docker container. There's a few other cool demos too. Check it out. Brian
TFS/Team Services Q4 Roadmap update
A few days ago we published our Q4 update to the TFS/Team Services roadmap. We should have done it 6 weeks ago but, Connect(); in mid-November had us really busy and it just fell through the cracks. Sorry about that. We should be updating it again in mid-January. As a reminder, everything on here is just our best estimates and things change. We try to give about a 6 month time horizon so that you know what we are working on/planning now. Beyond that, it really is just a backlog review exercise with no real ability to predict much concretely. I'm working on getting a few blog posts written to drill into some ...
News from Connect(); 2016
Today, at the Connect(); event in New York, we are announcing a whole bunch of cool new stuff. The news at Connect(); is broad so I'm going to focus on the TFS and Team Services related news. TFS 2017 RTM One of the biggest pieces of news is that we RTM'd TFS 2017. That's exciting because it unlocks a bunch of enhancements that we've made to Team Services for our on-premises TFS customers. New things in TFS 2017 include: Here are some handy links: Package Management GA In addition to the release of Package Management with NuGet support we updated Package Mana...
Connect(); event today
Check out the Connect(); event today. Live stream Scott's keynote and view on demand tons of other content - including my session on DevOps. https://connectevent.microsoft.com/ Brian
VS Team Services Update – Nov 7
This week we are rolling out our sprint 108 work to Team Services. You can read the release notes for details. It's another comparatively "light" sprint. It's the last sprint that should be significantly affected by our work to wrap up shipping TFS 15. We're pretty much done, have incorporated the feedback we got from RC2 and feel we are about ready. Looking forward to getting TFS 15 shipped. One of the biggest things we've delivered this sprint is integration with the new Microsoft Teams collaboration tool. We've enabled chat integration and hosting of our Kanban board in a team context. It's still preview...
VS Team Services Update – Oct 12
Before I get to talking about this update let me talk about a change in the way we are announcing updates... It takes a while for an update to roll out across the entire service. That is by design and it is part of our strategy to control the damage from any bugs we miss in the testing process. Our deployment process is currently divided into 5 "rings". The first (we call ring 0) is our own Team Services instance - the one the Team Services team uses to build Team Services. The second is a small public instance with external customers on it and the rings grow to more and more public instances. When we deploy ...
Code search and Exploratory Testing GA
Today, we are releasing the official "V1" releases of our two most popular VS Team Services extensions: Both are now out of preview. Code Search Code search enables you to search across all of your repositories (both TFVC and Git) in all of your projects. It supports simple full text search on any text file and semantic search in C#, VB, C, C++ and Java, enabling you to look for specific code element types (like class definitions) or filter out "noise" (like comments). Code search is available to everyone with a Team Services "Basic" license - including the 5 free Basic licenses in every account. To en...
One more farm story for this week
Sorry for the back to back farm stories but I was relating the Fire! story to someone the other day and remembered another story I hadn't shared. As a cattle farmer, I go through a lot of hay - about 300,000 lbs per winter. Spring and late Summer are the seasons for cutting, baling and storing hay. In the past I've had to buy a lot of hay because I didn't have enough land to make enough. A little over a year ago I bought another 35 acres of hay fields and this year I was able to make all the hay I needed. The new hay fields are about 6 miles from my "main farm" where I keep the cows and store the hay. In Augus...
Team Services Update – Sept 28
This week we are rolling out our sprint 106 work. Here are the release notes. By now, the update has made it out to most customers and it should finish by the end of the week. Overall, sprint 106 was a modest sprint. It has lots of nice, relatively small, improvements and nothing particularly earth shattering. Probably the biggest thing is a new capability to import repos into Team Services - from anywhere Team Services can access a repo. A lot of the effort over the past couple of sprints has gone into getting TFS 15 ready and, I think, that's showing a bit in this sprint. With RC2 out, I'm already starting...
Fire!
When you have a farm like I do, with a lot of pastures, a lot of fence lines and a lot of trees, you inevitably spend a lot of time clearing dead trees, fallen limbs, etc. from your fences and fields. It's a never ending job. Sometimes I collect the wood for firewood (I heat my house with that in the winter). Sometimes I just throw it back in the woods to rot. Sometimes I collect it up into a pile and burn it. Over the past 7 or 8 years, I have had hundreds of fires and burnt countless tons of debris. Three or four years ago I decided to clear a bunch of pine trees out of one of my pastures - they were kind ...
Team Foundation Server "15" RC 2 available
Today we released RC2 of TFS "15". The key links are here: You can check out the release notes for details of what's new. The release notes are a union of everything new in TFS 15 but you can identify changes since RC1 by looking for items tagged "New in TFS "15" RC2". As you can tell by the length of the release notes - many, many pages, there is a *ton* of new stuff in TFS 15. Among my favorite enhancements since RC1 are: This release is fully go-live and supported. You can upgrade from RC1, TFS 2015 with any update, TFS 2013 with any update and TFS 2012. You will, of course, a...
Team Services Update – Sept 2
Yes, I'm a bit late on this one. I was traveling to India and Israel in early Sept and didn't have a change to post about this. A little over a week ago we deployed the sprint 105 work to Team Services. Check out the release notes for details. We continued our journey this sprint to bring full process customization to Team Services with the ability to add custom work item types. Eventually this will lead to the full replacement of the Power Tools Process Template Editor with the new web based experience in TFS on-prem too. One of my favorite improvements this sprint is the new work item history experience. Th...
Paid extensions in the Visual Studio marketplace
It's hard to believe it but it's been almost a year since we introduced the Visual Studio Marketplace. It provides a single point of entry for finding extensions for Visual Studio, VS Team Services and VS Code - and since then hundreds upon hundreds of new extensions have been published. From day one, our vision was to enable the marketplace to be, well, a marketplace - meaning that part of its purpose is to provide a venue for extension authors to sell their creations. While I expect the vast majority of extensions will continue to be free, I expect to see an increasing number of high value, high quality exte...
New navigation for Team Services
In my blog post announcing TFS 15 RC1, I mentioned that we are working on a new navigation UI. In a somewhat unusual turn of events, it showed up in an on premises preview before it showed up in the cloud. Today we enabled the new navigation experience in Team Services, making it really easy for anyone to give it a try. This new experience is VERY much a work in progress. We know lots of issues remain and are working on them but it's time for us to start getting some meaningful feedback outside our own 4 walls. To minimize disruption, we've disabled it by default for every Team Services user. You must take ex...
Team Services Update – Aug 17
I missed a few updates while I was out over the summer but, hopefully, now I'm back on my normal cadence. This week, we are deploying our sprint 104 work to VS Team Services. It looks to me like it's a new record on number of items (defined by number of lines in the release notes) released in a sprint. You can read the release notes for all the details. A few things I want to comment on... I mentioned in a previous post that we are in the middle of some UI updates. One of the big areas of investment here is in pull requests and you can really see that work coming to life in this deployment. There's a long lis...
Pre-reqs for Team Foundation Server 15
A couple of aspects of this have come up on the post where I announced the TFS 15 RC1 and I thought it was worth a more explicit call out. First some context. We have 2 release "types" for TFS - major releases (TFS 2013, TFS 2015, TFS 15, etc.) and Updates (TFS 2015 Update 1, TFS 2015 Update 2, ...). We think about them very differently and have different promises around them. While nothing I say here should be taken too much as an absolute, they are the principles we try to operate by. Updates are intended to be "no-brainers". We work very hard in Updates not to break anything or change anything that might d...
TFS "15" RC1 is available
Today we released Team Foundation Server 15 Release Candidate 1. This is a "go-live" release, fit for production use and supported by our support team. You can find all the details on the following links: It's called RC1 because, yes, there will be an RC2. I don't expect an RC3 but that will depend on the feedback that we get. This release is "mostly" feature complete. It includes almost all of the major new features that we have shipped on VS Team Services and makes them available for on-premises TFS users - features like code search and package management. It has long standing top requests - li...
What I missed while I was relaxing this summer
I missed blogging about a ton of stuff that happened in late June and most of July while I was out. I'm not going to try to recap is all. You can find lots of it on the Visual Studio ALM blog or in the Team Services release notes. I do want to highlight a few things though. Hopefully, now that I'm back, I'll be able to keep up with all the news :) Brian
Where in the world is Brian?
I apologize for being away for so long. It's been a weird summer. I was out of the office for almost a month and have spent the last week furiously trying to catch up. So I've been absent from my blog for a while now. I'll fill you in on some of the details. Italy This year is my parent's 50th anniversary. My brother and I (well actually our wives) decided to take them on a trip to celebrate. We packed up my family (my wife and I + 4 kids) and my brother's family (he and his wife and 2 kids) and our parents and went to Italy. All told we were gone about 10 days (2 of which were just flying). We spent time...
Visual Studio Team Services Community Updates
I’m excited to see the recent surge in community activities around Team Services. Many meetups are taking place around the world in June/July where you can go and talk to Team Services users and fans in your area about some of the new features we’ve released recently and get some Team Services swag as well. You can also meet members of the engineering team in a few of these. The Team Services user community is increasingly engaging with each other and with us on Stackoverflow and Quora. We’re also getting a lot of great feature requests via our UserVoice site and via “Send a Smile” within Team Services. We’ve bee...
Java Tools Challenge results
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we are committed to making VS Team Services a great solution for all developers – for any application on any platform. 3 months ago we kicked off the Java Tools Challenge, sponsored by the Visual Studio Partner Program, and the Visual Studio Marketplace which was a longer term virtual hackathon designed to bring awareness to our Java solutions and engage the Java community to build working and published tools and apps. The Challenge was an opportunity for Java developers to explore the extensibility of Visual Studio Team Services as well as make use of some of our solution...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 3 RC is available
Today we released the release candidate for TFS 2015 Update 3. Update 3 is a modest release with only a few features and bug fixes for top reported issues. The features in TFS 2015 Update 3 include: We fixed a lot of bugs. About 140 in total. I spent about an hour curating the bug list and below are my results... I still have to go through the bugs in our Release Management and Test areas. If I don't get to that soon, I'll make sure we get them for our final Update 3 release. ***UPDATE June 8th *** I've added the rest of the bug fixes now. As you can see, there are quite a few. ...
Team Services Update – June 1
I'm a bit late this sprint - was a busy week last week. Last week we finished deploying our sprint 100 work. Yes, sprint 100. That means we've been doing a Scrum (or Scrum like) development process for 300 weeks. And for most of that time, actually releasing at the end of every sprint. Whew, that's over 5 and a half years. 100 sprints is a significant milestone. You can read about the updates in the Team Services release notes. There's quite a lot of new stuff but, among my favorite are: Brian
Video course: Continuous Delivery with the Windows Stack
Check out this new video course on automated deployments with Windows, Azure and Visual Studio by Marcel and Rene. I've known both of them for many years and have a great deal of respect for them. You can be sure it will be an awesome video with lots of good insights. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio Team Services is available in Brazil
Today we launched our Team Services instance in our Azure data center located in Brazil. This adds to instances in the US, Europe, Australia and India. When you create a new account from https://visualstudio.com we default your Geo to the data center closest to you. Customers in South American countries will now notice that Brazil is the default selection. As always, you can override the selection by choosing any Geo from the list – Brazil is open to everyone. If you have an existing Team Services account and you would like to move it to the new Brazil region, you can do that by contacting support. Next up, I ...
Team Services update – May 9
We are in the process of wrapping up the deployment of our sprint 99 deliverables. You can read the Team Services release notes here. There's a ton of new stuff in this sprint update but I'll just comment on a few. Let's start with one of the oldest surviving UserVoice items - a checkbox control. As you can see it was originally created in 2011. We've added the control but there's still some work to do. We've update the web UI to support it but the rich clients (like Team Explorer in Visual Studio) don't yet support it. That's coming. Aaron is going to be publishing a blog post on the ALM blog with details...
TFS 2015 Update 2.1 is available
We have released Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2.1. The KB article has a full list of included bugs fixed (updated from the list I posted on my blog a couple of weeks ago). I haven't done a full cross reference but I listed 25 bug fixes in my post and the KB article includes 28 so I'm assuming we added 3 more fixes since my post. You can install Update 2.1 on top of Update 2 or upgrade directly to Update 2.1 from previous versions (Update 1, TFS 2015 RTM, TFS 2013 and any of its Updates, TFS 2012 and any of its Updates, TFS 2010). Localized versions of the KB article, etc. are in the works and shoul...
Update on TFS 2015 Update 2.1
Hmm, it's been a few days of reflection. I don't think I expected my post on the bugs we were fixing in Update 2.1 to generate so many comments about other bugs that people are hitting. Let me share some questions that have been on my mind and my thoughts on them... Why did I get so many bugs reported as comments on my blog? In the end, my blog isn't the place I want people reporting bugs. It's high cost for me (I'm just overhead because I route them to the right person to look at them). It's not a great experience for you - you don't have a great way to track updates. And it's not a great experience for our...
Team Services in India
Today, we opened up an instance of Visual Studio Team Services in India (Chennai). This builds on the instances we already have in the US, Europe and Australia and is the next step in our journey to making instances available all over the world. You can create an account in India by just choosing the India region during the Team Services account creation process. If you have an existing account that you want to move to the India region, you can contact support to have them do that for you. There are some things to think about when creating an account in the India region: 1) India is a relatively new region in A...
Heads up: TFS 2015.2.1 coming
By now, I suspect, everyone is pretty used to our cadence for shipping Team Foundation Server. We ship a "major" release every year or so and then we ship "Updates" about once a quarter. We just shipped TFS 2015 Update 2 a few weeks ago (otherwise known as TFS 2015.2). We've been watching the feedback on that release closely and we've seen more bugs reported than I'm comfortable with. Every release has some bugs and we work to fix them in the subsequent Update (and provide hot fixes on demand) but this had enough that I'm uncomfortable making people "live with them" for a few months. There aren't really cata...
VS Team Services Update – April 13
This week we are deploying our sprint 98 work to Visual Studio Team Services. You can read the release notes for details of what's included. From time to time, I like to cross reference the work we are releasing with UserVoice to make sure we are actually making progress on the top requests from our users. It's good to see that we knocked off 3 long standing requests with hundreds of votes each this sprint. In addition to those, this sprint includes a bunch of other cool things. A couple I've heard a lot or requests for lately: Follow work item - the ability to easily flag/unflag an item so you get change n...
Team Services and TFS Roadmap update – Apr 2016
Today, we refreshed the roadmap for Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server. We've retired the items that were scheduled for Q1/Update 2, updated the items scheduled for Q2 and added the plan for Q3. We completed a significant majority of the things we planned to. A few things did not complete in Q1 and have been rescheduled for Q2. The only really big thing was: Git SSH support - We almost got it done but had some performance issues to work out we expect to have it available in Team Services in the next few weeks and in TFS 2015 Update 3. The rest of the long list that we had planned for Q1 and...
VS2015 Update 2 and TFS 2015 Update 2 have shipped
Yesterday, at the //Build/ conference, we announced the final release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2. You can learn more at the following links: We also released an early preview of Visual Studio “15”. We will not be releasing a preview of TFS “15” at this time. List with the 2015 release cycle, the best way to see what’s coming in TFS is to explore Visual Studio Team Services. We expect to release a preview of TFS “15” sometime this summer. TFS 2015 Update 2 has a lot of major improvements to almost every area of the product. Some of the most prominent ones inc...
Introducing Application Insights Analytics
Last month, in a post, I wrote about a VS Team Services outage, I mentioned (and showed some results from) a new tool we've been working on that we internally call "Kusto". We've now made a preview of Kusto publicly available as "Application Insights Analytics". Kusto is a phenomenal tool. I can't say enough good stuff about it. I can gush about it, without boast, because I can take almost no credit for it. Yes it's on my team but the folks who have done this have done an astonishing job and all I've done is watched. Kusto was already an incubation project when I inherited the team a couple of years ago and ...
Team Services extension for VS Code
Today we shipped a VS Code extension for working with VS Team Services. The new extension includes status bar indicators and a list of VC Code commands for common operations. You can read more on our blog post. Brian
YouTube channel for Team Services sprint videos
Some of our MVPs have put together a YouTube channel for VS Team Services sprint videos. It's very cool. Check it out. Brian
Ratings and reviews in the VS Marketplace
As of this morning, we now have ratings and reviews in the VS Marketplace! This will allow you to comment on your favorite (or least favorite) extensions and to see what other people are saying when choosing an extension. You can see a 5 star rating on each tile and at the bottom of each extension details page, you will see a list of reviews with comments. You, of course, have the ability to write your own. To limit spam and other abuse we require reviewers to authenticate with a Microsoft Account or Azure Active Directory account. Further, to the right of each review, you can flag offensive or spam reviews. ...
SOC compliance certification for VS Team Services
We take the protection of customer data very seriously and work hard to ensure your data is safe and that we comply with expected policies in all the regions in which we operate. Earlier this month we took another important step towards meeting the compliance needs of our customers by completing the Service Organization Controls certifications (SOC1 and SOC2) for Visual Studio Team Services. These audits evaluated the effectiveness of our internal controls impacting data security, service availability, confidentiality, and processing integrity. This report covers all of our generally available services at the ti...
10th anniversary of Team Foundation Server
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the day we shipped the first version of TFS - TFS 2005. It doesn't seem that long ago but we sure have come a long way. The other day I recorded a Radio TFS interview with Martin Woodward and Greg Duncan. Check it out if you are interested. I have to admit I haven't listened to it. I never listen to my own interviews - it just feels creepy :) I sure had a lot of fun doing it though. Brian
VS Team Services Update – March 3
We just completed our sprint 96 deployment and everyone should now have all the new capabilities. You can read more about what's new in the VS Team Services Release notes. This was a particularly plentiful sprint - with updates across most of the product - Agile planning, testing, Git, package management, gated checking support for TFVC in build.vnext, IntelliJ, and release management. Certainly the gated checkin support was very highly requested and it's great to see that go live. Get test results integration into release management is really nice. Squash merge on pull requests has also been a hot item with ...
Microsoft joins the Eclipse Foundation
This morning at EclipseCon, we announced that we are joining the Eclipse Foundation to further our goals of helping developers build applications regardless of the technology stack choices they make. At the same time, we announced the new open source project for Team Explorer Everywhere to enable anyone to contribute to creating a great Eclipse experience for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services. Read more about it in Peter Bright's article. This adds to a great deal of engagement already with the OSS community, including: our numerous Application Insights SDKs, our IntelliJ plugin for TFS and...
TFS 2015 RC2 and VS 2015 Update 2 RC are available
Today we released release candidate 2 of TFS 2015 Update 2 and the release candidate of Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. As usual I'll mostly comment on TFS and TFS related features and let the VS blog cover broader VS topics. In RC1 of TFS, we already released a ton of new compelling capabilities - like: RC2 brings a bunch more new stuff, including: Lots of good stuff. Of course, we also took all the feedback we got from RC1 and fixed all the bugs - thank you for all of the bug reports. Like RC1, this is a go-live release. You can upgrade directly to it from any p...
HockeyApp available through the Visual Studio marketplace
HockeyApp is a fantastic tool for managing mobile devops. It includes capabilities to publish apps to a select group of “beta testers”, to collect feedback from those testers and to gather and analyze crash reports. It works incredibly well for iOS, Android and Windows UWP apps. As of today, HockeyApp can also be purchased in the Visual Studio Marketplace via and Azure subscription. HockeyApp also has a free plan to get started with a few apps. I encourage you to check it out. Brian
Book on Continuous Deployment
Another good book recently hit the virtual shelves - this one on Continuous Deployment with TFS and VS Team Services. The book covers both the principles and practices around continuous delivery, as well as hands on guidance. Check it out... USA - http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Visual-Studio-2015/dp/1484212738 UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1484212738 Brian
A new book on Team Foundation Server 2015
One of our MVPs, Tarun Arora just published a book on TFS 2015. It covers TFS up to TFS 2015 Update 2. Check it out... http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1784391050. Brian
Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 RC 1 is available
Today we released TFS 2015 Update 2 RC 1 and VS 2015 Update 2 CTP1. I'm going to talk about TFS here and you can go to the Visual Studio blog to learn more about VS. This release of TFS is a "go-live" release candidate. We will support customers choosing to install it in a production environment. All the links you should need to learn about it and get it are here: Most of the features labeled Update 2 and described on our Features timeline are in this release. The one feature that we thought was going to be in Update 2 but I now know will not make it is SSH support for Git. We know that's a very hi...
Visual Studio Team Services Java Tools Challenge
We are committed to making VS Team Services a great solution for all developers – for any application on any platform. For several years now, we’ve had a concerted effort to build a great solution for Java developers with an Eclipse plugin, a cross platform command line, an IntelliJ plugin, a cross platform build agent and so much more. We’ve also been working hard to integrate popular Java tools like Maven, JUnit test results importing, JaCoCo and Cobertura, SonarQube and the list goes on. With the recent introduction of our Visual Studio Marketplace we are reemphasizing how open and extensible VSTS is and how...
A bit more on the Feb 3 and 4 incidents
Please read my post from yesterday first. Unfortunately I had a family commitment and had to leave early Friday afternoon before the post was complete. I asked someone on my team to finish it and he did an excellent job and I'm grateful. There are a few things I would yet like to add to the discussion. First I want to emphasize point #4 from the second incident. And note, I described the incidents in order of "worst" incident first. Actually, the second incident happened the day before the first one. That blip out to the right of the graph in the second incident was actually an occurrence of the very same ...
VS Team Services incidents on Feb 3 & 4
We had two serious availability incidents in the past 2 days. I'm incredibly sorry for the problems that these have caused. Increasingly we are bringing on more and more customers who rely on this service day in and day out and any significant interruption is entirely unacceptable. We know it. We live it. We breath it and, in the last 2 days, we have failed twice. We take this responsibility very seriously and continue to work to ensure such things do not happen. Both of these incidents were service wide incidents that affect large numbers of customers and critical scenarios. Worldwide outage causing log...
Package Management now available in Europe and Australia
When we first released the Package Management preview in November, it was only available in the US - If your VS Team Services account was in some region other than the US, installing the Package Management extension would fail. This week, we deployed Package Management instances in Australia and Europe (which are the only other two regions in which we have Team Services instances). So, as of this week, you can install the Package Management extension in any VSTS account and your Package Management instance will automatically be hosted in the same region as the VSTS account. Give it a try and let us know what...
Update Blog software
For months the team has been working on migrating our msdn blogs off of the "old" blogging system we used onto WordPress. In the last few days, my blog was migrated and is now running on WordPress. The system we had been using had gotten pretty out of date and clunky. I haven't used WordPress a lot but it generally has a good reputation and I'm looking forward to learning it and hope I'm really going to like it. Given some of the complaints I've gotten about the blogging software I've gotten over the past year, I hope you are going to see it as an improvement too. The new url is http://blogs.msdn.microsoft.co...
VS Team Services Update – Jan 25th
This week we are deploying the changes from sprints 93 and 94 (they spanned Christmas/New Years so we combined them into a single deployment. You can read the release notes for all the details.As usual, as I write this, the updates have not yet made it to all tenants but they will over the next day or two.This deployment has an unusually large list of improvements in it. I particularly like the test reporting improvements that continues the build + test + release management investment that makes 1 + 1 + 1 = 5. But there’s a ton of new stuff across the product.Also, keep an eye on the roadm...
Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap update
Today we are making a major update to our “Features Timeline” for TFS and VSTS. To remind you, the Features Timeline provides an indication of some of the bigger, higher demand things we are working on and when we think they will be delivered – both on premises in TFS and in the cloud in VSTS (formerly VS Online). A few caveats… It doesn’t represent everything we are doing - just some of the most highly demanded things. We'll continue to provide detailed release notes with every deployment/release. As with any prediction of the future some things may not turn out as we imagine. Right now the approach we’re ...
Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap update
Today we are making a major update to our “Features Timeline” for TFS and VSTS. To remind you, the Features Timeline provides an indication of some of the bigger, higher demand things we are working on and when we think they will be delivered – both on premises in TFS and in the cloud in VSTS (formerly VS Online).A few caveats… Right now the approach we’re taking with this is to update the roadmap about every 3 months and to project about 6 months ahead. There are other forums – blog posts, conference presentations, sales engagements, etc. where we provide h...
Team Explorer Everywhere 14.0.2 released
We recently released a small update to Team Explorer Everywhere – a cross platform command line and Eclipse plug-in for working Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services.You can download it here: Improvements include: Brian
Is your stomach bigger than your eyes?
For the past several months, friends have been bugging me to write another farm post – it’s been quite a while. The problem is that I haven’t been able to think of anything terribly interesting. Most farm work does make for a good blog post – chores, feeding, cutting hay, repairing fences, … Just not great content for an interesting post. Well today I had an experience that I thought was worth sharing. It’s Wed Dec 23rd and I’m off work. I’ve been doing a lot of farm work but, in the last couple of days, it has been raining like crazy – over 4 inches, I think. My fields are like huge grassy ponds and t...
VS 2015 Update 1 and TFS 2015 Update 1 are available
Today we shipped the final releases of Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 1. Here are the release notes: There were very few changes between the last release candidates and this final release – just a hand full of bug fixes. Check out the release notes for all the new stuff in this update – there’s a lot. You can install directly over a pre-release of this update (both VS and TFS) and it will update your installation. For TFS, you can also in-place upgrade previous versions (2013, 2012 and 2010) seamlessly. VS will install side by side with previous versions. Pl...
News from Connect(); 2015
Today is our annual Fall developer Connect(); event in New York. I’m here talking about a ton of new stuff that we’re doing to help developers adopt agile DevOps practices. Normally I would write a detailed post with screenshots and descriptions highlighting the news. However, this time, I’m going to take a different approach. There’s so much stuff to talk about that I can’t write that post – I’d spend days on it and you wouldn’t want to read it :) Instead, I’m going to write a directory of news.Over the next day or two, as blog p...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Management Pack is available
It’s been a painfully and embarrassingly long time coming but the SCOM Management Pack for TFS 2015 is finally available. Give it a spin and let us know if you have any feedback.Download TFS 2015 Management PackBrian
VS 2015 Update 1 RC & TFS 2015 Update 1 RC2 Released
We just released our final “pre-release” of Update 1 for Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio 2015. Lots of useful links are available here: You’ll find the installation links at the top of the release notes pages.As I was looking over things (and finding a few issues with the release notes page :)) to write this post, I was just blown away by how much stuff is included in Update 1. We just shipped 2015 and we already have a *ton* of great new improvements for Update 1. I strongly encourage you to check it out.It’s a bit too early to tell but I exp...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 30
As usual, you can read the release notes for this update on visualstudio.com. One of the most popular improvements released this sprint are our new dashboards. We’ve been dogfooding them internally for a few sprints now and some of my feature teams have put together some very nice dashboards. There are a number of tile types to choose from and you can add custom tile types to show whatever you like. Like most of the stuff we do in the cloud, this is just the beginning and there is lots more to do. Dashboards will evolve rapidly for several more sprints. Expect them to get better and better (like adding th...
Agile at Microsoft
Here's a nice Forbes article on Agile at Microsoft...http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/10/27/surprise-microsoft-is-agile/Brian
TFS Office Integration Installer
One of the things I forgot to mention in my post about TFS 2015 Update 1 RC is that we have also shipped a preview of our new TFS Office Integration Installer (ISO image). This new installer addresses a couple of scenarios: The PowerPoint storyboarding tool is a really nice way to mock up user experiences quickly and easily. You can leverage the PowerPoint skills you already have to build nice walk throughs of user flows before you invest in building them. In building TFS and VSO, we use is all the time. Here’s an example PowerPoint mockup from one of our walk-throughs of our new dashboarding fea...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 8th
Another post I missed last week was an announcement about our sprint 89 deployment for VS Online. You can read the release notes for details.Probably the biggest thing is support for Active Directory group support for managing permissions. This as been a very common request from our larger customers in VSO so they don’t need to maintain shadow groups in VSO and AAD.Another very notable thing is the preview of a new work item form. We are trying to improve the layout to make it “cleaner”, more extensible (setting us up for a good process customization story on the service) and r...
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 1 pre-release available
I’m a bit late to this party because we released them about a week ago. I generally try to sync my blog posts but we had a death in the family last week and I just didn’t have the time to deal with blogging.The Visual Studio preview is named “CTP 1” and you can read more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/10/08/visual-studio-2015-update-1-ctp.aspxThe Team Foundation Server preview is named “RC 1”. The reason for the difference is that we’ve learned over the years with TFS that unless we provide a “go-live” promise (sup...
VS Online Update – Sept 18
Sorry for being so late on this one. The last couple of weeks have been very hectic for me and I’ve mostly had to ignore my blog.Last week we finished rolling out our sprint 88 work. You can read about the details in the VS Online release notes.As has become the pattern over the past 6 months, this sprint, we rolled out a bunch more improvements to our Agile planning tools. The cards became even richer with on card sub-tasks. Queryability of kanban column metadata and more.Sprint 89 is already right around the corner. Stay tuned for info on the next round of updates in about a ...
September pricing and licensing changes
I want to update you all on the pricing and licensing changes we’ve been working on over the past year.VS Online Basic usersThe new, less expensive, tiered pricing model I announced a couple of months ago goes into effect Sept 1st (today). In addition, we are finalizing the licensing documents to include an on-prem TFS CAL with your VS Online purchases, making it easy for you to use on-prem, cloud or both. That will also go into effect in Sept.A changing philosophyBefore I explain some other changes that are coming, let me step back for a minute and talk about how we are changing the way we thin...
VS Online/TFS Feature timeline – the UserVoice version
As a follow up to my post yesterday on the Feature timeline refresh, I took a few minutes this morning to walk through our UserVoice site and summarize how the work we are planning over the next several months relates. This is a different granularity cut (because it’s based on UV suggestions) that what I published yesterday. I’m not promising that I caught every single one. And I’m not promising that everyone I’ve listed here will get done this fall (my crystal ball isn’t perfect). But, based on what I know now, this is a pretty good approximation of the plan. I stopped when I got down to UV items with les...
Features timeline refresh
With the TFS 2015 release behind us and a lot of planning for our next phase of work completed, it’s time to do a major refresh of our Visual Studio Online Features Timeline. If you aren’t familiar with this page, I encourage you to check it out. It not only gives you a peek ahead to things we’re working on, it also contains a log of the work we deliver every sprint. Lastly, it roughly maps when the VS Online features show up in an on-premises TFS release.A little commentary on this update… Hopefully you find this useful. Let me know if you have ques...
VS 2012 Update 5 has been released
This week we released the final build of VS 2012 Update 5. You can get it on the Visual Studio downloads page. There are only a few changes in it. You can find them in the VS 2012 Update 5 KB article.Brian
TFS 2015 Installation guidance
At least once or twice a week, I’m getting questions about where the TFS 2015 installation guidance is. We’re not doing well with search engines on that apparently. We’re going to see if we can do better but, in the mean time, here’s the link just in case you stumble across my blog :)Installing Team Foundation Server 2015Brian
TFS 2015 Power Tools are available
Today we released the TFS 2015 Power Tools that accompany VS 2015 and TFS 2015. The landing page that link points to includes lots of info about compatibility, changes, etc.Sorry it took a bit longer to get these out than we expected.Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 26th
This week we are rolling out our sprint 87 work. Nothing earth shattering this sprint but some nice project management improvements. Also we’ve added first class SonarQube support now with custom tasks for executing SonarQube and publishing the results for your build. You can read more on this week’s VSO release notes.Brian
SmartOffice4TFS and inteGREAT4TFS available for Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN subscribers
Managing requirements is an incredibly important part of the software development process for everyone. Different teams approach the problem very differently – from very lightweight/informal ways to very formal and documented ways. The needs of your business and the culture of your organization will determine what’s right for you.For years, we’ve worked with partners to provide great requirements management capabilities for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online. eDevTech provides a suite of tools that provide solutions spanning from relatively informal ways of managin...
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 7th
This week we are rolling out our Sprint 86 work. You can read details on the VSO release notes. Included is the next set of work to improve our Agile planning experiences and availability of a NuGet package for our TFS/VSO SDK. The NuGet package is a big step forward in making it easier to work with. You no longer have to mess with the complexity of getting an MSI installed. You can just copy the SDK files and you are good to go. Your app can be self contained and not have to worry about pre-reqs.The NuGet Package with work with TFS today and the Agile improvements will come to...
Team Foundation Server 2015 Final Release
Today we released the final version of Team Foundation Server 2015. TFS 2015 is a major step forward, with tons of improvements throughout the development process but with special emphasis on DevOps capabilities. Here are all of the TFS 2015 related downloads. Look under Visual Studio 2015 for things like Test Professional, under Team Foundation Server 2015 for TFS, Project Server, etc. and under Tools for Visual Studio 2015 for Release Management, Test Agents, etc. You can, of course, get TFS 2015 through your MSDN subscriber downloads and other places you normally acquire Microsoft softwar...
Included CALs and Tiered Pricing
I have to say that when I wrote my post last week on TFS and VSO related licensing and packaging changes, I didn’t think I’d be writing another one quite so soon. But I found out that we’re disclosing the next set of changes this week to help people plan, even though they don’t go into effect for another month. This isn’t some random path we are on. We have a reasonably clear picture of where we’re headed and we have quite a number of changes we are making on that journey. Please don’t ask me to describe the destination quite yet because I’m not re...
Self forming teams at scale
I want to share with you all a strange thing that we do. It’s unorthodox but has been very successful for us. Teams change. People come. People go. People move around. Reorgs happen. This is a fact of life, particularly in any large organization, and something managers spend a fair amount of time on – recruiting, re-recruiting, managing, developing, etc. Many years ago (I want to say around 2008), we had a reorg to do. In general, we do them every couple of years, usually associated with some big milestone/inflection, and use them to rebalance, apply talent to the new problems, fund new projects, etc...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 5 RC Available
As part of the 2015 wave of releases, in addition to the 2015 products and a 2013 Update 5, we are also releasing a VS 2012 Update 5 (not one for TFS 2012 though). This Update includes a few bug fixes. The most notable, from my perspective, are some changes to make using VS 2012 with a TFS or VS Online Team Project that gets renamed. This update will handle some of the local reaction work, like workspace updates, automatically rather than relying on manual fix-ups. You can find information on the release candidate here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=615776 I don’t have a date for ...
Licensing and packaging changes for TFS 2015
Over the past year, we have been working to simplify licensing for Team Foundation Server and make things as straight forward as possible for customers to adopt it. This has included changes like the introduction of the Stakeholder plan for broad access to work items within the organization, simplifications to release management to eliminate per deployment environment billing, reductions in cloud load testing prices and more. You’ll find some previous posts here: Today I want to tell you about another set of changes we are making that I think will move us yet another step forward. All of thes...
Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Released
Today, we released Visual Studio 2015, .NET 4.6, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 5. As I announced in a post a few weeks ago, Team Foundation Server 2015 is going to take just a bit longer (more on this in a minute), but you can get RC2 now if you like and it will work just fine with VS 2015 (and other versions too). We’re having an online event today to talk about this wave of releases if you want to learn more. I won’t repeat all of the great content on the Visual Studio blog post or on Soma’s post. Check those out for lots more info on what&rsquo...
Visual Studio Online Update – July 17
I told you a week or so ago it would come quickly :) We’re deploying our Sprint 85 work now. As always, it will take a few days for it to make it across the entirety of the service. You can find the details on the new capabilities in the release notes. I think you’ll be pleased to see a whole bunch of new Agile planning improvements. One of the “small” changes to the card styling feature macro support. Greg gave one example in the release notes. I thought I’d share a few more that someone sent around in an internal email to spark your thinking on how you might creatively use these. The Sprint 86...
Update on Team Foundation Server RC2
I wrote a post about a week ago announcing TFS 2015 RC2. Today, we released downloads for the rest of the languages, along with release notes. All the information in my previous post is still accurate and the links all point to the updated downloads. Brian
TFS 2015 Compatibility
As the release of TFS 2015 has approached, I’ve gotten a lot of compatibility questions. We were a little slow documenting the story but we have it now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/TFS/administer/requirements The short story is the TFS 2015 compat matrix is about the same at the TFS 2013 one was – we didn’t make big changes in that respect. There’s a few tweaks that I’d still like to see in the document but it’s close. If you find anything missing, let us know. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – July 7
I’m a bit late on this post. It’s been a busy week of travel. Last week we began deploying our sprint 84 release. Because of the logistics around finalizing our TFS 2015 release, it was delayed a bit. Sprint 83 is actually the last sprint that went into TFS 2015 RTM and we wanted to keep it live on the service longer while we iterated on the remaining bug fixes. But as of last week we moved forward. We’re now trying to “catch back up” and the sprint 85 deployment should be starting later this week. I’ll post again when I have something useful...
Team Foundation Server 2015 RC2 available
Today we released Release Candidate 2 of Team Foundation Server 2015. I believe this release is VERY close to the final bits we will ship. I’d encourage people to try out upgrades on production backups, pre-production environments and, production environments. We will support you regardless of the path you choose. Download: TFS 2015 RC2 Be aware that this TFS RC2 cannot be installed on the same machine as VS 2015 RC. It can be accessed by the VS RC just fine, but not installed on the same machine – this has to do with some versioning issues on some files that are shared between...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2015 RTM
We have released Team Explorer Everywhere 2015. It’s available on the Download Center and on the Eclipse Marketplace. Soma announced that VS 2015 will release on July 20th so stay tuned. This isn’t a particularly big release but it has some very welcome enhancements: Build.vnext and Team Project Rename are, of course, only available when using VS Online or TFS 2015. Please give us any feedback you have. Thanks, Brian
Team Foundation Server and VS Online adoption at Microsoft
Someone asked me in a blog comment recently to post an update on internal adoption – the last one was almost a year ago. I’m going to keep it reasonably short. The best summary is adoption continues to grow. TFS on-prem is growing slowly because it’s already huge. VS Online usage is growing more rapidly but is still far smaller than TFS on-prem. Here’s the latest TFS on-prem summary from our IT team that runs the production TFS servers: Here’s a month by month trend of VS Online adoption by major organization. The numbers look a little larger than they really are because adoption is still early and p...
Visual Studio Online Update – June 3rd
***PLEASE READ*** Ahh, my fortune for “delayed publish” in Live Writer. I was trying to grab screenshots for this and accidentally hit publish a day too early. The release notes won’t be published until tomorrow (June 3rd). I’m sorry for the inconvenience but with the number of people who get email notifications of my blog post, there’s no pulling it back, so I’ll just leave it up there. Today, we begin the process of rolling out our sprint 83 results. You can read the release notes to see the highlights of the new features. The kanban and task boards are making great progress towards having all the fea...
Visual Studio Online Update – May 15th
This week we are deploying our sprint 82 work for VS Online. This is a very BIG deployment – lot’s of stuff. You can read the release notes. First and foremost Build.VNext is here! It is now in Public Preview and everyone can try it. We also now have a hosted build pool so you don’t have to install a local build agent on Windows if you don’t want to. If you want to build on Linux or the MacOS, you will still need to setup up local agent for now. Since I offered a early peek at Build.VNext on my blog a month or so ago, I’ve been inundated with people requ...
A fun project for customer connection
Last week the VS Code team came to us saying that they really wanted a great experience getting bug reports from customers. Microsoft Connect just isn’t a pleasant experience. They looked at UserVoice and it’s great for suggestions but not optimized for bugs. We decided to pull a few people from across the VS Online team together and do a 3 day Hack-a-thon to see what we could put together. I’ve been blown away by what they accomplished. They shipped an increment at the end of each day – sometimes more than once, and delivered a fully functional experience at the en...
VS Online hosted in Australia
Today, we are expanding our VS Online footprint to include an instance in Australia. This adds to the several instances we have in the US and the one we have in Europe. It is part of our drive to make VS Online available to everyone, in a geography you are comfortable with and with performance you are happy with. Australia East is the Sydney/New South Wales data center. VS Online has logic to auto-select your region based on the IP address you are signing up from. It tries to default you to the “best” region for you. You can, of course, override it by choosing any of the regions from the list. The Au...
VS Online & Power BI
I briefly described our new Power BI integration for VS Online in my //Build/ post last week. I didn’t however provide any details on how to use it. Jeff Levinson has written a very detailed walk through that explains many of the concepts and shows you how to get connected. Check out his VS Online Power BI tutorial.Brian
A Real Madrid story
Real Madrid is one of the biggest and most successful sports franchises in the world. Over the past several months we’ve been working with them to build some digital experiences to provide their fans the best possible experience. As part of that, they wanted to have a great way to understand how their mobile/cloud experiences were working for their customers. Our Application Insights team has been working with them to instrument all aspects of their application – mobile devices, backend services, etc. to give a 360 degree view of the customer experience – reliability, performan...
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server at Build 2015
It’s conference season – //Build/ is this week and Ignite is next week. As you might expect, we have a TON of stuff to share so I’ll get right to it. Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2015 Release Candidate This week released the release candidates for both VS 2015 and TFS 2015. Both are “go-live” releases and are reliable enough to be used in production environments. At the same time, neither are finished so we know there are some remaining issues that we plan to fix between now and the final release. Useful links: Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2013 Upda...
VS Online Update – April 27th
This week we are rolling out our Sprint 81 work. 3 instances have been updated so far and the remaining 3 will update over the next couple of days – so, as usual, you may not see the changes immediately. This update comes close on the heels of the last one. We just finished the sprint 80 update only a week ago. It was delayed because of the huge changes to support team project rename. Starting with this sprint, we should be back on a normal schedule. There are some VERY nice changes in this deployment. You can read the release notes. Our #1 support request right now is people w...
First TFS 2015 RC production upgrade I know of
I got the first customer report of a production upgrade to the TFS 2015 release candidate today. Understand, we haven’t released it yet but we gave an early copy to our MVPs to give us final feedback on. One of our MVPs reported that he upgraded a customer with a 9GB team project collection (not terribly large, obviously), and that it took 11 minutes. I was happy to hear that it was both successful and reasonably fast. This release has a lot of database changes to support Team Project rename and other things so, for large databases, we expect the upgrade times will be significant. To...
Team Project Rename available on VS Online
Today we enabled Team Project rename on all VS Online accounts. Team Project rename is our #1 User Voice request, by far and the longest standing customer complaint. 6,156 votes and 178 comments later, it’s here (both on VSO – today and in the TFS 2015 RC – available shortly). I know it’s been a long time coming and I appreciate everyone who has been both patient and persistent. I really hope this will address all the pent up demand and all the mis-named projects out there :) You can try it by navigating to your project in the VSO web experience, then hit the settings icon on the upper right. There are ...
TFVC & Git support
I got a question on a blog post about differences in TFVC and Git support in TFS and VS Online. Here’s a link to the question for context: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2015/03/12/the-future-of-team-foundation-version-control.aspx#10608301 I can’t answer in a comment with reasonable formatting so I’ll answer in a post. One thing you can check out is an MSDN topic on the subject here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181368.aspx. There’s some useful information there but I feel like that page is trying to do too many things at once – explain some of the ...
VS Online Update – April 10th
We are deploying our sprint 80 results this week. You can read the release notes on visualstudio.com. There are some very nice improvements for both the Agile tooling and Git. This is an unusual deployment. First it's delayed a week and second it's going to take a couple of weeks before all the instances of VS Online are updated. As I write this, only the internal "Canary" and European instances have been updated. Today we are starting 2 US instances. Later this week we hope to start the largest instance - and we expect that will take 4 days to upgrade. Why so stra...
Ever want to create bugs from email?
Someone recently posted an open source copy of a popular internal tool called Mail2Bug. https://github.com/microsoft/mail2bug It will automatically create bugs from an email and then keep the bug up to date with any further conversation that happens on the email thread. It works for both VS Online and TFS but requires that you use Exchange (or O365). Check it out... Brian
The future of Team Foundation Version control
I've written about this before but it keeps coming back. From time to time I get the question "Is TFVC dead?" I guess I have to just keep answering it. No, it is not. We added support for Git in TFS 2013 so that we'd support the best centralized version control system and the best dvcs in the industry. We've been investing heavily in Git because there's a ton of work to do to bring it up to parity with what we can do with TFVC. I think people get confused for a number or reasons. We talk about our progress on Git a lot. The industry talks about Git a lot. And, if yo...
Visual Studio Online Update – Mar 10
Sorry for being a little late to the party this week. We are rolling out our sprint 79 build to VS Online build this week. You can read more about it here: https://www.visualstudio.com/news/2015-mar-10-vso. I haven't said anything about it explicitly but a while back we made the decision to increase our focus on burning down our UserVoice priority list. This week we delivered the #3 item on the list with 2,203 votes. Of course, we are also working on the #1 and #2 items. But, that's one very popular item delivered and 2,203 votes released to vote on something else :) As Aaron notes in the release notes, ...
VS 2015 CTP6 and TFS 2015 CTP1 shipped today
Today we shipped Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 and TFS 2015 CTP1. You can download both here: Download Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 and Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP You can also read the release notes to learn more about them: Please submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE. I know many people have been waiting a long time to see the first CTP of TFS 2015. I’ve even had quite a few people unsure of whether or not to believe that we actually intended to ship it :). We did. But, I keep telling people, that if you...
Visual Studio Online Update – Feb 18
Yesterday we began our sprint 78 VS Online deployment. You can check out the release notes here: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2015-feb-18-vso. there are a few nice improvements. It will likely take 4 or 5 days to upgrade all accounts so don’t be surprised if you don’t see the changes in your account right away. I also encourage you to check out our Features Timeline. We’ve made some updated recently, including some Agile/Kanban items, a Build.vnext entry, added a timeframe for Team project rename and more. Brian
Code Search on VS Online
In November, at our Connect(); event, I gave a sneak peek at a few features/services coming to VS Online, and ultimately Team Foundation Server. Among the things I demoed was a new source code search feature. I’m happy to say that the next step in that journey is upon us. Today, we announced a “limited preview” of our new Code Search capability. Limited preview means that not everyone will get access – you have request it and we will only enable a certain number of accounts. The feature is still early but it’s now at the point that it is very useful – we have been using it internally for more than a month an...
New page on VS Online Agile Tooling
We’re in the process of trying to significantly upgrade the content on our Visual Studio website. We’re starting with the pages that describe what VS Online is and why you might want to use it. The first new page is on Agile Tools. In parallel, we are also working to add some more educational/best practices content. I’m looking forward to seeing the site get better and better.Brian
Licensing changes – User acceptance testing and Agile planning
This is next in a series of licensing and feature changes that I laid out in December. With this, I think all of the cloud changes (and more) that I described have been made. Some of the on-prem changes will be available as we release more on-prem updates. User acceptance testing As of this week, you will no longer need a VS Online Advanced license to do user acceptance testing with Visual Studio Online. You will still need one to create and manage test plans but if you just need to execute tests, report results, file bugs, etc, then you only need a VS Online Basic license. Agile planning This w...
Hiring for VS Online and Team Foundation Server
Microsoft has an extensive recruiting effort. But we recently decided to try something new to try to find more people who might want to help build VS Online and Team Foundation Server. We added a Jobs page to visualstudio.com. It has a little info on what we do and links to job postings on the Microsoft careers site and some information about who we are. We've got quite a few positions open right now and are hoping to fill them as quickly as we can. This is a bit of an experiment. If it works well, we will probably expand it to include other parts of Visual Studio. Brian
Journey to cloud
Transforming a sizeable development organization from "classic" development practices to Agile cloud development is something I talk about a lot. Bhavik Shah, who used to work on our team, left Microsoft to go to business school and now works a Mckinsey, recently wrote an article on that transformation process. Buck Hodges, one of our Engineering Directors worked with Bhavik and others on it. It's a nice read: https://tmt.mckinsey.com/ The link is a link to the Mckinsey home page - I don't have a perma-link to the article. It's on the front page as I write this. The article is titled "From...
Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 is available
Today released CTP 5 of Visual Studio 2015. This is not a “go-live” build but is getting close to functionally complete. If you’re curious what’s coming in VS 2015, check it out. Once again, we did not release a TFS preview with this VS CTP, however, this is the last time. Our next VS 2015 preview will also include a preview of TFS 2015. So, if you’ve been wondering where it is, you won’t have to wait too much longer. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio Online ISO 27001 Certification and European Model Clauses
In December, we hit an important milestone for Visual Studio Online. We received ISO 27001 certification and added the European Model Clauses to our service terms. We take protection of customer data very seriously and work hard to ensure your data is safe and that we comply with expected policies in all the regions in which we operate. These two milestones are important steps on a journey of increasing our guarantees and documenting our adherence to our policies. Here’s a nice image of our certification document (blushing with pride :))… You can find the documentation on our inclusion of European ...
Build & Load Test pricing changes are in effect
The changes to the VS Online build and load testing services that I described a few weeks ago are now complete. This represents a substantial reduction in price for both services. We’ve also removed the 10 user limit of Visual Studio Online Professional subscriptions. The slider goes up to 100 now. You can contact support if you need more than that. You can see the latest VS Online Pricing on the pricing page. Last, but not least, the change to remove the per-processor charges for Team Foundation Server on-premises release management capability has also been removed. The rest of the changes...
Git vulnerability with .gitconfig
Today the Git community disclosed an issue in Git that, in the worst case, could allow a developer’s machine to be taken over. This is an issue that manifests across much of the Git ecosystem and is not unique to Microsoft’s Git implementation or to Windows. I’ll describe the problem and the steps we’ve taken to ensure our customers using Git repositories are protected against this issue. First, I want to thank the Hg (Mercurial) community for their help. An analogous issue was discovered in Hg. They took the time to look at Git and discovered that the same issue ex...
Improved Welcome/Wiki experience
I mentioned this in my post on the sprint 75 deployment and I wanted to include a video but it wasn’t ready. Now it is and I want to share it. Keep in mind that the deployment is still in progress so it may not be available in your account yet. The deployment should be done by tomorrow (Friday). https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/briankel/Lightweight-Web-Editing-with-Markdown-Files-in-Visual-Studio-Online I’m just tickled at how nicely this experience is turning out. I hope you like it too. Of course, all of this will show up in TFS 2015 too. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 17
This week we are deploying our sprint 75 results. You can read details on the VS Online release notes. For whatever confluence of reasons, a lot of things came together in this sprint an there’s a ton of new stuff that I think you will like. One of my personal favorites is the updated Wiki/Welcome page experience. It’s now incredibly easy to create and update Wiki pages using markdown in VS Online. I encourage you to check it out. This is the last deployment of this year. In fact, we’ll be honoring our tradition of skipping the deployment that overlaps heavily with ...
A new Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server Features Timeline
We are always working on ways to communicate more effectively with customers about what we have done, what people like and don’t like, what they want, what we’re planning, etc. A year or so ago we added a Features Timeline page to our News section of visualstudio.com as one step in that journey. The news section, for VS Online particularly, announces the new features that we’ve deployed each sprint. The Features Timeline then maps those new features to the on-premises TFS release you can find them in. Here’s an example snippet: At the same time, it’s all backward looking – stuff we’ve already done an...
Microsoft acquires HockeyApp
I’m excited to announce our acquisition of HockeyApp – the next step in our journey to turn Application Insights into the best tool in the world for helping you get insight into your applications. With HockeyApp we add great support for mobile devices, allowing you see more of your application and helping you answer: 1) Is my application available/reliable? 2) Is my application performing? 3) Is my application succeeding – allowing my users to accomplish what they intend and delivering on my business goals? HockeyApp brings a fantastic solution for: And HockeyApp provides fantastic support fo...
More pricing and licensing changes coming
Earlier this year, we started a process of reviewing our pricing and licensing for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online. Our intent was to review all of the customer feedback we’ve received to look for changes that would simplify purchasing and make it more affordable for teams to include everyone in the broader organization who needs to interact with the development team. I previewed the first set of changes in July which included a new Stakeholder license that enables people outside the “development team” to track progress, make suggestions, file bugs, etc. This means th...
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 2nd
This week we are rolling out the sprint 74 updates to VS Online. You can read details about the features on the service news page. There’s nothing huge here. After the larger announcements we made at Connect(); in November, we’re back to iterating on and improving capabilities more incrementally. For large organizations, my favorite improvement is the new identity control. As it evolved, I kept asking the team to try to make it work like address resolution in Outlook works – I like it a lot. It’s not quite the same because we don’t have a local copy of the add...
Outage on Monday Nov-24
Just Friday, the week before, I was speaking to Buck about the incident we had the previous week and expressing a strong desire to avoid another incident anytime soon. We agreed to postpone the VS Online deployment so that we didn’t have to rush it in a short holiday week and we could ensure that everyone needed was on hand in case something went wrong. Then I woke up Monday morning to see that we were in the middle of an incident. It started at 7:00 UTC (11:06 Sunday night, PST). By the time I got online at about 11:30 UTC, the team had been engaged for hours and were working diligently o...
Special Offers from Visual Studio Partners
Last week at our Connect(); event in New York City, we made some big announcements regarding our ecosystem from a developer as well as a partner point of view. In addition to those announcements, I wanted to call your attention to special offers for MSDN subscribers from some of our top Visual Studio partners. You can also check out this short video on Channel 9 to learn more about the partner ecosystem and these great offers. These offers are live on the MSDN Special offers page and include: We just added another partner offer with Team Companion Bridge the gap between stakeholders and d...
Incident response
We had an incident on VS Online yesterday, starting at 1 AM UTC (5:00 PM PST). The incident was caused by an underlying Azure storage incident affecting many stamps in several regions. I don’t know the root cause of that yet but I’m sure I’ll find out. I want to start by apologizing for the incident. No incident is good or acceptable. I know it disrupted important work happening for our customers and we take that very seriously. At the same time, they happen. Nothing you can do can ever 100% prevent them. As a result, how you respond to them is as important as the work you do to prevent them. I wante...
News from Connect();
This week we had our “Connect();” developer event in New York. We made a ton of announcements. You’ll find a bunch on Soma’s blog, the Visual Studio blog, the Visual Studio ALM blog and in the release notes. At the highest level, we announced: I also previewed some features that will be coming to VS Online & TFS in the not too distant future. We did *not* release a preview of TFS 2015 today – not because we aren’t working on it but rather because we’ve found that shipping these capabilities to VS Online is by far the fastest way to provide you with a preview of what is coming ...
Connect(); is today
Our Connect(); event for developers is today. I’m in New York getting ready for a few presentations I’m giving. It’s going to be a busy day because we have a lot of stuff to tell you about – some of it, I think, pretty exciting and unexpected. If you’ve got time, I encourage you to tune into the live stream – it starts at 10:00am eastern time (the times on the website appear to be Pacific time). Looking forward to chatting with you today. I’ll try to keep up with blog comments, etc today. It’s a pretty busy day so I may not be prompt wi...
VS Online Data Protection
It’s not uncommon that I get questions about data security and privacy in Visual Studio Online. It’s something we take very seriously, design for, test for and focus on. Jeff Beehler, who runs our compliance team, did a talk at TechEd Europe this week on our data protection approach. As he worked to put together his presentation, he also put together a VS Online Data Protection document to share the information even more broadly. You’ll find it hosted along with other key service documents (like our service level agreement) on the VS Online support page. In addition to working ...
Super simple load test trial experience
In order to make it super easy for anyone to get a tiny taste of what the VS Online load test experience is about, we added a new web based experience a few days ago. ***UPDATE 10/29/2014 12:30PM EDT*** - When I wrote this, I wasn't aware that it is only available to VS Online customers licensed with an MSDN Ultimate subscription. We're having a conversation about whether or not we want to leave it that way but that's the status for now. If you go to your account home page on any VS Online account, you’ll see a new top level tab. If you click on it you’ll get a page that allows you to run a very sim...
TechEd Europe 2014 News
Today, in the keynote for TechEd Europe, we announced several cool new things… VS Online European data center We now have a VS Online instance in the Azure “West Europe” data center and it is open for business. You can read more about it in my separate post. VS Online REST APIs and Service Hooks RTM This spring, at TechEd in the US, we announced a new extensibility approach for VS Online, and ultimately for TFS too, based on REST, OAuth and Service Hooks. Today, we announced that the V1.0 of these APIs are now final. That’s not to say, by any stretch, that we are done with the APIs completely but rather th...
Visual Studio Online is in Europe!
Today we opened up our shiny, new VS Online instance in the Azure “West Europe” region, which is located in the Netherlands. This is a big step and is the first of many more to come in making VS Online a truly global service. I’ve been getting requests for over a year to provide the ability to host data in different regions – for some it’s about the comfort of having their data on “home soil”. For others it’s about reduced latency to access the service. Whatever your reason, Europe is now an option for you. You can get started today by going to http://visualstudio.com and creating a new account. The accou...
Visual Studio and TFS 2013.4 (Update 4) Release Candidate
It’s time! The Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013.4 and Team Foundation Server 2013.4 is here. I’ve written some posts about the CTPs along the way. But I’ll give a high-level recap of the ALM improvements and talk about a few of the new things showing up in this RC. Work item tracking and Agile project management improvements – This update includes a ton of “smallish” improvements to work item tracking. Things like trend charts, area path search, better embedded url support, performance improvements, full screen support and more. No single thing is likely to blow your socks off but, in t...
Visual Studio Online Update – Oct 14th
Today we began releasing our Sprint 72 build on VS Online. You can read the release notes on the site. As usual, it will take a couple of days for the changes to propagate across all accounts. This sprint was a pretty light sprint. We released the “Test artifacts as work items” changes, previously made available in TFS 2013.3, that enable customization (eventually), auditing, permissioning, querying, etc. We also introduced a small new feature to enabling copying formatted query results to the clipboard. The truth is we spent much of this sprint making progress on some of the f...
Visual Studio Online Update – Sept 23th
This week we are releasing our sprint 71 work on VS Online. You can read more about the changes on the news page. In the past, we’ve struggled with how to “time” the publishing of release notes with the deployment of the software. As we get more and more instances (we have 4 now and will be adding a 5th one soon), it becomes increasingly hard to get any timing right. Starting this sprint we are going to publish the release notes when the upgrade for the first public instance starts. That means the release notes will always be available a little before the features a...
Visual Studio and TFS 2013.4 CTP2 is available
Today we released the second CTP (community technology preview) of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and TFS 2013 Update 4. You can read about the VS changes on the Visual Studio blog. You can download the CTP. Or you can check out the release notes. Also here’s the link to the blog post I wrote on CTP1. TFS improvements in this CTP include: The addition of support for stakeholder licensing is certainly the largest change in this CTP. You can read more about stakeholder licensing. And you can go to the “Access Levels” tab in the TFS web access s...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2013.2 (Update 2)
Today, we released Update 2 of Team Explorer Everywhere. You can read details on Will’s blog post. I’ve been amazed lately how many people don’t know about Team Explorer Everywhere. We’ve had it for a couple of years now. It’s a really nice solution for Java/Eclipse users to use Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online. It includes an Eclipse plugin and a command line both of which run on Windows, Mac or Linux. I know quite a few customers who use it and like it but it continues to surprise me that, more often than not, when I mention using TFS on ...
SAFe with Team Foundation Server
Greg Boer posted a very detailed article on how to use the Scaled Agile Framework with TFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/09/11/scaled-agile-framework-using-tfs-to-support-epics-release-trains-and-multiple-backlogs-whitepaper.aspx Check it out, Brian
Visual Studio in Gartner’s Integrated Quality Suites report
Gartner recently released this year’s update to their Integrated Quality Suites report. This is the next version of the report I blogged about last year. We’ve worked hard over the last year to continue to improve our testing tools offering – for developers, testers and end users. We’ve made our testing experiences available via a web browser, reduced licensing requirements, improved customizability and more. It’s great to see that, once again, Gartner has placed us in the leader quadrant in their 2014 Integrated Quality Suites report after evaluating out integrated ...
Visual Studio Online Update – Sept 4th
We’ve recently started bring some larger Microsoft teams into VS Online. That has been a very enlightening experience. It has particularly highlighted issues with fit and finish for high bandwidth activities like bug triage, performance and scale issues with larger data sets, etc. This sprint (sprint 70), deploying today, we’ve delivered a large number of smallish improvements based on what we’ve learned. I think this pattern will continue for the next couple of sprints as we get everyone “settled in” to using VS Online in heavy daily use. **IMPORTANT** This deploym...
VS & TFS 2013 Update 4 CTP 1 is available
I don’t know about you but it’s kind of hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we are already on the road to delivering Visual Studio 2013.4 and Team Foundation Server 2013.4. Update 3 wasn’t that long ago. Today we are delivering Update 4 CTP (Community Technology Preview) 1. As always, there will be a couple of CTPs – roughly 3 weeks apart, then a release candidate and a final release. So, the final release of Update 4 is still a ways off – Oct/Nov timeframe, but if you are interested in seeing it develop, the CTPs give you a good way to follow it. For TFS functionality, particularly early in the...
How to purchase VS Online
Brian Keller interviewed James Rice (he's on our business team) for Channel 9 about how to purchase Visual Studio Online. This may clear up any uncertainty you have. https://aka.ms/HowToBuyVSO Brian
Stakeholder license is live
About 6 weeks ago, I announced a plan to make some licensing changes to VS Online and Team Foundation Server that would make it easier for more people to participate in the development process. A few weeks ago, we did part 1 by enabling Test Hub access for VS Online Advanced licenses. Today we have completed step 2 by enabling the new Stakeholder license allowing an unlimited # of people in each account significant access to the work item tracking and Agile planning capabilities, at no charge. You can read my news announcement here: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-aug-27-vso. The fin...
Sending email to a Team Room
Here's a very cool way to use our new VS Online extensibility (that will be available in TFS V.Next) to enable sending an email to a Team Room. Our new REST, OAuth and Service Hooks support can be used in countless creative ways. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/slange/archive/2014/08/26/send-email-to-a-team-room-with-vso-service-hooks-and-zapier.aspx Brian
Retrospective on the Aug 14th VS Online outage
We had a pretty serious outage last Thursday all told it was a little over 5 hours. The symptoms were that performance was so bad that the service was basically unavailable for most people (though there was some intermittent access as various mitigation steps were taken). It started around 14:00 UTC and ended a little before 19:30 UTC. This duration and severity makes this one of the worst incidents we’ve ever had on VS Online. We feel terrible about it and continue to be committed to doing everything we can to prevent outages. I’m sorry for the problems it caused. The te...
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
Well, today was my turn to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This morning I was tagged by both Adam Cogan and Scott Guthrie. Tempting as it is though, I’m not doing it twice I don’t know if it’s typical, but Adam challenged me to complete the task within 24 hours. I spent today thinking about how I would get home early enough, how I would orchestrate it and where I would get the ice. I decided to do it on the farm (notice the cows behind me) and to have my kids help me. When I first told them that I needed their help, they moaned in exasperation at having to “help dad again”. When I told them, they wou...
Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 18th
Yesterday I rolled out the release notes for our sprint 69 deployment. Check out the updates! P.S. the outage we had last Thursday was *not* caused by the rollout of updates (or, at best only tangentially so). I’m hoping to get the outage retrospective written up tomorrow. Brian
Visual Studio “14” CTP 3 available
Today we released CTP of our next major Visual Studio release. You can look in the release notes to see what is in it. You can also read about the highlights on John’s post. There’s no startling new improvements in this CTP but lots of nice, smaller, things. Just a reminder, we aren’t shipping CTP previews of TFS “14” at this point. Visual Studio Online is still your best way to check out the latest TFS improvements. Please submit bugs through Connect, suggestions on UserVoice and quick thoughts via Send-a-Smile in the Visual Studio IDE. Brian
VS Online outage last week
Let me start by apologizing for the pretty horrific outage we had last week. I’ve been silent on it because I was on a “last family vacation” in Europe before my oldest son goes off to college. Buck Hodges and others have been working hard on it. I’ve been reading up on everything that happened and everything that’s been done. I need to spend some time talking with the team but I expect to publish a lengthy retrospective in the next few days. Stay tuned for more. At this point, I think enough has been done that we won’t see a recurrence of the issu...
VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) released
Today we released the final version of Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 and Team Foundation Server Update 3. You can get the update using the link below. Note that the link includes both the Visual Studio & TFS downloads (among other things) if you expand the Details section on the page. Download Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 See the full list of new features in the Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 RTM release notes and bug fixes in the Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 KB article. You can also watch a video about the release. I’ve blogged about the features before but I’ll reiterate that some of ...
A white frog?
I was out doing chores on my farm yesterday morning and ran across something surprising (to me, at least). By the pig pen, we have an electric fence charger and it is covered by buckets. For some reason I don’t understand (my wife did it), there are two buckets – one nested inside the other. Yesterday, I removed the top bucket and inside it, I found a frog. It took me a minute to recognize it as a frog because it was so white it didn’t look much like a frog. I know frogs can change colors to match their surroundings but white? I’ve seen documentaries of incredible color changing animals but those are exot...
Explanation of July 18th outage
Sorry it took me a week and a half to get to this. We had the most significant VS Online outage we’ve had in a while on Friday July 18th. The entire service was unavailable for about 90 minutes. Fortunately it happened during non-peak hours so the number of affected customers was fewer than it might have been but I know that’s small consolation to those who were affected. My main goal from any outage that we have is to learn from it. With that learning, I want to make our service better and also share it so, maybe, other people can avoid similar errors. What happened? The root cause ...
The rest of the story (about sand)
A month ago I wrote about our newly enabled capability to measure quality of service on a customer by customer basis. In that post I mentioned that we had actually identified a customer experiencing issues before they even contacted us about them and had started working with them to understand the issues. Well, the rest of that story… We’ve identified the underlying issue. The customer had an unusually large number of Team Projects in their account and some of our code paths were not scaling well, resulting in slower than expected response times. We have debugged it, coded a f...
Visual Studio Online Update – July 21
Today we began deployment of our sprint 68 work. There’s a bunch of really good stuff there. I say “begun” because deployment is a multi day event now as we roll it out across instances. Everyone should have the updates by tomorrow (Tue) afternoon. You can read the release notes to get details. Licensing You’ll see that one part of the licensing changes I described a couple of weeks ago are now live – addition of Test Hub access to the Visual Studio Online Advanced license. The remaining stakeholder licensing changes are still tracking to go live in mid-August. Stay tuned for more. Azure Active Directory...
Upcoming VS Online Licensing Changes
Through the fall and spring, we transitioned VS Online from Preview to General Availability. That process included changes to branding, the SLA, the announcement of pricing, the end of the early adopter program and more. We’ve been working closely with customers to understand where the friction is and what we can do to make adopting VS Online as easy as possible. This is a continuing process and includes discussions about product functionality, compliance and privacy, pricing and licensing, etc. This is a journey and we’ll keep taking feedback and adjusting. Today I want to tal...
Visual Studio “14” CTP 2 Available
I’m not going to make too big a deal about this because there’s going to be tons of them between now and when VS “14” ships. But we shipped another CTP today and you can learn more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/07/08/visual-studio-14-ctp-2-available.aspx We’re continuing the practice of making Azure VM templates available to make it really easy to try out the CTPs. We are starting to show some nice new features that are worth learning about. I think the lightbulb feature is promising, for instance. For reasons I explained in my last post...
TFS Adoption at Microsoft – July 2014
Years ago, I used to do monthly updates on TFS adoption at Microsoft. Eventually, the numbers got so astronomical that it just seemed silly so I stopped doing them. It’s been long enough and there’s some changes happening that I figured it was worth updating you all on where we are. First of all, adoption has continued to grow steadily year over year. We’ve continued to onboard more teams and to deepen the feature set teams are using. Any major change in the ALM solution of an organization of our size and complexity is journey. Let’s start with some stats: As of tod...
TFS Upgrade Improvements in TFS 2013.3
I’ve talked about this before but something happened today that got me thinking about it again. One of the necessary components of the rapid release cycle we are on for VS and TFS is an easy and seamless upgrade process. All through the 2012 Update cycle (.1, .2, .3) we worked on making the TFS Upgrade process easier and more reliable – mostly focusing on the upgrade leaving your server configuration exactly how it was. What caught my eye today was a mail from a customer titled: RE: [ TFS2013 ] Feedback - Upgrade to 2013.2 RC does not keep IIS settings required for Kerberos It was a respon...
VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) RC
Today we are releasing Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3. You’ll find a complete list of download links in the release notes. This is a “go-live” release and is expected to be the last preview before Update 3 is released. It will be supported in production, can be used to upgrade production environments and will support upgrades to the final version when it is available. We expect the final release to be within the next month or two. There is quite a lot of stuff in VS 2013 Update 3. You can read about a lot of the detail on the Visual Studio blog or in the rele...
Visual Studio Online Update – July 1
This week we are deploying our sprint 67 updates. We've started on a set of small changes to the Agile Project Management experience and you'll see the first of them in this sprint's release notes: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-07-01-vso. Of course, we continue moving forward in other areas as well but I hope these will improve your experience. Busy week for me catching up from my week at the beach last week so I'm going to keep this post short and sweet :) Brian
Are customers a bag of sand?
I sometimes use an analogy to a bag of sand. I use it to refer to treating something in the aggregate. Each grain of sand can be inspected for mineral content, density, porosity, size, color, etc. but usually we just talk about how much of it there is. In software people sometimes use a similar technique to deal with customers, resources (oh, I mean people ), schedules, etc. Treating things in the aggregate is sometimes necessary but never forget what you are losing in doing so. Today I am excited. Maybe sometimes I’m excited by small things, but, none-the-less, I am excited. Some months ago, I wrote a p...
The effect of Updates
There was a question on one of our internal aliases today about version to version improvements in our test capabilities. One of the program managers in that area wrote a response that really caught my eye. Primarily because it seems like an awesome demonstration of the effectiveness of our “Updates” model. It’s a pretty cool, constant stream of value. Below is an excerpt from his mail that includes links to information on each of the new capabilities that have been released.VS 2012 (Microsoft Test Manager) - RTM: VS 2012 VS Update 1: ...
Use of SQL 2014 with TFS 2013
We’ve certified TFS 2013 (and its subsequent updates) to work with SQL 2014. However, there’s a hitch. Because TFS 2013 shipped before SQL, the license than grants the right to use it with SQL Server only allows SQL Server 2012. Starting July 1st, we will be adding SQL Server 2014 to the list of license grants for TFS 2013. That won’t, apply to earlier versions of TFS though – we haven’t even tested those with SQL 2014. Anyway, hopefully this will make your life a little easier if you want to use SQL 2014. Of course, you can keep using SQL 2012 if you li...
Visual Studio Online Update – June 10
It’s time for our sprint 66 deployment already! Over the next couple of days the update will be rolling out across accounts. The big news in this update is Pull Requests for Git repos. Pull requests are a workflow often used with Git whereby a developer makes some changes in a private branch. They then submit a “pull request” with is essentially a request for changes checked into that branch to be merged into another branch by the “owner” (or a committer in Git speak) of the target branch. That workflow enables a code review experience with back and forth discussions of the changes, refinements if the change...
VS/TFS 2013.3 CTP 2 is now available
Today we released the second preview (CTP) of VS/TFS 2013 Update 3. You can download it here. That I know of, there’s not much in the way of new features over and above what I listed in CTP1. The changes are mostly bugs fixed and features refined. I’ll remind you that CTPs are not “go live” and are only provided for “tire kicking”. I believe our next CTP is going to be “go live”, I’ll let you know for sure when it releases. Brian
Team Foundation Server on Azure IaaS Guidance
Over the last year, I’ve run across numerous customers who are looking for cloud benefits but aren’t ready to go to VS Online – for any number of reasons. I asked the Ranger team to put together some guidance on helping people make this decision and then best practices should the decision be to go with TFS on Azure VMs. They just released a preview of the guidance. It looks pretty thorough to me. You can check it out on Willy’s blog post. Feedback welcome as always, Brian
Visual Studio “14” CTP available as an Azure VM
This is so cool. Yesterday we uploaded the VS 14 CTP we released the other day as a VM in the Azure VM gallery. In the time that it took me to drink my morning cup of hot chocolate (I don’t drink coffee), I was able to spin up the VM, start up VS, connect to my VSO account (roaming settings made that even easier), sync my project locally and build my app. Very cool! Hopefully we can start doing this with every pre-release to make it easier than every to check out the new stuff with no risk and little time investment. Brian
The first Visual Studio “14” CTP
Today we released the first Visual Studio “V.Next” Community Technology Preview. You can read more about it on Soma’s blog post. Don’t confuse this with my announcement of the VS 2013 Update 3 CTP that I announced 4 days ago. We are doing development on the next major version of Visual Studio in parallel with Updates to Visual Studio 2013. You can expect to see continued Update and V.Next releases in the next several months. For the TFS community, I want to explain that we did NOT ship a CTP of Team Foundation Server V.Next at this time. Because we can deliver...
Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3 CTP1 (VS 2013.3.1 if you wish)
Better late than never, I guess. Sorry for being so late blogging about this; it’s been a crazy week. About a week ago we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 – Community Technology Preview 1. That's a mouthful. Just a bit of orientation. This is a VERY early preview of Update 3 – heck, we just shipped Update 2 at TechEd about 2 weeks ago. It is not intended for use in production environments. I’m not expecting everyone to run out an install it but, if you are really interested in what’s in it, it’s a good opportunity to track the progress. We will likely be shipping a few CTPs before...
Wookiki – A Windows store app for keeping an eye on builds on VS Online
Check out Wookiki… It’s a Windows 8.1 store app for keeping up to date on build statuses on Visual Studio Online – it has push notifications, live tiles and more. A previous version had been built with the OData solution for TFS that Brian Keller put together a couple of years ago. Now it’s been ported to work with the new Open APIs that we announced earlier this month. Here’s a short video of the previous version if you want to see what it does. Brian
Real time collaboration with VS Anywhere
The VS Anywhere guys have been continuing to improve their real time developer collaboration capabilities by adding a web experience along side their VS add-in. They’ve also taken advantage of our new VS Online Open APIs to do so cool VS Online integration. They’ll be doing a web cast on it in a couple of weeks and I encourage you to check it out. Session title Interactive Code Reviews with Visual Studio Online and VS Anywhere · Date: Thursday, June 12th, 10:00am PST · Registration link: https://aka.ms/VIS44PALReg · Description: When a software devel...
Visual Studio Online Update – May 20th
This week we are deploying our sprint 65 work. You can read the release notes here: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2014-may-20-vso The really big news is that we’ve completed the next step in the journey to fully supporting Active Directory integration through Azure Active Directory. You can now create a new VS Online account through any of the paths we offer and connect the new account to Azure Active Directory in the process. The news post has a bunch more detail, tutorials, etc. This has been one of the top service requests for a while now. In fact, there are two highly voted Uservoic...
Useful stuff on the VS Online Open APIs
I’m just sharing interesting stuff I run across that relates to the new open apis for VS Online that we announced. Here’s a blog post someone wrote on configuring and using UserVoice with VS Online: http://roadtoalm.com/2014/05/15/integrate-uservoice-with-visual-studio-online-using-servicehooks/ Clemens, one of our MVPs, wrote a post about a tool his Sogeti team wrote to give visibility into resources his team is consuming. It includes both Azure resources (like running VMs) and VS Online resources (like cloud builds): http://www.clemensreijnen.nl/post/2014/05/12/Integrate-Azure-Visual-Studio-On...
Tasktop: Another tool in your toolbox for integrating VSOnline/TFS
For many years now Tasktop has been bridging the divide among various systems for tracking work/tasks. This week they announced some new support for Visual Studio Online along with our new open API announcements. Check out this blog post they wrote on what they can do: http://tasktop.com/blog/news/tasktop-sync-integrates-visual-studio-online-with-popular-devops-tools Brian
Migrating On Premises TFS to VS Online
One of the questions I’ve frequently gotten from customers considering Visual Studio Online is “How do I migrate my on-premises TFS data to VS Online?” Until now that’s been a tough one to answer. In general you’ve had to cobble together a solution by checking in the latest version of your source code, maybe using Excel to ferry across the latest version of most of your work item fields, etc. In short, I’ve generally told people – Use VS Online for new projects. The one exception is that, because Git is a distributed version control system, you can add a...
Zendesk integration with VS Online
Yesterday, I announced a new set of open APIs for VS Online and a bunch of integrations that have already been built. One of them was support for Zendesk. Here’s a very detailed blog post on how to install/configure it: http://www.bfcamara.com/post/85562983333/vso-zendesk-integration Brian
Application Insights extension for Visual Studio Update – May 12
Today we shipped an update (version 1.3) of our plugin for Visual Studio 2013 that makes working with Application Insights from Visual Studio really easy. Improvements include: If you have any of the Preview releases, you can get the update several ways, including: If you don’t already have the tools, you can download the latest version here: As always, let us know what you think. Brian
VS 2013 Update 2 and other TechEd news
Today at TechEd in Houston, we announced the final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. Remember that Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 released about a month ago. You can get the Visual Studio update from the VS updates service in the IDE or look in the “Additional software and updates” section in the VS download page. We also had a ton of other “preview” announcements, including: I encourage you to check out Soma’s blog for more info on the first four and my post for more on the last one. Brian
A new API for Visual Studio Online
The “big” news that I announced at TechEd this week was a new API for accessing Visual Studio Online (and, in a future release, Team Foundation Server). This new API is based on REST, OAUTH, Json and Service Hooks – all standard web technologies broadly supported in the industry. The API is still currently in preview while we take feedback and refine it. The reason for the new API is we wanted to make it dramatically easier to integrate VS Online with other web based tools and to access VS Online from any mobile device – whether they are 3rd party commercial tools or custom ones you are building. Because we...
MSDN Magazine article on Application Insights
Chuck Sterling did a nice article on using Application Insights in the latest MSDN Magazine issue: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn683794.aspx Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – May 1st
This week, we are deploying our sprint 64 work. You’ll notice that there’s no update on the release notes page. We decided to skip the release notes because there wasn’t really anything new to tell you about. Why? A couple of reasons – we released a bunch of stuff at Build less than a month ago, we have a bunch of work piled up for TechEd week after next and we’ve been working on a bunch of infrastructure work. In fact, if you read the paragraph above carefully, you’ll notice that I said “This week, we are deploying our sprint 64 work”. ...
How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes
Someone forwarded me a link to a blog post that put a smile on my face today. I enjoyed reading how VS Online was such a natural journey for this person. I’d like to think Azure would be a great choice for hosting the app, but I’ll be happy that VSO is a satisfying starting point. Read it yourself… http://theagilecoder.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/how-visual-studio-online-won-me-over-in-under-90-minutes/ Brian
Creating installers with Visual Studio
Some years ago we discontinued support for creating installer projects in Visual Studio and directed people to InstallShield for that functionality. There were a number of reasons for that decision that I won’t detail here. However, there was vocal feedback from many of our users that they were very unhappy with that decision. I’m happy to tell you that yesterday, we released a preview of a new extension that will enable creating installers from VS 2013. I expect this extension will evolve and ultimately be included in a future version of VS. You can read more about it and find...
Is Microsoft abandoning TFVC in favor of Git?
No. This is an example of the power of social media. I had planned to ignore it but I’ve had enough requests for “official confirmation” that I guess I have to say something :). Last week someone tweeted “Microsoft phasing out the TFS version control repository and moving to Git. Unofficially confirmed at a TFS presentation” It caught on and created a minor retweet storm. It’s simply not accurate. I’ve been told it was the result of a misunderstanding generated in a hallway conversation between one of our MVPs and a customer at a presentation on TFS. Mis...
Visual Studio Online Update – Apr 8th
You probably didn’t notice that we did our sprint 63 deployment last week. I didn’t blog about it because there wasn’t much to say. We announced a whole bunch of new stuff at Build the week before and there wasn’t much new in sprint 63 beyond consolidating on the Build feature set and preparing for our next event – TechEd in early May. I suspect next sprint’s deployment will also be light as it’s the last deployment before TechEd and most of the work will be preparing for those announcements. I hope to see you at TechEd and, if not, I’ll see ...
New Azure Portal Overview
Brian Keller did a very nice blog post on how you can use the new Azure portal to create a super cool devops dashboard: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2014/04/10/building-your-dream-devops-dashboard-with-the-new-azure-preview-portal.aspxBrian
Visual Studio Online Integration in the Azure portal
Today, at Build, we unveiled a new Azure Portal experience we are building. I want to give you some insights into the work that VS Online team is doing to help with it. I’m not on the Azure team and am no expert on how they’d like to describe to the world, so please take any comments I make here about the new Azure portal as my perspective on it and not necessarily an official one. Bill Staples first presented to me almost a year ago an idea of creating a new portal experience for Azure designed to be an optimal experience for DevOps. It would provide everything a DevOps team needs to do modern cloud based ...
Visual Studio Online “General Availability”
Today is a monumental day for VS Online. It’s the culmination of a long journey from a glimmer of an idea to prototype, private preview, limited preview, public preview, “go-live” and now, finally General Availability. VS Online is ready and open for business. I’ve written a fair amount about the transition in the service release notes getting posted today so I don’t want to repeat all of that. Read them and if you have questions, please feel free to ask. I want to take a few minutes to reflect on something else. It’s been really amazing to watch the gro...
Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server Release Notes
For well over a year now, we’ve been posting release notes for Visual Studio Online roughly every 3 weeks describing the enhancements we deploy each sprint. In our last redesign of the visualstudio.com site, we added a similar news feed for the on-premises products but haven’t updated it very often or provided a ton of detail. Starting with VS 2013 Update 2, we are going to try out publishing VS & TFS release notes on that news feed, providing you one place to go to keep up with the latest capabilities both in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online. Check out the VS 2013 Update 2 relea...
TFS 2013.2 (Update 2) Released
And VS 2013.2 RC released… OK, this is weird, I admit, so I’ll explain. Today we officially released the final version of TFS 2013 Update 2 and we released a Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. It’s weird that we RTMed TFS Update to but only RCed VS Update 2. We generally work hard to RTM them at the same time. This time we couldn’t. The reason had to do with some hard dates with regard to VS Online and on-premises TFS compatibility with it. If you read my blog, then you likely know that we are approaching the end of the Early Adopter program and transition to standard commercial terms. ...
Visual Studio Online Update – Mar 18th
Wow, this post is late. It’s been a pretty tough month for me personally. Probably the highlight was an ice storm that hit central North Carolina and crushed us. My house was without power for 4 days. The whole area looked like a war zone. There were trees down everywhere. Roads were impassable. It took me 2 days just to clear my driveway so we could get cars in and out. I took off an entire week plus to work on clean up. I’ve logged more hours with a chainsaw in the past month than, I think, most people do in a lifetime. Even now, I&r...
VS/TFS 2013.2 CTP 2 available
Last week we released the next CTP for VS 2013.2 and TFS 2013.2 (aka Update 2). Unfortunately, I was unable to find the time to blog about it because I was in Europe speaking at a conference and visiting customers. So, I’m correcting the error now For TFS, at least, this is a “go-live” release, meaning you can get support and we will enable upgrades from this CTP to the final RTM. In fact this TFS CTP is actually labeled a Release Candidate (RC). It’s a bit weird to have a CTP of VS and an RC of TFS but there are some good reasons for it having to do with the staging of this TFS update, the Gene...
Visual Studio Online Update – Feb 28
Today we finished the deployment for sprint 61. You can read the service news to see what’s new. A lot more new code was deployed than is apparent. We’re gearing up for some big announcements in April and May – expect to hear more in that timeframe. Overall this deployment went reasonably well. Much better than the issues we had late last fall but not quite as well as last sprint. Overall we’re on the right track and I think it will keep getting better and better. And, if you have an early adoption account, you should see that the extension I described last week is now effective. Here’s mine, as of to...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2013 Update 1 available
You can download Team Explorer Everywhere 2013 Update 1 (version 12.0.1) from the Download Center or install the TFS plug-in for Eclipse from directly within your Eclipse IDE (update site URL: http://dl.microsoft.com/eclipse/tfs). Improvements in Update 1 include… Build support for Java projects in Git (and more) The VS Online service blog describes new capabilities we just delivered on the service for building Java projects managed in Git. TEE Update 1 provides the client tools necessary to utilize these new features. Here is a summary of what is now possible on the service when using TEE Update 1: ...
VS Online early adopter program extended to May 7, 2014
***UPDATED*** June 2014 - The early adopter program ended in may and the data export capability described below expired on May 20th. I know this is the second time I am doing this but I believe it is the last. For a refresher for those who don’t remember what the early adopter program is, let me explain. We released the public preview of VS Online in November. At that time, we introduced our business terms, in a preview form – including free access for up to 5 users. You can read more about your options for purchasing VS Online on the Visual Studio Online overview page. We had promised the throngs of peop...
Visual Studio Online Update – Feb 10
Yesterday, we completed our sprint 60 deployment. With it comes two new features: Exporting test plans as HTML documents and a permission to control who can create new work item tags. You can read more about the new features on the service release notes here: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2014-feb-10-vso. As you may know, since ~Oct, we’ve had a run of “bad” deployments that caused unacceptable down time. Due to this we made a number of changes. One was to move our deployments to weekends to reduce the number of people that any unexpected interruptions affect. This was the second deployment to happen o...
Application Insights Visual Studio Add-in preview
In the fall, we introduced a preview of a new VS Online service called “Application Insights” that enables you to instrument your app to ensure that it is available, performing and successful. It combines APM capabilities with usage analysis, aimed at developers to help them create the best possible apps. Yesterday, we released a preview of a new Visual Studio add-in that makes getting started with Application Insights so easy that everyone should do it without even thinking about it. Install the add-in below and get started right away. The add-in will automatically by-pass the invitation code process neces...
VS/TFS 2013.2 (Update 2) CTP Released
Today, fast on the heels of Update 1, we released the first CTP of VS/TFS 2013 Update 2. Although Update 1 was a pretty small release, Update 2 is much larger. This CTP is *not* feature complete and it is *not* “go-live”. It is an opportunity for you to get a peek at some of the things we are planning to release in Update 2. The next CTP (at least of TFS) will be feature complete and “go-live”. In this post, I’m going to talk mostly about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) related improvements coming in Update 2. For the most part, we focused on continuing to “round out” features t...
SCOM Management Pack for TFS 2013 Available
OK, that took much longer than it should have – way too much red tape for this, unfortunately, but the management pack for TFS 2013 is now available. I’ve been getting emails, blog comments and other forms of queries for months asking about it and it’s finally here. You can download it here: TFS 2013 management pack It works with either System Center 2007 or 2012. You can also get the TFS 2012 management pack if you need it instead. Brian
Visual Studio Online Update – Jan 22
Today, our sprint 59 deployment to VS Online went live. There’s several new features and improvements that have been highly requested. All of the significant ones are in the general area of work management. Since we introduced tagging as a lightweight work item “customization” approach, people who’ve tried it have had some consistent requests. One of the top ones was support for querying on tags (we only supported filtering initially). That feature was just rolled out to VSO as part of this deployment – give it a try. Other requests include the ability to work with tags in the VS IDE (rather than just in ...
VS 2013.1 (Update 1) is available
In a previous post on the subject, I explained that this is a pretty small update focused primarily on getting VS 2013 working better with versions of IE prior to IE 10. I also explained that there would be no update to TFS available for Update 1. You can get Update 1 through numerous channels, including the VS Update facility built into Visual Studio (you will get a notification), from MSDN subscriber downloads or from the Microsoft download center here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=301714 Other useful links include: KB Article: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=331377 Release Management upd...
A Pile of Puppies
We have two Great Pyrenees dogs (a male and a female) who guard our goats and keep the coyotes away. When we got them, we decided that we would breed them (they are not related) at least once. Almost 3 weeks ago, Artemis’s litter of puppies was born. It’s been fun to watch. My wife (the vet in the family) happened to walk in just as Artemis was starting so she stayed and watched the whole thing. The puppies started so small – small guinea pigs and have been growing fast. They sleep a lot. And their eyes just started opening about a week ago. Yesterday, I was out in the barn checking on everything and to...
Load Testing Webinar
On Thursday, Jan 23rd, Chuck Sterling and Manas Maheshwari will be presenting a Webinar on using VS Ultimate along with VS Online to get started with load testing quickly and easily. You can register to attend here. I honestly can’t imagine how anyone could consider shipping any web site or service that’s part of some important business function without incorporating load testing into their development regimen. Load testing helps you uncover bugs, deadlocks and race conditions that only happen under load, helps you find performance and scale bottle necks that drag the app down in peak hour...
ALM Days 2014 in Dusseldorf
Sam Guckenheimer and I will be traveling to Germany next month to participate in the German ALM Days event Feb 24 – 26. We’ll be talking a lot about engineering on a cloud cadence among other things. If you are interested/able, we’d love to see you there. Of course, I think, all of the conference, except my part, will be in German . Brian
What are “Off-times”?
I got called out in email, I think reasonably appropriately, for using the term “off-times” when referring to choosing a better time to do our sprintly upgrades. In a 24x7 continuous service world, there really is no such thing as a “good” time to have a problem. I’ve written in the past about the extensive lengths to which we’ve gone to ensure that our full upgrade process is “online” and we pretty much never, ever have to take the whole service down for anything. However, there are bad times and worse times to have a problem. We have designed our current upgrade schedule to make sure we have developers av...
Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 11
Today we did our last deployment of 2013 (Sprint 57). You can read about it here: http://visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2013-dec-11-vso Our next deployment would normally fall very close to the Christmas holiday and to avoid that, we’ll be skipping the Sprint 58 deployment and just rolling all of that work into the Sprint 59 deployment in mid January. We have worked very hard to ensure that this deployment goes more smoothly than the one we did in mid-November. Overall, it went much better but wasn’t incident free. We had a hiccup on Tue during the beginning of the rollout. We kno...
Visual Studio 2013.1 RC is Available
We are doing a pretty quick turn of the crank on VS 2013 Update 1. Originally we were thinking our first Update would take a little longer but for a variety of reasons (most prominently the feedback about VS supporting versions of IE before IE 10), we decided to do a quick initial Update focused on just some key bug fixes. Our first significant “feature Update” is still planned for the first half of 2014. You can download the RC here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41204 You can read the KB article (including the list of fixes) here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb...
Load Testing VSOnline/TFS
Ed Glas, Bill Barnett and Jiange Sun published a detailed write up of their experiences load testing VSOnline/TFS. It’s a good read because they go into a lot of the reasons for the things they do and also talk about things they’ve tried that didn’t work. They’ve now moved almost all of their load testing to the VS Online load testing service and had great results with it. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/edglas/archive/2013/11/27/load-testing-visual-studio-online.aspx Check it out, Brian
Another silly post about clothes
And an embarrassing moment. I’ve gotten some teasing about wearing a tie at the French Visual Studio 2013 launch event in Paris this week. There are some pictures of me floating around online. It’s certainly a rare occurrence. I don’t wear a tie more than a couple of times a year. I brought it on this trip “just in case”, expecting I wouldn’t actually wear it. But… I felt pretty bad about the night before so I decided to err on the side of formality for the event. Here’s the story… Sunday was, in many ways, a typical day on the ...
Visual Studio 2013 Demo VM available
Brian Keller has released the RTM version of his incredibly useful demo VM. He loads just about everything you could want to demo onto it and makes it easy to see how anything in VS or TFS works. Read more: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2013/08/02/visual-studio-2013-application-lifecycle-management-virtual-machine-and-hands-on-labs-demo-scripts.aspx Brian
Visual Studio Surveys
We are running a couple of surveys on Visual Studio to collect feedback for our next release cycle. We’d appreciate any feedback you have. Here are the links to the surveys on the VS blog. Thanks, Brian
A Rough Patch
Either I’m going to get increasingly good at apologizing to fewer and fewer people or we’re going to get better at this. I vote for the later. We’ve had some issues with the service over the past week and a half. I feel terrible about it and I can’t apologize enough. It’s the biggest incident we’ve had since the instability created by our service refactoring in the March/April timeframe. I know it’s not much consolation but I can assure you that we have taken the issue very seriously and there are a fair number of people on my team who haven’t gotten much sleep recently. The incident started the morning...
How much data can you put on VSOnline?
I don’t get asked that question too often but I do occasionally and, as the service matures, I know I’ll get asked it more and more so it’s been on my mind. I was looking at some data yesterday about some of our largest tenants. No, I wasn’t looking at any of their IP (I can’t) but I was looking at some meta-data to understand usage patterns so we can plan ahead to make sure the service provides a good experience as tenants grow. So far, no customer has hit any limit on how much they can store in VSOnline but there are limits and I keep wondering how to help people unders...
Application Insights going fast
Overall, tire kicking on Application Insights is going well and the invitation codes continue to get used up pretty quickly. We’ve now got many hundreds of accounts enabled so I’m probably going to slow down a bit on handing out invitation codes. But… Here’s another one for another opportunity: VSInsights258441337 Brian
SmartOffice4TFS
A couple of weeks ago one of our great partners, eDev Technologies (makers of InteGREAT – an excellent formal requirements management tool for TFS), released a new set of tools called SmartOffice4TFS. Whereas InteGREAT is a pretty comprehensive requirements suite, SmartOffice4TFS is intended for teams with a less formal process but who still need to be able to manage requirements as documents. SmartOffice4TFS helps bridge the gap between the work that the development team is managing in TFS and stakeholders/customers/vendors/etc. that need a document. To make SmartOffice4TFS even more attractive, eDev Techno...
Another Application Insights invitation code
Well, the last one was exhausted in a few hours. It’s great to see there are plenty of people who want to take an early peek. Here’s another one to unblock the next group of people… VSInsights3413009183 Brian
Application Insights invitation
In the launch keynote on Wed, I announced, and Nicole demoed a new service on VS Online called Application Insights. I also announced that it is in “limited preview” – meaning it’s an invitation only service for now. It’s early and we want to grow it slowly so that we can incorporate feedback early, getting fresh eyes along the way. The most dependable way to get an invite is to create a VS Online account, then click on the Try Application Insights tile and request an invitation code by clicking on “Add me to waiting list”… We’ll try to get invite codes out at a reasonable pace but it’s just going...
Launching Visual Studio 2013
Today, I am in New York at the launch of Visual Studio 2013 speaking with a local audience and broadcasting around the world. In many ways it’s a celebration of the blood, sweat and tears we put into VS 2013. At the same time, it’s a bit anti-climactic because VS 2013 has been in preview for months and released for weeks. For me, there’s nothing really new to say about it because hundreds of thousands of people have it and are using it daily. So the fun part is talking about all of the stuff that we’ve been working on that isn’t part of VS 2013 – and there’s a ton of it. The Cloud First, we all know the clo...
Listen to your service – it is talking to you
We had a nasty enough service incident on Friday that I can’t let it pass without commenting on it. If you follow my blog or the service, then you know we were doing a deployment on Friday. The natural assumption, both inside and outside Microsoft, was that it was caused by the deployment. It wasn’t, but more on that in a minute. We received notable Twitter traffic, blog comments and emails both about this incident and the pattern of incidents. I’m going to tackle both topics (at least lightly) here. First, people are justified to be upset about Friday’s incident. The service was mostly down for about 3 ...
Team Foundation Service Update – Nov 8
Because of the big launch we’re doing next week, we updated TFService with the sprint 56 deployment a little early. We deployed a couple of nice improvements today – making our charting feature easier to share and improving our load testing service. You can read more about the changes in the release notes. Next week is going to be a big week. I’ll be in New York participating in our VS/TFS 2013 launch. As part of that, I’ll be making a bunch of new announcements and enabling a new set of features on the service. You can participate online at http://events.visu...
TFS Git support for Continuous Delivery to Azure Web Sites and Services
A little over a year ago we unveiled a continuous delivery feature for TFS –> Azure, allowing you to configure the TFS build pipeline to automatically deploy to running Azure applications. In the intervening time, we added Git support to TFS but getting Git integrated into all of our scenarios is a journey. This week we released the next small step on that journey: TFS Git –> Azure continuous delivery using Team Foundation Service. Scott wrote up a nice overview of the scenario on his blog so, rather than replicate it, I’ll just refer you there. It starts about half way d...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2013 is Available
Among the deluge of Visual Studio 2013 releases in October, we shipped the 2013 release of Team Explorer Everywhere – updating the experience for team members working in Eclipse and/or on non-Windows environments. Team Explorer Everywhere includes an Eclipse plug-in, a cross-platform command line client, and a Java SDK for building custom tools that access TFS. In addition to a good number of bug fixes, the 2013 release significantly improves the Team Explorer experience and adds new capabilities to both the Team Foundation Version Control and Git version control experiences. You can download Team Explorer...
Visual Studio 2012 tools for Git RTM
We released the first drop of our Visual Studio tools for Git about a year ago as a plugin for VS 2012. Our ultimate goal was to release them as part of VS 2013 RTM (and we did). At the same time, we wanted to iterate quickly on VS 2012 because we could get a lot more feedback and because there’s always an adoption curve for a new VS release and supporting 2012 allows us to deliver for more customers. A couple of days ago, we released the “final” build of the Git tooling for VS 2012. You can get the latest build on the Visual Studio Gallery: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.micr...
Team Rooms in Visual Studio
In TFS 2013, we introduced a new feature called “Team Rooms” that keep a record of things that happen in your team – checkins, work item updates, build failures, code reviews, etc. And you can have conversations about the activity directly in the team room. This keeps a durable record of what’s happening in the team and makes it easy for people to catch up if they’ve been out or to ask a question about something. In 2013, Team Rooms only appear in the TFS web UI. From the day we previewed it, we started getting questions about enabling team rooms in Visual Studio. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to do t...
Team Foundation Service Update – Oct 21
If you check out the news post yesterday, you’ll see that the big change in this sprint’s deployment was to the project and account home pages. Quite honestly the account home page was mostly useless and not very visually appealing. One of the big things we focused on with these updates was improving the getting started experience. One change we made was a new “Create your first project” panel on the account home page (where you land immediately after creating an account) to try to make it crystal clear what the next step to do anything useful is. After you’ve created a project, the create your fist pro...
Visual Studio 2013 RTM Available
In the wee hours of the morning this morning, we made the final versions of Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server 2013 and .NET 4.51 available. You can download the trials and related products and MSDN subscribers can download the licensed product from the subscriber portal. You can learn more about what’s new in VS 2013 here. Windows 8.1 is also available today. It’s quick and easy to upgrade from the store so get it soon. On November 13th, we’ll be hosting the Visual Studio 2013 launch. At launch, we’ll be highlighting the breadth and depth of new features an...
Brian Keller’s 5 reasons for Team Foundation Service
Brian created a great little video on why he likes Team Foundation Service. I figured I’d share it… https://vimeo.com/microsoftvisualstudio/review/74686407/42c694668d Brian
How do you measure quality of a service?
Since we started down the path of building an online service a couple of years ago, I have learned a lot. One of the things I’ve learned a lot about is measuring the health of a service. I don’t pretend to have the only solution to the problem so I’m happy to have anyone with a differing opinion chime in. For the purpose of this post, I’m defining the “quality of a service” as the degree to which it is available and responsive. The problem The “traditional way” of tackling this problem is what’s called “synthetic transactions”. In this approach, you create a “test agent” that is going to make some request...
Running a high scale TFS server
Grant Holliday, recently wrote a post on managing TFS servers. Grant has a colorful history. I first met him when he joined the Team Foundation Server MVP program. He was so knowledgeable and helpful that I eventually offered him a position on my team to help us manage internal adoption of TFS (over 45,000 people today). He was a Program Manager for a few years but decided to move back home to Australia. He moved to work in MCS and Premier support, helping customers with ALM practices and TFS. 6 months or so ago, I reached out to Grant again and asked if he’d be willing t...
VS 2012.4 and TFS 2012.4 RC 4 is available
Yesterday we released the final release candidate for Update 4 for VS 2012 and TFS 2012. We’re on track to release the final versions in a month or so. I encourage you to try them out and let us know if there are any last minute issues we need to fix. One thing to keep in mind – If you install TFS 2012.4 RC4, you will have to upgrade to the final TFS 2012.4 release before upgrading to TFS 2013. There is no upgrade path from the Update 4 RC –> 2013 RTM (other than by installing Update 4 RTM first). You can find the full list of fixes in Update 4 in the KB article ref...
Hosting GPLv3 Projects on CodePlex
I’ve been a bit quiet here recently about what’s been going on with CodePlex. I don’t blog every time we do a release otherwise I’d be blogging about the site every week, but we made a change today that I thought was worth mentioning – the GPLv3 license has been added to the list of open source licenses available when creating a new open source project on CodePlex. On CodePlex we’ve always asked you to specify what license you are releasing your source code under before you publish a project. It’s important that whenever you publish code on the internet and you want that code to be freely used by people that...
Team Foundation Service Update – Sept 30
Today we deployed our sprint 54 release. All of the “new” stuff you’ll find in this sprint are refinements of existing features: Check out the release notes for more. This sprint was also really our last TFS 2013 sprint. As you know our release is scheduled for Oct 18th and we are pretty much done. We are still fixing a last few bug fixes that have been reported on the Release Candidate but we are really down to 2 or 3 fixes a week. The majority of the team has shifted focus to Update 1 and you should start to see the velocity pick up in a sprint or two. Thanks, Brian
TFS 2013 Power Tools are available
I apologize for the long wait. But, the TFS 2013 Power Tools are finally available. There’s no new features in this release but there are a fair number of bug fixes and the Power Tools have all been updated to work with VS 2013 and TFS 2013. Also, the version checking has been changed so that these Power Tools will also work with VS 2013 Updates – so you don’t have to wait for a new version of the Power Tools for every VS Update. And, of course, these will work with VS 2013 RTM. We are not planning another Power Tools Update for RTM unless people find significant is...
What is a Product Owner?
Adam Cogan, one of our TFS MVPs, had his company put together a short animated video on the role of the product owner. I thought it was pretty cool so I figured I’d share it. It’s only a few minutes. It’s worth checking out… http://tv.ssw.com/what-is-a-product-owner Brian
Visual Studio 2012.4 RC 3 Available
Every few weeks I’ve been posting about new pre-releases for VS/TFS 2012 Update 4. Yesterday we released another one – RC 3. Important links: Among other things, the KB article contains a list of fixes in Update 4. At this point we are starting to get towards the end of the Update 4 cycle and I’d encourage you to install this build and try it out if you intend to test Update 4 before it ships. I think there might be one more RC build before we are done but there won’t really be time to take much feedback from that final RC and react to it. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio 2013 & TFS 2013 RC is available
Today we released the Release Candidate for the VS 2013 suite of products. This is a “go-live” production worthy version and will likely be the last publicly available build before we RTM. I strongly encourage you to try it out and let us know if you find any blocking issues. The clock is ticking and time is running out for us to make any more changes before the product ships. I’m not going to write about it extensively since there will be so many other people who do. Instead, I’ll mostly provide you links to other places you can read more. Along with...
Team Foundation Service Update – Sept 9
Today we deployed our sprint 53 work to Team Foundation Service and posted the release notes about the changes. When I wrote last sprint’s release notes, I alluded to “one more nice big new feature”. While “big” is in the eye of the beholder, I forgot there are actually 2 “big” new features. Work Item Charting The one I was referring to last sprint was “work item charting”. Reporting has always been a cornerstone of TFS. It enables transparency in the development process. It brings together diverse data about your team’s work and allows you to mine that information for insight. Our current reporting imple...
Expanding Windows Azure MSDN Benefit
We are expanding the Windows Azure MSDN benefit to two additional subscription levels: MSDN Platforms and Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN. MSDN Platforms subscribers will receive a $100 monthly credit, while Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN subscribers will receive a $50 credit per month. Plus, subscribers will receive a $200 USD Windows Azure credit the first month they use their Windows Azure MSDN benefit, The benefit will work the same way as for other MSDN subscription levels: And don’t forget the Aston Martin contest that Scott Guthrie announced at TechEd. MSDN sub...
VS/TFS 2012.4 (Update 4) RC 2 is available
Three weeks ago I announced that there will, in fact, be a fourth update to VS/TFS 2012. It’s going to be a very small update – really not much more than key bug fixes. It’s going to ship sometime toward the end of the year and, between now and then, we will be releasing as series of “Release Candidates”. Normally we’d only have 1 or 2 release candidates for a release but, in this case, we are going to have several. Today, we released the second release candidate. You can download it here. And you can learn more about it, including what bug fixes it includes, in the KB article. I don’t expect a lot of pe...
Team Foundation Service Update – Aug 19
Today we are deploying the results of our Sprint 52 work. I wrote the release notes this sprint and you can check them out on the news page, so I’ll keep that short. Right now, our focus is on wrapping up all our TFS 2013 feature work – incorporating feedback, fixing the last set of bugs, signing of on our release criteria, etc. At the same time, we are starting to plan our post-2013 work. Now is a good time to make sure the UserVoice site is up to date. Over the past year, we’ve been publishing news along with our service deployments. Along the way, one of the thin...
Feedback on the refreshed Microsoft Developer Network
First, thanks for all the feedback, even if some of it is a bit brutal. Sorry for not getting back a bit sooner. I had planned to it Monday but came down with a pretty nasty cold this weekend. However, I’ve been reading all the feedback carefully and digesting it. Let me distill the feedback that I heard in order of strength and I would appreciate you letting me know if I captured it correctly: Let me start by explaining where I am coming from with the new design… It should be no secret that Microsoft is trying to help people learn how to build Windows Store applications....
The Improved Microsoft Developer Network
Today we launched the new Microsoft Developer Network site. As I've mentioned before, my team is responsible for much of the infrastructure and experience for MSDN. I’m very proud of what we have and at the same time see opportunities for improvement. There are two primary use modes for the MSDN web site. The biggest one is search. You want to know what the CommentRegex class is and its properties? Just Bing “CommentRegex” and your top results will be the MSDN pages for the class reference. Lots and lots of people experience MSDN this way. However, there’s another way. You might, for instance, be new...
VS 2012.4 (Update 4) will exist!
Sometime this spring, though for the life of me I can’t find it, I wrote a blog post where I said I thought Update 3 (VS/TFS 2012.3) would be the last update in the VS/TFS 2012 update line. I often say that nothing that is said about the future is more than a guess with varying levels of confidence. So, it turns out that I was wrong. A month or two ago we decided that we were going to need to do a 2012.4 release. The primary motivation is addressing compatibility and migration/round-tripping issues between VS 2012 and VS 2013 and the various platform releases to make adoption of VS 2013 as smooth as possibl...
One year of news!
It wasn’t until after I posted my “news” post this morning and I was perusing our news site that I realized that the first news post was almost exactly 1 year ago on August 6th 2012. These are precisely the kinds of things that sneak up on you unawares. Who could have guessed that we’ve been doing this for a year now? It seems like it was just yesterday. It’s been a busy year. I spent a little time reviewing the news posts from the past year and figured I’d summarize some of the “highlights”. This is, of course, just a sampling. Ev...
Visual Studio 2012 tools for Git (0.9.5.0) are available
Today we released an update to our Visual Studio 2012 tools for Git. We’ve been iterating on these since the first release in February and each release gets more complete, easier to use and better performance. Of course that same tooling (though it’s a bit older release than 0.9.5.0) is included in the VS 2013 preview and more recent version will be included in the VS 2013 RTM. Here’s an excerpt from the release notes on what’s new in this release. Check it out and let us know what you think. Brian
Team Foundation Service Update – July 29
Today we are deploying our sprint 51 build. You will soon be able to read the release notes here. Today’s deployment is what I’d like a lot of deployments to be like – nothing particularly big but a bunch of nice improvements. Probably the biggest thing is the next installment on my promise of an enterprise class Git solution – branch permissions, enabling control over who has the right to create, delete and modify branches on the central repo. Lots of other things to – like the ability to delete a team room, get Git notifications in a team room and lots more....
Kids!
We are gradually working our way into goats. Last year we bought a dairy goat and she had 2 kids. This year we bought 2 meat goats (Kiko breed) and one of them, “Pretty Girl” just had 3 kids. I thought I’d share some pictures. They are very cute. Here’s a picture from soon after they were born. And here’s a picture of my daughter and her friend holding them. While I’m at it, here’s a picture of this year’s pigs. They are still pretty small they’ll get a few times bigger before all is said and done. Just a brief interlude but I figured I share a few pictures of the goings on ...
Visual Studio a leader in software quality suites
Visual Studio has always been a great tool for developers. In 2010, as we continued to expand the breadth of our Application Lifecycle Management suite, we made our first foray into tooling specifically for testers with Visual Studio Test Professional. Thus started a journey to really incorporate testers into the application lifecycle, enabling teams to deliver higher quality software faster. In our 2012 wave of products we expanded our testing offering beyond traditional test case management, manual testing, automation, etc with a new set of tooling aimed at helping Agile teams move their testing pra...
REST API for Team Rooms
I had someone ask about this so I decided to go ahead and post something. Below is the contents of a Word doc that describes our REST API for working with Team Rooms. It should work both on Team Foundation Service and on a public preview of TFS 2013. Please let me know if you have any feedback on the doc. This is a very early preview and we’ll launch it officially later this year. It’s also incomplete but it’s a start. Hopefully it will give you what you need to know to do basic Team Room extensions. Ultimately we’ll follow up with samples and more but r...
Team Foundation Service Update – July 9
Last week we completed sprint 50 and, today, the changes went live on the service. You can read more of the details of what’s new on the service news feed. One of the things I’ve had to get used to with a service is the notion of publishing features that aren’t nearly finished. In all my years of working on software I had developed a notion of what “done enough” was to ship a product. That notion was somewhat based on the development model we used and somewhat based on the deployment model. The result of it was that I have always had a pretty high bar for &ldq...
InRelease Acquisition is complete
At TechEd, in early June, I announced our agreement to acquire InRelease – a release management product built specifically for Team Foundation Server by InCycle Software. Since then, we’ve received tons of requests for more information, demos, etc. Unfortunately, we’ve only been able to point people at InCycle because the acquisition was not final. I’m happy to say that about a week ago we closed the acquisition and InRelease is now a part of Microsoft. That doesn’t mean we can start selling it right away. There are a number of things that have to happen in or...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update available
During the excitement of the releases last week is that we also shipped a new version of Team Explorer Everywhere – our Eclipse and Cross-Platform client for Team Foundation Server. This is officially part of the TFS 2012 wave of products, meaning that it’s equivalent to Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 3 though it’s also fully supported against TFS 2013 Preview, the hosted service and TFS 2010. We had a few important bug fixes and updates that we wanted to get into the “RTM” version of TEE rather than having them in a “Preview” labeled build which was the...
A few more Visual Studio 2013 Preview features
I recently announced the availability of the Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 previews. There are a couple of new features available with this preview that I’d like to talk a bit more about. Cloud Load Testing Now that the Preview is available, you can try out our new cloud load testing experience. We’ve been using it on the TFS team for the past couple of months and have run close to 100 load test runs. We’ve been incredibly happy with how much more friction free the experience is. You’ll need a Team Foundation Service account to use the cloud load testing but you don’t have to use the ac...
Visual Studio 2013 Preview is available
Today at the Build conference, we announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Preview and Team Foundation Server 2013 Preview. You can download them here. You can also read my blog post from Tech Ed for a bunch of info on the new ALM features. You can also check out Soma’s blog for more on what’s in this release. This is a “go-live” preview meaning, if you are comfortable upgrading production systems, we will support you. I do expect there are some bugs but we’ve been using it in our production environment for months and have had a handful of “pre-p...
Visual Studio 2012.3 is released
Today we officially released Visual Studio 2012.3 and Team Foundation Server 2012.3. All in all, these are small releases, mostly containing high priority bug fixes and a few changes to improve the compatibility/interop story with VS 2013. You can read all about it in the KB article or download it here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=290979. Of course you can also just use the Visual Studio Update manager to get the Visual Studio improvements. Thanks, Brian
An update on the forums refresh
As with any significant change, there is a period of “burn in” the tune it. I want to thank everyone who has already provided feedback and ask that you please keep it coming. We’ve already released an update with some improvements for the “easy stuff” and the team has created a backlog for the next sprint to address some of the bigger things. Here’s a list of the things we’ve done to address feedback already in the deployment we did yesterday afternoon: We’ll continue to work on improving it based on the feedback. Thanks for your hel...
Enterprise grade Git
In my Visual Studio 2013 post from TechEd a couple of weeks ago, I made a very innocuous comment about including Git support in our TFS 2013 preview that will ship next week (at the Build conference). I wanted to take a few minutes to expand upon it. We first introduced Git support as a VS 2012 VSIX for Visual Studio and server side support in Team Foundation Service in Feb 2013. Since then, we’ve been updating both regularly – every 3-6 weeks. At the announcement, I also said that Git support would be “included in the next major release”. At the time, I couldn’t sa...
Team Foundation Service Update – June 19
Today we updated the service with our sprint 49 work. You can read the details of the significant improvements on the news blog. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a comparatively small update. We released so much on Jun 3rd for TechEd, there’s just not a lot of new stuff to show :) Two areas worth mentioning are Agile Portfolio Management. We are on a journey and we announced the beginning of it at TechEd. You should expect that every sprint we will improve it. This sprint is no different. Next sprint should have more and on and on for many months into the f...
A refresh of our forums
We’ve just completed and launched a new version of the Microsoft forums. We’ve worked really hard to substantially improve the experience both for people looking for answers and those providing them. We started by making it easier to find what you are looking for. Instead of navigating categories to find those that might be relevant, we’ve started with search as the entry. You can search directly from the root and get results immediately. The categories show up on the right hand side allowing you to filter your results. We’ve also reformatted the page to provide more space for your content and added p...
Excuse me sir, your cow is stuck in the mud
I try to share some of the funnier and stranger stories from my life. Unfortunately, I don’t always remember to share them. I’m working from home today because I’ve got an all day phone call with people in Redmond. As I was sitting and waiting for my meeting to start this morning, the phone rang. It was the camp adjacent to our farm. The voice on the phone informed me that one of my cows was stuck in the mud. Well, it’s been raining a lot (2-3 inches of rain for tropical storm Andrea and more rain again today). Further, I just moved the cows, first thing this morning into another field that has a sizea...
VS 2013 round tripping
In VS 2012, we introduced the notion of “round-tripping”. This meant the ability for VS 2012 to load and save VS 2010 compatible solutions/projects. That was a huge customer ask and I’ve heard a lot of feedback since then that customers rely on it. At TechEd this week, I was asked what the story with 2013 would be. Specifically, with the move to a more rapid cadence, I heard that this feature is more important than ever. In fact, some of the customers I spoke with wanted to make sure that not only could VS 2013 support round tripping with VS 2012 but it could also support...
Visual Studio 2013
Hold on to your seat, this is going to be a long one… Today at TechEd, I announced Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 and many of the Application Lifecycle Management features that they include. Today, we enabled some of those features on Team Foundation Service for you to try out immediately and I announced that a preview of VS 2013 and TFS 2013 will be available at the Build conference later this month. It’s an exciting time now that we can start talking more openly about what’s coming in our next major release. As usual, there’s so much I will only be able to just skim the surface with th...
Team Foundation Service Update – May 28
Sorry for being a little late with this but I’ve been traveling this week and it’s thrown me off. On Tues May 28th, we deployed our Sprint 48 build to Team Foundation Service. It was quite gratifying to see the deployment go incredibly smoothly given that the last few sprints have been a bit rough. I’d like to think we’re “back to normal” and that going forward our sprint deployments will be easy, seamless and quick again. You can read about the new capabilities in this deployment on the Team Foundation Service news article. One update to that news arti...
Visual Studio 2012.3 RC2 available
We are getting close to shipping Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012.3 (Update 3). This week we shipped Release Candidate 2 (RC2). We’re down to fixing just the last few bugs and if you are thinking up upgrading to Update 3, now would be a good time to give it a try and let us know if there are any last minute issues we need to fix. As I’ve mentioned before, this release is primarily just bug fixes but there are quite a few and some pretty valuable ones. You can see a full list by reading the KB article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2835600 You can download Update 3...
Support on Team Foundation Service
Update: Um, egg on face. When I first posted this, it ended up having the email thread with the customer attached. I updated it to remove it as quickly as possible but I sincerely apologize. I got an email from a customer a couple of days ago asking about issues he was having with Team Foundation Service. After looping in our internal support team, he asked if that was a route he could use directly. I took the time to write up some thoughts on support and thought it would be interesting to share them in a post (having been embellished slightly) . Here are the thoughts… Unfortunately, you won’t be abl...
New Windows Dev Center release
Yesterday we launched a new Windows Dev Center. You might ask “Why are you telling us about that, Brian?” Well, the answer is that my team is responsible for MSDN and much of the infrastructure behind it. We partner very closely with the Windows team team produce an awesome Windows Dev Center. Yesterday was the culmination of months of work to really overhaul the dev center and make it serve our customers even better. Here’s a list of some of the key improvements in the dev center… Check it out… Brian
Team Foundation Service Update – May 13
Yesterday, we deployed an update to Team Foundation Service. You can read the release notes to see the improvements. The improvements aren’t major but there’s a few nice things – Some updates to UI styling with a greater use of color, some navigation improvements that include the ability to see the task board for all sprints (rather than just the current), and support for multiple Git repos per Team Project. Less prominent, but we’ve also made a bunch of changes to our authentication code. We’re working to better support people who use multiple Microsoft Accounts (L...
Some thoughts on a comment about VS 2012.3
Yesterday, I got a thoughtful comment from Dean on my post about Update 3. I sat down to write a response this morning and it turned into a but of a novel (in fact, the blog says it’s too long to post as a comment ). So I’ve turned it into a post. Here was Dean’s comment: Brian, I looked at the list of fixes, you weren't kidding when you said small. Are those just the major ones (crashing)? There are a whole lot of things logged on Connect that when added together really stifle productivity (many involving the editor with intellisense, syntax highlighting, etc.). I get nervous at this point in a VS life...
TFS 2012.2 Power Tools update available
Yesterday we released our update to the TFS 2012 Power Tools to work with VS/TFS 2012.2 (Update 2). Yes, I see the irony in announcing this the day after announcing the first “go-live” Update 3 CTP It took us longer than we had hoped to get the Power Tools ready. However, we’ve made a key change to mitigate this issue in the future. Our Power Tools setup has traditionally had a block to prevent it from working with the next version of VS (which is why the Power Tools from Update 1 wouldn’t work with Update 2). This is a bit of a hold-over from before we started doing the regular update...
Visual Studio 2012.3 (Update 3) “go-live” CTP is now available
I know it seems like 2012.2 just released (at least it does to me) but we’re already well into our schedule for 2012.3. Today, we released the updates for both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. This is the first “go-live” release in the 2012.3 line of CTPs – this means that we’ve tested it to the point that we think you can install it in your production environment (we have in ours) and get help with any significant issues you encounter. Our go-live process found 8 or 10 TFS bugs for Update 2. We were able to fix those for the final build and ensure ev...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS 2012.2) ISOs available
I’ve had a healthy discussion with some of you on this post and we’ve received quite a lot of feedback on Soma’s blog and other places. Based on this feedback we’ve produced ISOs for Visual Studio Update 2 and decided that for these "”larger” updates, we’ll continue to do so in the future. You can read more about it on the Visual Studio blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/05/03/announcing-availability-of-isos-for-visual-studio-updates.aspx Brian
Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 2
I missed announcing the availability of Team Explorer Everywhere Update 2. We released the update the first week of April. You can get it either by: Mostly our Update 2 for Team Explorer Everywhere contains bug fixes and small feature improvements. Here’s a list of the improvements you will find… Let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks Brian
Updated TFS 2010 MSSCCI Provider
Last week we released an update to the TFS 2010 MSSCCI provider. The primary motivator for this release was to enable it to work with VS 2005. This now enables you to connect to TFS 2012 using VS 2005, particularly from Windows XP. The support for VS 2005 was the only enhancement to this update of the 2010 MSSCCI provider. Thanks, Brian
Visual Studio Tools for Git Update available
Yesterday, we released a major update to our Visual Studio Tools for Git. While still nowhere near done, we feel like we’ve crossed a significant threshold of completeness and usability. If you’re already using them or have tried them and didn’t feel they were ready, I encourage you to give this update a go. You can install the latest drop here: https://aka.ms/git4vs It will require that you have Visual Studio 2012 Update 2. The most compelling improvements include: Additional improvements are: As I never like talking...
Sprint 45 service issues
If you are a regular user of our Team Foundation Service - particularly during peak times, you've probably noticed that it hasn't been running as seamlessly as usual. Our recent issues started with our sprint 45 deployment that I wrote about here and foreshadowed here. In this post I want to give you some insights to what happened and what we've done about it. The team has been working long and hard since the deployment and I really appreciate the dedication and tenacity. As our service has evolved, we've begun to expand the breadth of the services we are trying to offer. We are also worki...
VS/TFS 2012.2 (Update 2) released today
Today, we released our second update to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012. You can read a fairly detailed post with all the new capabilities on the ALM blog. There’s a ton of new value in the in this update as evidenced by the long list of new features in that post. Roughly speaking, Update 2 is about the same size as Update 1 was (in terms of numbers of new features). Many of the features have been aired before in our CTP posts. But there are a couple of things about the TFS update that I want to highlight. TFS 2010 Build controller/agent compat – We’ve recei...
BUILD 2013 has been announced
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/03/26/announcing-build-2013.aspxBrian
Team Foundation Service Update–Mar 22
Today, we released the results of Sprint 45 on Team Foundation Service. You can check out the release notes to learn more about today’s release. There were 2 basic areas of new capabilities on the service: Git Branch insights and Web based test execution UI. Both are nice improvements in usability and experience. You might notice that we’re releasing this on a Friday and we “always” do our service releases on Mondays. This is an unusual one. Last sprint I mentioned that we are making some big infrastructural changes and that these changes are going to require ...
Are you missing a cow?
Saturday night I was at my son’s lacrosse game with the family. My wife got a phone call. It was a fellow farmer and neighbor, Noah (about 2 miles south of us). His question was “Are you missing a cow?” The answer, of course, was we didn’t know. Even if we had been home, counting ~100 cows turns out to be a lot harder than you’d think – the dang things just won’t stay still. It turns out Noah had seen a stray black cow with no distinctive markings. So I had to leave the lacrosse game to go home and see what was up. By the time I got home it was dark. I stopped by Noah’s house and learned that he had la...
Git extension for VS 2012 Update 2 CTP4
A couple of days ago I announced the availability of VS/TFS 2012.2 CTP4. At that time I mentioned that there would be an update of our Visual Studio Git extensions to work with it. We released the Git extension update last night and you can read more about it in Matt’s and Andy’s blog post. We continue to push forward with additional Git functionality as quickly as we can. The biggest advance in this release is a new merge experience. Check it out and give us feedback.Brian
CTP4 (March) of VS/TFS 2012 Update 2 is available
We are continuing our journey to deliver a final release of Update 2. You can read about the CTP3 we shipped a few weeks ago here. The most notable thing about this CTP is that it is “go-live”. One of our big learnings from shipping Update 1 was that we really do need feedback from real customer deployments before we ship a major update. We provided a “go-live” build to a select set of early adopters in the last CTP and got some great feedback. In that process we found 3 or 4 significant bugs and fixed them for this CTP. We now need a bunch more people t...
Team Foundation Service Update – Mar 4
Sprint 44 is done and has now been deployed to the service. You can read the release notes on the Team Foundation Service Portal to learn more about what’s in it. Maybe the biggest news is that the customizable swim lanes for kanban are live on the service now. Over all though, it was a sprint of just moving the ball forward on many fronts – improve test case execution, version control annotate/blame, scheduled builds for Git, etc. No real big news – just everything a bit better. It’ll probably continue to be that way for a few sprints as we pull together our ...
Bad day
Clearly yesterday was a bad day. Team Foundation Service was mostly down for approximately 9 hours. The underlying issue was an expired SSL certificate in Windows Azure storage. We use HTTPS to access Windows Azure storage, where we store source code files, Git repos, work item attachments and more. The expired certificate prevented access to any of this information, making much of the TFService functionality unavailable. We were watching the issue very closely, were on the support bridge continuously and were investigating options to mitigate the outage. Unfortunately we were not su...
Professional Team Foundation Server 2012
Grant Holliday and friends just put out a new version of their excellent TFS book, now updated for TFS 2012. It’s worth having if you are really trying to understand the ins and outs of TFS. Learn more on Grant’s blog.Brian
Update to VS Git tooling
Yesterday, we posted a small update to the Git tooling for VS. Since we just released it the other day, we don’t have much new yet but we should continue (at least for a while) to update it after each of our 3 week sprints. This update has 3 significant bug fixes: 1) Add support for VS 2012 Express for Windows Desktop 2) Fix a bug that broke Resharper 3) Fix for a problem detecting global config files. If you’ve installed the tool, you should get popup notifications in VS of any updates we publish and, at least for now, updating the extensions is super fast – only a few seconds. That&rsquo...
Lessons 451 & 452 in farming
OK, I made up the numbers. I debated what to call this post. Adventures with a horse? Water: a famer’s nemesis? It’s been a fun couple of days. Sunday night the whole family was out doing chores and my wife and kids were exercising the horses. I finished up the chores and left them to wrap up with the horses – feed them, clean up etc. Yesterday mid-day my wife called me and told me that someone had left the gate to the hay area open and the horses had gone in and eaten the better part of a bag of sheep feed. For those of you who don’t have a lot of horse experience – that’s really bad. My response to...
CTP for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS 2012.2) is available
Read more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/02/11/february-ctp-for-visual-studio-update-2.aspx We’ve just shipped the next Community Technology Preview (CTP) for VS and TFS Update 2. This release is still not a broad go-live release. Learning from our last Update (Update 1 – VS 2012.1), we are enabling go-live earlier. In this CTP, we have identified a small set of “early adopters” who we’ll hand hold through a go-live experience on this CTP. The next CTP we ship will be a broad go-live release. The blog post in the above link has a li...
Team Foundation Service Update – Feb 11
Yes, I know it’s hard to believe it’s time again already. Didn’t we just have all those big announcements – Git support, Test Hub, Work item tags…? Yes. We had last sprint’s deployment on Jan 21, then all the big announcements on Jan 30 and now it’s time for sprint 43! As you can probably guess all of the new features we announced on Jan 30 were deployed on Jan 21 and just hidden behind feature flags – in fact, some of them were deployed a sprint or two earlier than that even. Much of what we unveiled on the 30th was very cool but not really...
Team Foundation Server and IE8
This is one of those posts that I can’t win by writing but I have to anyway. It can’t make anyone happy and will undoubtedly garner me some amount of flame, but here it goes. We’ve been working hard over the past couple of years to improve and expand our web experiences for TFS. In TFS 11, this came through all the nice new Agile planning tools. Most recently you’ve seen this in the substantially improved version control experiences. It’s a trend we are continuing. As we are getting deep into our work on TFS 12, we are looking, as always, at our platform suppo...
Team Foundation Server 2012 and System Center 2012 Operations Manager VM and Hands-on-Lab / Demo Script
Check out Brian Keller’s post.Brian
David Warren – the inventor of the Black Box
I try not to use my blog for too many personal things but I couldn't resist. A good friend of mine, who also happens to be one of our Visual Studio ALM MVPs, sent me an email. He told me about a project his daughter has undertaken to have the world commemorate the life and work of David Warren - the inventor of the flight data recorder, or Black Box. I just finished watching her YouTube video and am amazingly impressed with the work of such a young woman. I added my name to the petition. Regardless of whether you support her campaign, I encourage you to watch her video. She has a bri...
Team Foundation Server on Azure IaaS
I’ve been getting a few questions lately about whether or not we support TFS on Azure IaaS. The truth is that a number of us have set up and used it on IaaS but we have never really formally tested it. My biggest question was performance. We’ve just finished running some performance tests. Here’s the results we got: In this configuration, we were able to achieve results supporting a team of 500 – 1,000 users. This is roughly consistent with the hardware sizing guidelines we give for dedicated hardware. Our results indicate that TFS on Azure IaaS will ca...
Customizable kanban swim lanes
It’s been a crazy week with all of the announcements. Among the demos I did Wednesday was one that hasn’t gotten much coverage yet. The reason is because you can’t put your hands on it but you will be able to in about a month. We introduced a kanban board into Team Foundation Service in August and released it in TFS 2012 Update 1. We identified 4 core features that were necessary for a successful kanban implementation: In true Agile fashion, we were only able to get 3 of the 4 done in the Update 1 timeframe so we shipped what we had to let people start playing with it but we knew we had m...
Today's Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA)
I'll start answering question on today's AMA at about 10:15am PST this morning. It will open about 30 minutes ahead of time to start collecting questions and letting people vote them up/down. ***UPDATE*** The url for the AMA is:https://aka.ms/ama_bharry Hope to see you there. Brian
Hotfixes for TFS 2012 Update 1 (TFS 2012.1)
Thank you for being patient. If you’ve followed my blog, you’ve seen that we’ve struggled a bit with some issues we introduced in our initial Update 1 release. A few weeks ago, we released a patch and quickly pulled it back as we found some people with install issues. Stung with humiliation, we have spent the last few weeks working hard to make sure we had a good patch that would really work for people. We’ve learned a lot from the process – including that our patching infrastructure that we build in TFS 2012 was not as robust as we thought it was. We are rolling all of these learnings into Update 2 and we e...
Git init VS
Today at the ALM Summit I made a bunch of announcements. A couple of them warrant a bit of extra comment Today, I made 2 announcements involving TFS, VS and Git. Resources That’s right, TFS & VS support a full fidelity implementation of Git. Although this comes as kind of an abrupt announcement, it’s been a long time in the making. We started talking about having DVCS support for TFS a year or more ago. I even mentioned at the end of this post over a year ago that DVCS was in our future. After a few months of investigation (in the middle of working on TFS 2...
Announcing Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2)
Today we released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2). It’s exciting to see the next update of VS working it’s way to completion. There’s going to be a ton of cool new capabilities in Update 2. Not all of them are available in this CTP but many are. Below, I’ve described the significant improvement’s that you’ll find in this CTP and I’ve grouped them into 4 categories: This CTP is NOT a “go-live” CTP. It is for evaluation only. We’re trying to learn from Update 1 and get feedback earlier in the cycle. We will be having “go-live” pre-re...
OData for Team Foundation Service
Last week I wrote about accessing TFS using OData and how this makes writing device apps against TFS easier. Friday, we published the OData support on our online service – Team Foundation Service at: https://tfsodata.visualstudio.com. If you go to that url, you’ll find some basic instructions on using it, including links to a video, a sample Windows 8 store app (which I’m trying to get the team to publish in the store), etc. You can also read more about it in Brian Keller’s blog post. Because all projects on Team Foundation Service are currently private, you can onl...
Stand-alone installer for TFS object model
For years we’ve had requests for an easier way to install the Team Foundation Server object model. Since 2005, the only way to install it was to install VS or Team Explorer, both of which included a VS shell, Office extensions and a bunch of stuff that you really didn’t need to do basic programmability against a TFS server. In TFS 2012, we set out to address the long standing request and create a stand-alone installer that would just install the programmability components – making for a faster, smaller and less impactful install. We actually released it along with VS Update 1 back in...
Team Foundation Service Update – Jan 21
I mentioned a couple of sprints ago that we were going to be investing in making the source control experience in the browser shine. We’ve just finished sprint 42 and are deploying it today. The biggest change you’ll notice is a new context menu when exploring changes in source files that allows you to perform a lot more actions to understand the context of the change. You can read more about it here. The last few sprints have been comparatively small to moderate improvements. As I mentioned last sprint, we’re working on some significant changes and we’ve now got on...
Modern Lifecycle on the Cloud OS
Microsoft announced a bunch of new releases today, advancing our Cloud OS vision. You can read more on the overall announcements here but I will focus on some new/improved application lifecycle management scenarios that support our DevOps initiatives. The cloud continues to drive new demands on application development. It enables new ways of conceiving, building and delivering great app experiences. It does this by enabling rapid cycle times from idea –> delivery –> feedback. In order to really realize this virtuous cycle, you need to rethink the way you do development.&n...
Accessing Team Foundation Server with OData
TFS has very nice SDKs for building both .NET & Java applications for it. However, some platforms – particularly some devices don’t support those SDKs. On those platforms, often the easiest way to access a service is with REST or Json. Brian Keller recently blogged about an update to his OData service for Team Foundation Server 2012 that exposes OData end points. He also described a sample Windows Store app built with it. You can read more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2013/01/07/odata-service-for-team-foundation-server-v2.aspx In the coming ...
Skype and the new Team Explorer
As you probably know, we made a pretty significant rev of the Team Explorer in VS 2012. As part of that we did a re-think of the Team Members Power Tool to provide a much nicer collaboration experience than what we could do in VS 2010. The Power Tools Team Collaboration tool supports Lync and Live Messenger but it also has an extensibility model so you can plug in other communication technologies. Nico has now updated the Skype provider on Codeplex to work with the new Team Members Power Tool. Check it out: http://tfscollab.codeplex.com/ Brian
TFS 2012 Update 1 Hotfix
*** Updated Jan 14th 2013 *** Some days you just want to crawl in a corner and cry. We released this patch on Friday to address customer reported issues in Update 1 and over the weekend had a significant bug reported in the patch. It turns out that if you have TFS installed in a non-default location (like another drive), the patch will not install correctly. We've had 3 or 4 reports of this so far but it's enough that we've decided to pull the patch down, fix this issue and republish it. It will take a few days to do that. This patch relies on a set of technolgy we use to produce inc...
TFS 2010 will not support SQL 2012
With every release – of our product or a dependency, we think hard about the test/support matrix. As we developed Team Foundation Server 2012, we decided to support both SQL 2008 R2 and SQL 2012 – due to the close release proximity. TFS 2010, of course was released WAY before SQL 2012 and supported SQL 2008 and SQL 2008 R2. When SQL 2012 was released we, not surprisingly, started getting requests for TFS 2010 to work with it. We thought it would likely “just work” and we just needed to run a test pass on it so we indicated, informally, that we expected to release support ...
Renaming your Team Foundation Service account
We’ve seen a growing cadre of people who created Team Foundation Service accounts and have decided they don’t like the name they chose. So far this has required that you contact our support organization. They would have to delete the account and then you could create a new one with the name you wanted – clearly not a desirable approach. However, in November, of our 132 support cases, 118 of them (about 90%) were to do precisely this. In December, we created a PowerShell script to enable our support team to rename accounts rather than do the delete/recreate path. Today, we have bundled that logic into the...
VS/TFS 2012 Release Candidate expiring
I’m starting to receive mails from a number of people observing that their installs of the 2012 Release Candidate are approaching expiration on Jan 15. That’s just over a week away. I’m being asked if there’s some way to extend the expiration because the customer isn’t ready to upgrade. Unfortunately, there is no way to extend the expiration. The release candidate will cease to function on January 15th. You will need to upgrade to the final release build in order to keep using the product. You can tell if you have a release candidate build by looking at ...
Git-TF 2.0.1 Released
Today we shipped a new binary release of the Git-TF tools. We did a deployment of the Team Foundation Service yesterday and one of the things that changed was the way that we do basic authentication. We are currently doing some work to make talking to TFS easier, this will help people building clients for TFS – especially as we support basic authentication over HTTPS if you have enabled alternative credentials. However, one of the issues with basic authentication when we started doing a bit of testing is that some clients require the basic authentication realm to be set. We didn&rsqu...
Team Foundation Service Update – Jan 7
The results of our sprint 41 were deployed today. You can read the news about them on the release notes. Because of the holidays it was a pretty modest sprint. The biggest end user feature was making the new send work items via email feature work on the backlog as well as on work item queries. We also did some work on our Basic Authentication mechanism to better support a wide variety of clients. Sprint 41 actually ended Dec 24th but, because of the holidays, the deployment of it was delayed until today. However, sprint 42 will end as scheduled and deployments will resume on their normal s...
Bugs in TFS Update 1
I’ve posted here the list of bugs that we’ve found in our TFS 2012 Update 1. We’ve got a hot fix in final testing now. I’ll post a link as soon as it is available and we’ll be updating the Update 1 download pages to reference it. Installing the patch will address all the known issues. The first 4 issues on the list were all a result of the significant services refactoring we did – I wrote a bit about that in my previous post. While we are at it, we are including one fix in the patch that addresses a bug that’s actually in the 2012 release but was discov...
Team Explorer Extensibility
We redesigned the Team Explorer window in TFS 2012. Previously, it was simple tree control with limited flexibility. In 2012, we made it richer page navigation system that enables much more control over data presentation. We’ve also received a bunch of feedback on things people don’t like about the redesign (like the presentation of pending changes). We’ve got some improvements based on that feedback in the works but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. This post is about a sample for how you can extend Team Explorer and take advantage of some of the new rich...
Retrospective on TFS 2012 Update 1
In late November I made a tour of a few cities in Europe, speaking about VS/TFS 2012 and application lifecycle management. One of the talks I gave a couple of times was about how we are managing our new release cadence. We are shipping a service every 3 weeks and a new on premises server/client roughly every 3 months. I talked about how we plan releases, how we manage schedule, quality, etc. In one of the talks, someone asked me something like “How well is the new release process working?” I answered “Ask me again in about a year and I’ll tell you.” ...
Team Explorer Everywhere Update 1
I recently posted about the Team Foundation Server Update 1 release alongside Visual Studio Update 1, but I also wanted to take some time to call out that we also shipped Update 1 of Team Explorer Everywhere on the same day. There has been a version of our Eclipse and cross-platform tooling available to support every version of Team Foundation Server since we launched TFS 2005 and I’m proud to say that the tradition continues to this day. Team Explorer Everywhere Update 1 includes: New Chinese language pack Originally Team Explorer Everywhere shipped in English only but due to popular demand we adde...
Sidekicks is available for TFS 2012
Attrice has now updated their Sidekicks to support TFS 2012. Read more here: http://www.attrice.info/blog/2012/12/06/team-foundation-sidekicks-for-2012-available/Brian
Team Foundation Service Update – Dec 10
Today we deployed our sprint 40 update to the Team Foundation Service. You can read more about it on the release notes. We continued to make progress adding valuable components to the build images. We have two significant issues with our build images at the moment and both will be solved in the same way. First, we don’t have the ability to build Windows 8 store apps. That’s because our build VMs are based on the older Azure VM roles and they don’t support Windows 2012 (you have to use Windows 8 or Windows 2012 to build a Win 8 store app). Secondly, we are about out of space on our VM images so we are bein...
TFS 2012 Management Pack Available
We have just about finished shipping the 2012 versions of all of the various pieces that complement Team Foundation Server. Last week we shipped the SCOM management pack for TFS 2012. It works with System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 and 2012. We didn’t add any major new features to it but rather updated it to properly support TFS 2012 and to support the latest versions of System Center. You can read more about it on Grant’s blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/granth/archive/2012/12/10/tfs2012-monitoring-management-pack.aspx Brian
Visual Studio, TFS and the Egyptian elections
A little over a year ago, I was contacted by someone responsible for helping the new Egyptian government build the software necessary to run their first elections. It was clearly a profound time for the country and for the world. They took the responsibility of having robust, trustworthy and event free elections very seriously. They were particularly concerned about how to build for and handle the load their applications would experience in a very tight time window. They had only one shot at this and the world was watching. We worked with them to show how Visual Studio and TFS could help t...
New Power Tools for Update 1 are available
Today we shipped updated TFS 2012 Power Tools for Update 1. The team worked hard to ship the Power Tools update very close to the official release of VS/TFS update 1 and this is the first time we’ve ever accomplished in the same week. Congrats the the people involved. There aren’t very many change but a few valuable ones: The VS Gallery package has been updated with the new Power Tools. If you still need to TFS 2012 RTM Power Tools, you can get them from the download center. Thanks, Brian
Confirmed hiccup upgrading build agents with Update 1
We have identified and issue (I’ve seen 2 customer reports) where users get an error configuring build agents after installing TFS 2012 Update 1. The error will say “TF30040: The database is not correctly configured. Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator” It is not actually a problem with the database but rather a problem with what the app tier thinks the database should be. It is the result of a race condition where the server receives a request (from a client, a build agent, etc) while part of the upgrade is still in progress. This won’t be terribly common but if you get this issue, you...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 is available
UPDATE Nov-29 We've confirmed a report of an issue that can occur during upgrades. It's not serious but you will want to read here for more details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/11/29/confirmed-hiccup-upgrading-build-agents-with-update-1.aspx Read more about it on Soma’s blog. You can easily get it through the Visual Studio Update in you VS 2012 IDE (Tools –> Extensions & Updates). You can also get TFS 2012 Update 1 (and other components) here. I’ve been talking about Update 1 for a good while now and giving previews: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive...
Team Foundation Service Update – Nov 19th
Sprint 39 is now done and deployed. As always, you can see the latest on the service on the service release notes: http://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/home/news/ Sprint 39 was another modest release. We went through a pretty big reorganization after VS 2012 shipped and it has taken a couple of months to get all of the new teams formed, get there plans settled and get moving quickly. RTMing the service a few weeks ago also took a fair amount of behind the scenes work. So other than a few big things we’re not quite ready to announce yet, other visible improvements have been fewer than I’d like. The biggest ...
Git-TF 2.0 update available
Yesterday, we released our second major version of Git-TF. To refresh your memory, Git-TF allows developers to use Git locally and “sync-up” with a central TFS server. It’s a particularly nice way to, for example, enable integrated version control is XCode but still participate in a team working with TFS. This update includes quite a few new features… Download link: https://aka.ms/git-tf CodePlex page: http://gittf.codeplex.com If you want a DVCS solution with TFS, I recommend you check it out. Brian
Team Foundation Service RTM
Today, we announced that the Team Foundation Service has released. Read more about it on the service web site here: http://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/home/news/. I wanted to provide a bit of my own commentary (beyond what I put on the web site news)… Our original plan was to hold RTM until all the billing infrastructure is in place. Over the past several months, we’ve seen dramatic increases in people signing up. At the same time, I’ve seen two questions come up repeatedly: Over the past couple of months, we’ve been asking ourselves what we could do to make these issues clearer and eliminate...
Manual testing in the browser
In my Update 1 preview post 6 weeks ago, I described a new capability enabling test case management and manual testing from within a browser, rather than having to install Test Professional on the target machine. Unfortunately, we had to make the decision a couple of weeks ago to pull that from Update 1. That, of course, is the risk of talking about anything before it actually happens – there’s always the possibility that it won’t. Unfortunately the feature just wasn’t quite ready in time for the Update 1 cut off. We fully expect to include it in Update 2. I a...
Team Foundation Service Updates – Oct 29th
Yesterday, we deployed our sprint 38 work to the service. You can read the release notes on the service here: http://tfspreview.com/en-us/home/news/2012/oct-29/ Other than some bug fixes, this sprint was primarily about our build automation features. We announced the new build drops feature, the ability to download builds as zips and the ability to view and download build logs. Later today, we are also updating our build image with the latest Windows Phone SDK so that you can use the build service to build Windows Phone 7 & 8 apps too. I’m sorry this has been so long coming but w...
Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 – Final CTP
UPDATE Nov-28 2012 Update 1 has now released and the final CTP is no longer available. See this post for more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/11/26/visual-studio-2012-update-1-is-available.aspx Today we released the final CTP of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1. You can visit the download page here. You can also learn more about the this CTP from Chuck’s post on the ALM blog. This is the first time in a very long time we’ve tried this kind of release cadence for Visual Studio. It’s been a great journey and we’ve learned a lot about how to turn around a ...
Typescript – a real world story of adoption in TFS
As you may know, we've had a web UI for TFS for quite some time. In our TFS 2012 release, we did a pretty major overhaul of our web UI to modernize it - both in look and feel and in architecture. We moved to REST/Json, and a lot more in-browser Javascript and a lot fewer Ajax calls. The result has been a faster, more responsive and enjoyable experience. The result has also been a lot more Javascript. All told, we now have about 80,000 lines of Javascript (actual code, not counting balnk lines, comments, etc - it's about 150,000 if you count that). This is a fairly sizeable chun...
MSDN subscribers worldwide get Pluralsight Starter Subscription
Today we announced that MSDN subscribers around the world are eligible for a 12-month Pluralsight training subscription. We originally made this limited-time benefit available to our US subscribers over the summer. Due to the great response and feedback from our customers, we’re excited to expand this benefit globally through December 11, 2012! The Pluralsight Starter Subscription is a custom 25-course subscription created specifically for MSDN subscribers. With this extension, we partnered with Pluralsight to include several new Visual Studio 2012 courses: Additionally, there are courses...
RedGate supports Team Foundation Service
RedGate now supports connecting to http://tfspreview.com. Read more here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/andy_leonard/archive/2012/10/08/redgate-sql-source-control-and-tfspreview.aspx Brian
Team Foundation Service Update – Oct 9 and VS 2012 Update 1 CTP
Yesterday, two significant things happened (ok, maybe more than that, but two I'm going to talk about :)). Like clock work, we deployed our end-of-sprint update to the Team Foundation Service. You can read more about it in the update news. We also released a CTP of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (CTP - stands for Community Technology Preview). I've been talking about the new, more regular release cadence, and giving some sneak peaks at the improvements in Update 1 for a while now. Now you can get your hands on it and try it out for yourself. Update 1 includes updates to pretty much ...
Building a goat barn
It’s been a long time since my last farm post. As I’m just wrapping up a major project, I figure now is a good time to provide an update. When we first bought the farm, we thought our primary activity was going to be goats. After doing some research on difficulty of raising goats, market for goats, etc we decided to go with cattle – they are WAY easier than goats. However, we knew that we still wanted to try goats some day. Earlier this year (Jan?), my wife took the dive and bought a pregnant dairy goat. She had 2 kids. Kim milked the mother goat for several months and then ultimate sold her due to an ud...
Codeplex upgraded to TFS 2012
I haven’t been blogging about it regularly (because there’s a separate Codeplex blog) but Codeplex continues to march forward. We’ve done some good work on pull request workflow, work on streamlining and bringing forward the code focused experience, etc. This last week, we also upgraded our Codeplex TFS servers to TFS 2012. This means that you can now use many of the nice new TFS features with Codeplex – like VS 2012 local workspaces, merge on unshelve, rollback in the UI, etc…Brian
Team Foundation Service Updates 9/17
Yesterday we published a new update for the Team Foundation Service. You can read more about what’s in it here: http://tfspreview.com/en-us/home/news/2012/sep-17/ A couple of notes… You’ll notice that the release notes, this week, were written by Aaron Bjork rather than me. Aaron is the GPM responsible for most of our work item tracking, Agile project management, etc features. I’m trying to spread out some of the release notes work between Aaron, Jamie Cool and me. I’ll introduce you to Jamie sometime in the next couple of months when he writes his first rele...
TFS 2012 Power Tools are now available!
I know many of you have been waiting patiently. I apologize for the delay. They actually shipped yesterday but I didn’t have time to write a blog post about it until tonight. Team Foundations Server 2012 Power Tools A few reminders about how Power Tools work and comments on this release… For the most part, this Power Tools release is just a port of the existing TFS 2010 Power Tools to TFS 2012 and VS 2012 (along with a bunch of bug fixes). However, there are a few notable changes. Storyboard Shapes Power Tool We added a tool for creating dynamically sizeable storyboard shap...
iOS, iPhone & iPad storyboarding
Update: when I first wrote this a couple of hours ago, the link to the iPad shapes was broken so I didn’t mention them. It’s since been fixed so I’m adding it to this post. Clearly there’s a lot of overlap between the iPhone & iPad shapes. So much happened yesterday I’m still trying to catch up on writing about it. Yesterday we release three new sets of storyboarding shapes on the Visual Studio Gallery. Common iOS Icons iPhone controls iPad controls These shape libraries are designed to be used with the Storyboarding tools in VS 2012 Premium, Ultimate and Test...
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop
We repivoted our Express SKUs this release to focus on application type rather than on language. The Windows 8 and Web Express SKUs have been available for a while now. Today we made the Desktop Express SKU available. The last yet to be released is the Phone Express SKU and I’ll let you know when it’s available. You can read more about the news of the day on Soma’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2012/09/12/visual-studio-2012-and-net-4-5-launch.aspx Brian
No Jeans at the Launch
I saw on Twitter some people expressing their disappointment at my wearing formal clothes for the launch keynote. I feel it necessary to defend myself Ok, not really, but there’s a funny story here. I was packing to come to Seattle last week and it occurred to me that no one had said anything about dress code. So, being me, I thought, hey, it’s a developer event – jeans and a decent shirt should be good. The day after I got here I got an email on dress code – black slacks, grey shirt, etc. I replied saying – sorry, not sure I even own clothes like that but regardless, they are in North Carolina and I am h...
Visual Studio Update this Fall
For a while now we’ve been talking about increasing our delivery cadence for Visual Studio. Jason first talked about it at DevConnections in the Spring and I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago outlining our general approach to cadence (focused on TFS). This week, at the launch of Visual Studio 2012, we gave a bit more insight into what we think the first VS 2012 update, later this Fall, will contain. I want to use this post to drill into that a bit more. I can’t say enough how happy I am to be trying out some new cadences. We’ve done a number of things in the past (like Power Tools) to try to suppleme...
Visual Studio 2012 launch is today!
Today is the launch of our 2012 wave of developer products, including Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and .NET 4.5. We’ll be having a small “in person” event in Seattle today but all of the content will be available online so, no matter where you are in the world, you can participate. Visit our launch website to learn more. We’ve been working on VS 2012 for quite a while now and it’s really a joy to finally be launching it and enabling developers around the world to adopt it. In this release we focused hard to enable developers to build modern, cloud connected...
Sam and Neno’s VS 2012 Book Available at Launch
Sam Guckenheimer and Neno Loje have updated their book on Visual Studio and TFS and it is in print and shippingwith our launch this week. This is an end-to-end guide to applying Agile software engineering practices across the lifecycle using 2012. Here’s my foreword: Sam and I met in 2003 over a storyboard. We were on this new team with a mission to take Visual Studio – the world’s leading individual development environment – and turn it into the world’s leading team development environment. He had just joined Microsoft and wanted to convince me that we would succeed not just by building the best tools, but...
Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook available
Richard's new book 'Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook' is now available. It's a great broad overview of the new capabilities in VS 2012 and is a good way for an existing VS user to get up to speed on all the new stuff. Read more about it on Richard's blog post:http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/09/visual-studio-2012-cookbook-is-now.html
Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management Virtual Machine and Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts
Brian Keller just recently released a new VS/TFS 2012 VM and hands on lab. It’s a handy way to kick the tires and check things out. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2011/09/16/visual-studio-11-application-lifecycle-management-virtual-machine-and-hands-on-labs-demo-scripts.aspx Brian
TFS Shipping Cadence
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while but somehow the days just slip by and I never find the time. Team Foundation Service If you are a reader of my blog then you’ve been seeing my posts on our service updates for months now. But let me rewind a bit and start at the beginning. About 2 years ago we began the journey to bring TFS to the cloud. In the beginning it was just an experiment – Can we port TFS to Azure and have a viable cloud hosted solution? It took a summer to prove that we could do it and the fall/winter to shore it up and make it production ready. So a little over a year ago, we d...
Team Foundation Service Updates 8/27
It’s that time again! Today we deployed the results of our latest sprint (Sprint 35) to Team Foundation Service. You can read the release notes here: http://tfspreview.com/en-us/home/news/2012/aug-27/ As usual, it might take a few hours for all features to show up in all accounts. Note, we’ve now got perma-link support for the news so you can bookmark it and get the latest news. We still need an RSS feed, etc but we’re making progress. Also, we’ve updated the cross platform command line client that comes with Team Explorer Everywhere to work with the hosted service using the ne...
Announcing Git Integration with TFS
Distributed Version Control (DVCS) has a growing following. It enables a set of workflows that can be very handy and Git is an increasingly popular DVCS solution. Today, we are announcing Git-tf, a solution that enables you to work locally with a Git repo – edit, commit, revert, branch, merge, etc. and then “sync up” with a central TFS repository. In this way, you can have the best of both DVCS and TFS. Git-tf works great in hybrid teams. You may have a TFS project that’s been running for a while. Most of your dev team is using our Visual Studio or Eclipse integration and perfectly happy. At the same tim...
Introducing Kanban
Today, we enabled a new kanban board Team Foundation Service. Check out the news here for more information about the experience and how we plan to evolve it. I also wanted to mention that our plan is to include the kanban support in our first TFS 2012 on premises update later this fall. I’m really liking how the 3 week cloud cadence is playing out. It’s allowing us to roll up capabilities and deliver really meaningful quarterly updates to the on premises product where you might have had to wait 2 years for the same kinds of improvements in the past. It’s a much more motivating approach for us and I hope a...
Team Foundation Service Updates – 8/6
Today we deployed a service update with our sprint 34 work. As part of this, we have introduced a new "News" section on the tfspreview.com site. Here's a link to today's news: http://tfspreview.com/en-us/home/news/2012/aug-6/. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have a news perma-link. I'll have to look into that and maybe it will become a user story for sprint 35 :) Anyway, I'm happy to be able to provide the latest status and feature updates directly on the TFSPreview site. From now on my deployment notices will be published there rather than my blog. For the next few months, I'l...
Some valuable testing guidance
The Rangers have been hard at work lately putting together guidance for good practices for organizing real world test efforts and how our tools can help. If you’ve got a significant test effort and are using the Visual Studio tools, I recommend checking this out. Test Release Management – covers guidance on managing test practices and artifacts around release boundaries. Test Tooling Guidance – covers guidance on how to organize coded UI tests for large apps, helping you componentize your UIMap so that it is not too unwieldy. Hopefully you will find them useful. Brian
Brief interview about Team Foundation Service
A month or so ago, I recorded a brief interview with Tim Huckaby. Here's a link if you want to check it out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/jj553284.aspx Brian
Upcoming book on VS 2012 ALM
One of our MVPs has written a book on VS 2012 ALM. It’s not quite available yet and I haven’t had a chance to look at it closely, but Mathias has been working closely with us for a long time and I expect it will be a good book. Here’s a link to where you can learn more and ultimately order it when it is available. http://www.amazon.com/Application-Lifecycle-Management-Visual-Professional/dp/1430243449/ Brian
Team Foundation Service Updates 7/16
This sprint is the smallest service change in a while. It was the last sprint for really wrapping up our TFS 11 on-premises work so most of our effort went into that. I’m expecting that we’ll see a significant increase in new service capabilities over the next couple of months. So, for the most part, this deployment has a bunch of miscellaneous bug fixes. There’s really one significant change – some navigation restyling and one new feature. Navigation restyling Before 7/16, the service navigation experience looked like this… About a month ago we launched a new “Welcome” experience to learn about th...
Coded UI testing support for Silverlight
After we shipped VS 2010, we shipped a “Testing Feature Pack” that included support for testing Silverlight 4 applications using UI automation. Our full intent was to incorporate that support into VS 2012. Unfortunately, there were so many competing priorities, we just didn’t have time to get it in – and what’s more we released Silverlight 5, further widening the gap in our support. As VS 2012 has been winding down, the team has had some “spare” time and has done some work to take the original Silverlight support, extend it to also support Silverlight 5 and pa...
Test Professional performance improvements
I’ve written in the past about some of the work we’ve done on performance in TFS/VS 2012. I’m happy to see in the feedback that many people have noticed. We’re in the process of wrapping things up for this release and I got an update on our Test Pro performance results that I thought was worth sharing. This graph shows our top priority performance test scenarios (there are probably another 40 or so lower priority ones – just for Test Pro). The vertical axis the the ratio of the actual result to the 2012 goal. The purple bar is the ratio of 2010 SP to the 2012 goal and green is the ratio of the current res...
Team Foundation Services Updates 6/26
Well, the last 3 weeks were busy. We announced our Azure Continuous Deployment support and removed the invitation codes to open the service up to everyone. As I wrote in my Spring wrap up post, we’ve kind of emptied the pipeline of all of the big stuff we’ve had in progress. So this sprint, we’ve got a few nice little enhancements to the service but nothing that’s going to change your life or blow your socks off. This is the denouement after the climax We’re building a new pipeline now but it’s probably going to be fairly tame for a couple of sprints. Let’s not forget that we still have to tie the bow on T...
DevExpress announces full coded UI support
Visual Studio has a variety of ways to test your code. – one of them we call “Coded UI”. Coded UI testing is useful when you want to automate a full functional test, as a user would do it, against the UI of your application. You usually start by recording a test case – you manually execute the test in the app and the recorder watches what you do. You also define as set of things you want to verify about the result. It turns your actions into a sequence of events to send to controls in your application. It can generate code for that sequence of events and you can then tweak that code if you like. In order ...
A couple of great books on 2012
There are a couple of new books out now – one on overall application lifecycle management with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012 and the other a deeper drill into TFS. These were written by some of the best authors I know – combined they know as much about how to explain VS and TFS as any group of people I can imagine. I highly recommend these books if you really want to know how to get the most out of your ALM investment. The images are hyperlinks btw Brian
P&P Paper on Continuous Delivery with VS 2012
The Patterns & Practices team has just published a document on best practices for implementing Continuous Delivery using VS & TFS 2012. It’s a great overview of how to think about the problem and how to implement it. Check it out… http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj159345 Brian
Spring is over
OK, so maybe I didn’t need to tell you that. Or maybe, you observe that it isn’t quite true because summer officially starts in about a week. But then that’s not really what I mean. I’ve written little tidbits about our transition from an organization shipping a box product every couple of years to one still shipping a box product but also shipping a cloud service every 3 weeks. There have been changes to virtually every aspect of how we work. One of those aspects is planning. For our cloud cadence work, we have moved to a 6 month planning cycle. We roughly draw out our vision in 6 month phases. We st...
Team Foundation Service Preview is public!
Since we announced the Team Foundation Service Preview at the BUILD conference last year, we’ve limited the onboarding of new customers by requiring invitation codes to create accounts. The main reason for this has been to control the growth of the service to make sure it didn’t run away from us and end up with a bad user experience. In this time period, we’ve continued to work on our infrastructure, performance, scale, monitoring, management and, of course, some cool new features like cloud build. We now have enough experience under our belt that we are confident enough to open up the preview by removing the ...
TeamDevCentral and hosted Lab Management
A couple of years ago, we partnered with TeamDevCentral to set up one of the first hosted Team Foundation Server clouds. It was the very beginning of our thinking on what a cloud based ALM solution might look like. Since then Rational eyes, the company behind TeamDevCentral has continued to chart new territory. Most recently they worked with us to create a case study about some great work they've done with QuestionMark to host virtual lab environments along with TFS in the cloud. It's great way to improve productivity and focus on what your core business is. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/...
TMap for TFS Windows Phone 7 App available in the marketplace
Clemens Reijnen recently blogged about a new Windows Phone app for working with TFS and the TMap testing methodology. Read more about it on Clemens’ blog here: http://www.clemensreijnen.nl/post/2012/05/11/TMap-for-TFS-Windows-Phone-7-App-available-in-the-marketplace.aspx Brian
A Team Foundation Service Invitation Code
I've seen a spike in requests for invitation codes following our announcement of the new TFS/Azure Continuous Delivery work at Azure Day this week. I figured, I'd put out another multi-use invitation code just to minimize the wait for additional people who have learned about it and want to try it out. Here, you go. You can go to http://www.tfspreview.com, plug in this invitation code and be off an running. Check it out. Invitation code: bharry-invite Brian
Update for VS 2008 and TFS 11
We’ve finally gotten to shipping an update to VS 2008 SP1 to fully support TFS 11 – including the the hosted service http://www.tfspreview.com. VS 11 has supported it from the beginning, of course. We’ve released updates for VS 2010 SP1 along the way. And now we have an update for VS 2008 SP1. This will enable VS 2008 SP1 to work fairly seamlessly with TFS 11 and the hosted service. As has generally been the case in the past, many administrative actions (creating Team Projects, creating Build definitions, modifying process templates, etc) will require you to use a V...
Upgrading the DevDiv dogfood server to TFS 11
I've mentioned in a couple of posts recently how busy it's been around here lately. One of the many things keeping us busy over the past several weeks has been upgrading the main Developer Division Team Foundation Server to TFS 11. We've been using TFS in production on smaller servers (for example the one the TFS team uses) for over a year now but the DevDiv server is the largest single TFS server in the world (I believe) and we wanted to get to the release candidate before we made the big move of updating that server. A ton of work went into pre-production testing and preparation and it finally...
More on yesterday's Azure announcements
Here's a link to some "chalk talk" video's on yesterday's Azure announcements. Among them is a video from our very own Aaron Bjork on the TFS integration that we've done. Check it out for a more colorful explanation than yesterday's blog post :) http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/DigitalChalkTalks Brian
Announcing Continuous Deployment to Azure with Team Foundation Service
I mentioned earlier this week in my sprint 31 deployment post that we were working on some bigger things I wasn’t ready to talk about yet. Well, this is one of them…. As development organizations are trying to improve the cycle times on their development process – getting ideas through development and into production and collecting feedback faster and faster, they are looking for ways to streamline the process. You hear a lot of talk these days about “DevOps” and “NoOps”. Both are rapidly evolving perspectives on how to improve the interaction between development and production with the goal of improving th...
Team Foundation Services Updates 6/4
We’ve just finished sprint 31 and today we deployed it to the service. In all, it a modest set of things but some nice improvements. We’re now starting to get to the point that new things showing up on the service are ahead of what we have in the on premises product. Some of this will show up in the RTM release of the on premises product and some will show up in incremental updates. We’re moving to a model of updating the on premises product more frequently – partly to avoid too much divergence between the service and the on premises capabilities. However, as a general rule, if you want to know what’s coming...
TFS Power Tools for the RC
We won't be releasing a new build of the Power Tools with the Release Candidate. The Beta Power Tools that are available will work with the RC build. The next time we'll update the Power Tools will be along with the final release. Please let us know if you find any problems.Brian
A Community for Storyboard Shapes
A while ago, I wrote a post about the importance of feedback in the software development process. In that post I introduced a new storyboarding tool that we’ve built as part of the VS 11 wave of products that enables you to collect feedback on your designs before you write a line of code. In the product, we ship a bunch of pre-canned shapes – Windows, Web, Sharepoint, Windows Phone, Windows 8, etc. But once you start storyboarding, your imagination can run wild with all of the different ideas of shapes and visuals you might want to use in applications. Of course, you can use any PowerPoint shape or bitmap in ...
Visual Studio/TFS 2012 Release Candidate Available Today
Today we released the Release Candidate for VS, TFS and .NET (and, of course, Windows also released their RC). You can learn more about it and download using the following links: Here are a few notes on the changes in TFS since the Beta. Of course, we’ve done a ton of testing and fixed a lot of bugs. So it should be even more stable than the Beta. Here’s some of the feature enhancements: Feature Enablement – This is a new capability in Web Access that allow you to enable new features (like Code Review, feedback, the Taskboard, etc) in your process template without having to bre...
Progress on CodePlex pull requests
If you checkout the CodePlex suggestions and feedback, you’ll see that the #1 top voted item involves improvements in pull request workflows. For the second week in a row, we’ve released some nice improvements (along with other bug fixes and minor improvements). We’ve got several more weeks of work to do to continue to drive improvements in this experience and then we’ll pick another thing off the list of feedback and continue to improve. If you are a CodePlex user, follow the CodePlex blog and please share your thoughts on the most important things we could do to make the CodePlex experience...
Formal Requirements with TFS and InteGREAT
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent a fair amount of time our visiting with customers and potential customers. Much of it was spent talking about the new stuff coming with TFS/VS 11. One question that came up at probably 1/3rd of customers I visited is how to do formal requirements with TFS. If you’ve looked, you’ve probably noticed TFS doesn’t have a built in formal requirements solution. We did some work in VS/TFS 11 and Test Professional 11 to support what we call “Agile Requirements” – important feedback loops with your stakeholders. But for some organizations, formal requirements are a must – Requi...
that CONFERENCE
I got a request from a friend to mention a new conference that’s coming up this fall in August in Wisconsin. It looks like a good opportunity to stay up to date on the latest technologies and rub elbows with your peers. Check it out if you are interested. http://www.thatconference.com/ Brian
Team Explorer Everywhere in the Eclipse Marketplace
Several weeks ago, I announced that we’d be removing the price on the Team Foundation Server Eclipse plug-in. One of the benefits of this change (aside from begin cheaper ) is that it’s easier to keep your plug-in up to date because we can use the standard Eclipse update mechanisms. Team Explorer Everywhere is now on the Eclipse Marketplace… http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/tfs-plug-eclipse and we have an Eclipse update site… http://dl.microsoft.com/eclipse/tfs Of course, update site links are to be entered into Eclipse for update notifications, etc – not viewed with a browser. Brian
Some insight into our 4/26 deployment
This is a post I wrote about a week ago and somehow left it in my drafts folder. Though it’s “old” now, I think there’s still some good stuff here… The good news is the deployment we did today seems to have gone off without a hitch (knock on wood)! We did a TFSPreview.com deployment on 4/26 and you may have noticed that we suffered a few hours of down time. It’s the first upgrade we’ve had go really bad in a long time – the last several have suffered little or no down time. I wanted to share a little bit about what happened and what we learn...
Team Foundation Service Updates – 5/15
**UPDATED 5/15 @9:21EDT** Drag and drop of tiles has been enabled now for a few hours and I just updated the "Improved logout section" with a screenshot. It’s that time again. Our next sprint is complete and today we’ve updated hosting service with new bits. In general, the list of new capabilities is still modest. Much of our attention is still focused on tying a bow on TFS 11 and some continued hosting infrastructure work – some of which I’ll mention here. So, the notable changes in this release include: Copy capacity from previous sprint – Setting up a new sprint can be tedious and one sprint is ofte...
Update on building Win phone projects on the build service
It doesn't work right now because the Phone tools SDK isn't installed on our build agent images. We've been talking with the phone tools team about this. The blocker that we have is that the Phone tools SDK can't be installed on a server edition of the OS (it's blocked). Add to that the fact that you can only run server OS editions on cloud environments and you have a recipe for "no-worky". The Phone tools SDK team has commited to doing the work to unblock the Phone SDK on a server OS edition. I don't yet have a timeframe for that but I'm guessing within the next couple of months.Bri...
Update on the VS 11 UI
There was quite a lot of feedback after we released the Beta about the new UI style in VS 11. We've been processing that feedback and working to improve the look and feel. We've just released a new blog post on changes to the VS UI in our upcoming Release Candidate. Check it out and please share any feedback you have.Brian
Codeplex UI Refresh
Today we launched our new Codeplex look and feel that I previewed a few weeks ago. As I said then, we’ve redoubled our effort on Codeplex and you should expect to see it evolve fairly rapidly. First Git support, now a new look. What’s next? Stay tuned and you’ll see. Check out Mark’s blog post to see how we’ve both improved the look and simplified the experience. Or visit Codeplex and check it out for yourself. Brian
TFSPreview update
Last week we rolled out an update to TFSPreview. The majority of it was underlying plumbing changes to improve operations, diagnostics, cost, etc. As we roll off our TFS 11 work, we’ll see more and more of our effort show up as new service capabilities. That will mean more improvements, faster. The two biggest things we did in this latest release were: But beyond that, there were a few visible changes as well. As I said, the visible changes in this release were pretty modest. We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff in the queue. Brian
Preemptive Analytics in Visual Studio and TFS 11
Over the past couple of years there’s been a growing connection between development and operations. The “old” world where development teams throw applications over the wall at ops is disappearing the same way the world where developers threw applications over the wall at test did. Whether you’re talking about continuous deployment, DevOps or “Build, Measure, Learn”, these are all catchy phrases that are various aspects of getting the development team connected more closely with the customer and with the application in production. I’ve had the privilege of living this life for the past couple of years as we’v...
TFS 11 Power Tools Beta Available
About a week ago, we shipped a Beta the first version of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools that work with VS 11 and are optimized to work with TFS 11. This will be a bit shorter than a full announcement post because it’s a Beta and it’s not complete yet. I’ll do a comprehensive post when we get closer to a final build. This Power Tools release is designed to work with a VS 11 client (they’ll actually work with Team Explorer 11 too) but you won’t get the VS integration in a VS 2010 or earlier client. If you want that integration, you need to install th...
New Agile guidance
We've been working with some of the Agile & Lean thought leaders to gather their perspectives on the state of the art - past, present and future. It's some good reading. Check it out here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee889983(v=vs.110).aspx Brian
Announcing a Build Service for Team Foundation Service
Today in my VS Live keynote, I announced and demonstrated a new cloud based build service for our Team Foundation Service on Azure. From the beginning with tfspreview, you’ve been able to do builds, but – you had to install, manage, patch, etc the build machines yourself. With this new service, we’ve made it possible to skip that and just use a pool of build machines that we manage in the cloud (though you can still install and manage build machines if you like). And, of course, you can do more than just build – like with on-premises TFS, you can run a default workflow that includes, compilation, testing, etc ...
Keeping your TFS 2010 up to date as of March 2012
UPDATE It looks like Grant Holliday wrote a nice post that covers more than mine does. It's not quite as up to date with the Compat GDR but it's good reading too: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/granth/archive/2012/01/03/tfs-2010-what-service-packs-and-hotfixes-should-i-install.aspx We've been releasing a variety of updates to TFS and the VS support for TFS. I realize that it can be dizzying and I want to start by apologizing. For the past year, we've been in a transition from a more ad hoc process to a more structured process of quarterly cumulative updates. I've been trying to push us generally ...
The Future of CodePlex is Bright
The last 6 months or so have been really busy around here. Over the next several months, you’ll see a lot of what’s been keeping us busy come to light. Clearly a big part was unveiled recently with the launch of the VS/TFS/.NET Beta. In this post I want to talk about CodePlex. As you probably know CodePlex is a software development/open source collaboration site that we’ve run for several years. From the beginning it’s been based on Team Foundation Server – and for a long time, it was really the only way to experience TFS hosted “in the cloud”. When we first began development of what is now Team Foundat...
VS ALM Rangers Beta Content
Along with the VS/.NET/TFS Beta, the Visual Studio Rangers created a whole bunch of new readiness content to help you be successful with the next generation of our tools. Real on their blog for more details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2012/02/29/welcome-to-visual-studio-11-alm-rangers-readiness-beta-wave.aspxBrian
Even Better Access to Team Foundation Server
About 2 years ago, we first introduced Team Explorer Everywhere. In doing that we enabled diverse teams to work closely together regardless of platform or technology stack. We provided organizations a substantially improved ability to manage all of their projects and get consistent visibility across them. And we gave a new group of people access to a comprehensive set of software development collaboration tools. Over the last two years, we have consistently improved on that initial release. These improvements include an SP1 with some nice improvements that also introduced localized versions, a Java SDK tha...
VS 11 Beta and Windows 8 Consumer Previews Available
As we said earlier this month, the VS 11 Beta and Windows 8 Consumer previews are available. In the next couple of weeks I’ll write more about things to look for in the TFS Beta. In the mean time, checkout Jason’s blog for a good overview of what you’ll find. Here’s a bunch of useful links to learn more: Visual Studio 11 Beta & .NET 4.5 Beta Announcement by Jason Zander Windows 8 Consumer Preview Announcement (on the “Building Windows 8” blog) Visual Studio 11 Beta Downloads (includes Visual Studio 11 Beta, Team Foundation Server 11 Beta, and .NET Framewor...
SCRUM in a more formal organization
Here’s a nice article on how you can integrate SCRUM and other agile practices into a more formal project management process by combining TFS and Project Server. http://www.mpug.com/News/Pages/Exchanging-Project-Data-with-Your-Development-Team.aspx Brian
VS Announcements Today
I’m trying hard to keep up with all of the news. I’m in India this week and the time zone difference is making it tough. Here I’m going to give you a bunch of links so you can follow all of the news. The Road to Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta Sneak Preview of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta Coming Soon: Team Foundation Server Express Introducing the New Developer Experience – Part 1 Learn more about Visual Studio 11 Beta What's New in Visual Studio 11 Beta Hopefully you’ll find all the answers you want in these links but, if not, let me kno...
Coming Soon: TFS Express
Soon, we will be announcing the availability of our VS/TFS 11 Beta. This is a major new release for us that includes big enhancements for developer, project managers, testers and Analysts. Over the next month or two, I’ll write a series of posts to demonstrate some of those improvements. Today I want to let you know about a new way to get TFS. In TFS 11, we are introducing a new download of TFS, called Team Foundation Server Express, that includes core developer features: The best news is that it’s FREE for individuals and teams of up to 5 users. TFS Express and the Team Foundation Service ...
Make sure your SQL Server enterprise edition is up to date
A month or so ago we started seeing crashes on the SQL Server associated with one of our dogfood TFS servers. The crashes ultimately resulted in us having to restore the database from backup. It was a significant work disturbance and an important thing to avoid. We diagnosed the problem in tandem with the SQL Server team and discovered it was due to a SQL Server bug in tables using page compression. That feature is only supported with SQL Server Enterprise Edition and above – but, that’s what we use. TFS ships with SQL Server Standard Edition so the vast majority of customers w...
Kicking myself
I kind of checked out of the blogosphere just before the holidays and haven’t resurfaced. I feel bad about it. I will say I had a good holiday. I took a full 2 1/2 weeks off and did pretty much nothing but farm work. It was a great vacation. It’s the longest I’ve been away from work in a very long time. When I got back in January, things were busy. we’re now updating the hosted service weekly with “major” updates every 3-4 weeks. Plus we’re busy locking down to ship VS11/TFS 11 Beta. Plus it’s performance review season...
December 2011 TFS Power Tools Release
In the last release of the Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools we focused on improving the experience for developers in Visual Studio and using the Shell Extensions inside Windows Explorer. Today we just released a new update of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools focusing on developers outside of Visual Studio with the following improvements: Power Tools Come to Eclipse We are completely committed to ensuring that developers outside of Visual Studio have great access to TFS and that includes bringing Power Tools to these developers when appropriate. Today we made a new Power To...
A new invite code for the Team Foundation Service
Yesterday I wrote about the updates we’ve made to the service with our December update. Today, I’m here to deliver on the promise of providing another invite code that people can use to sign up. If you’ve already created an account, there’s no need to use this code. Your preexisting account is still working and has been upgraded to the December release. Just sign in and take a peek. If you don’t yet have an account, feel free to use this code to create one at http://tfspreview.com. The invitation code is: TfsDecUpdate In the next couple of days I’l...
December refresh of the Team Foundation Service
Today we are updating the Team Foundation Service (running on Azure) with a new build. You can read more about the features in the new update on the Visual Studio ALM blog. The process of updating all of the accounts is ongoing as I type this. It will take most of the day and maybe into tomorrow to finish updating them all. In the meantime, you’ll see much of the new UI but if your account hasn’t yet been updated, you won’t see all the features. We started the service in April of this year and ran a private pilot program for several months. Then, at the BUILD conference in September, we announced it and m...
Expanded hosted TFS offering from DiscountASP.net
DiscountASP.net just recently expanded their hosted TFS offering. You can read more about it on their site and on their blog post. I can imaging people might wonder why I’d talk about this when I talk so much about our current hosted preview service. Let me give a few reasons why you might want to use a service like the one from DiscountASP.net over the TFS on Azure preview we are currently doing. I don’t claim it to be a complete list but rather just what comes to the top of mind at the moment. 1) DiscountASP.net’s solution is a production service based on a released version o...
Traveling this fall
Next week I’m getting ready to hit the road for a bunch of conferences and customer visits. I’m looking forward to getting out and talking with people about what they are doing and what’s coming in VS 11. It all starts with the ALM Summit in Redmond 11/15 – 11/17. There we’ll have a bunch of people passionate about application lifecycle management, and particularly Agile processes, get together and discuss where the industry is going. The following week I’m headed to Germany for ALM Days 2011 11/23 – 11/25 in Munich. Yes, much to my surprise, this actually means I’m going to be in Germany giving a keynot...
TFS Databases growing out of control
Several months ago I first started hearing customer reports of TFS databases growing out of control. Every once in a while I’d hear of someone with a database growing by 100GB a week or something equally nutty. Previously that had been the result of someone checking in crazy amounts of data – A few years ago a similar report turned out to be someone checking in 75GB of slide decks from a conference they went to That turned out not to be the case this time. After some investigation, we realized that the problem was data associated the TFS’s testing features. TFS and Microsoft Test Professional gather very ...
Lab Management improvements in TFS 11
The Team Foundation Server 11 Developer Preview introduces a number of simplifications and enhancements in Lab Management. The primary one you will notice in the developer preview is the introduction of 'Standard environments'. Here is a brief summary of what Standard environments are and what you can do with them. Ever since we released Lab Management we’ve gotten feedback from a segment of our customers that they love the Lab Management promise but aren’t ready to bite off SCVMM & Hyper-V. Some people use VMWare other just want to just automate the physical machines they use today. Standard environ...
Multi-line test steps available in Microsoft Test Manager, among other things…
Along with the launch of the Team Foundation Service preview we announced at the BUILD conference, we released a new client patch for the VS 2010 family of products. You can get it here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=212065&clcid=0x409 (or you can find the link on the Team Foundation Preview service web page). You’ll see that it’s called “Visual Studio 2010 SP1 TFS Compatibility GDR” but it’s actually got a few things of interest in it. It’s a roll up of recent fixes and improvements. Here’s a list of the most significant ones: ...
ALM Summit 2011 in Redmond – Nov 14-18
Now that BUILD has wrapped up and hopefully most of you are busy trying out the VS 11/TFS 11 developer preview, I wanted to let you know about an event that I will be speaking at in November. At the ALM Summit in Redmond, November 14-18th, we get a chance to talk about the process of making great software. We intentionally had fairly light coverage of our V.Next ALM plans at the BUILD conference because it we heavily oriented towards the new Windows 8 capabilities. The ALM Summit is really the next time where we’ll get to go deep on our future ALM plans. Last year was the first year of the...
Deleting a Team Project from the Team Foundation Service on Windows Azure
I've seen a few questions come up about this. Two questions, actually: Question: How do I delete a Team Project Collection on the Team Foundation Service? Answer: You can't. For now we automatically create one collection per account (called DefaultCollection) and you can't delete it, rename it, add another one or anything else. Question: How do I delete a Team Project on the Team Foundation Service? Answer: You can but it's ugly. This is one of those unfinished scenarios that helps explain why this is a "preview" and not a finished service. Buck wrote a post on how to do this. Brian
The New Team Explorer in TFS 11
You’ve seen snippets of the new Team Explorer in previous posts I’ve done on version control improvements. In this post, I’m going to focus on the new Team Explorer experience, talk a bit more about what overall changes we’ve made and why. You’ll recall that the Team Explorer window in TFS 2010 and before is a pretty standard tree control – it looks a bit like the solution explorer. For a long time now, we’ve felt that the model that everything we wanted to do in Team Explorer would have to fit into a tree was overly constraining. When I built the Team Members Power Tools a couple of years ago, I very much...
Team Foundation Service Registration code for Asia-Pacific
I got several comments last week that posting my registration codes in the middle of the afternoon North Carolina time was not very friendly for people in the Asia-Pacific region. It worked out to the middle of the night and since they didn’t last more than a few hours, they were all used up by the time people woke up. Tonight I’m going to remedy that situation. Here, I’m posting another registration code but I’m doing it late night my time on Sunday night – which should be morning to mid afternoon for most of Asia. Please try it out and let us know what you think. ...
Improving Visual Studio Performance
We've had a few healthy exchanges about performance on my blog and it's clear there's a lot of energy out there about it. After the last exchange I kicked off a discussion internally about making sure we are directing our performance efforts at the right things. We published a User Voice site a couple of months ago and performance issues dominate the top of the suggestion list. However, they are, by and large, pretty general and difficult for me to derive specific priorities from. So, we hatched an idea to create a new User Voice site and pre-populate it with a hand full of fairly specific sugge...
The VS 11 developer preview is now live
Visit the landing page here: https://t.co/48p0iAdHBrian
Visual Studio 11 ALM Virtual Machine and hands-on-labs available
Brian Keller just published a virtual machine with many of the VS 11 Preview bits on it and a bunch of hands-on-labs to walk you through many of the new features. Check it out: https://aka.ms/VS11ALMVMBrian
Configuring a build server against your shiny new hosted TFS account
Now that you have a Team Foundation Service account, some of you are going to be interested in setting up a build machine to work with it. Richard Hundhausen did a very nice video to walk you through this process but I’m going to recap it because there’s a few additional things I want to explain. If you watch his video, it’s higher fidelity than this post but you might get some additional understanding here. First let’s talk about options. You can install and configure a build machine to run against your Team Foundation Service account. You will have to use a TFS 11 build agent. The TFS build agent is par...
More Team Foundation Service activation codes
The demand for accounts to try out the Windows Azure based TFS Service Preview we announced yesterday has been terrific. We've used a bunch of avenues to get codes in people's hands but the demand keeps out pacing supply. Because of that, this morning, we bumped the number of activations on my "bharry" activation code. There should now be a bunch of new activations available now. If you've been wanting to get an account but struggling to get a ticket, give it a shot. We'll see how fast it runs out :) Read more about getting started here:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/09/...
VS 11/TFS 11 Developer Preview
Yesterday was a pretty crazy day with our new hosted TFS Service going live. I'd stayed pretty focused on that to make sure everything went smoothly. But, in case of some rare anomaly that you missed it, we announced a VS 11/TFS 11 developer preview yesterday as well. They are available to MSDN subscribers on the download center today (well last night, actually) and will be available to everyone tomorrow. Read Jason's blog entry for a good overview: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2011/09/14/announcing-visual-studio-11-developer-preview.aspx Here are the public download links for wh...
Team Foundation Server on Windows Azure: A Preview is available!
Today at the BUILD conference, we announced availability of our Windows Azure based Visual Studio Team Foundation Service Preview. If you’ve been following my blog, then you know we’ve been working on it for a while now. We’ve had a private preview going for the past several months and are up to several hundred users. We’re ready to take the next step and open it up to a broader audience. As part of the announcement at the BUILD conference we gave invitation codes to all attendees to sign up for an account. Everyone who signs up for an account can invite as many people as they like to use it with them. In addi...
Wrapping up TFS 11 Version Control improvements
This is the third post in the series on “Developers are Raving Fans” TFS features. The first post was on workspace improvements, the second on merging and this is kind of a wrap up post that covers the rest of the version control improvements. There’s a few more that are in progress that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet but this should cover the majority of what is left. Team Explorer Probably the biggest thing I haven’t talked about yet is the changes to Team Explorer and the Pending Changes window. I’m going to do a full post in the future on the overhaul we have done to Team Explorer so for now I wil...
Merge enhancements in TFS 11
Here’s the next post in my series of “Developers are raving fans” enhancements coming in TFS 11. My last post was on workspace improvements. One of the things we consistently get customer feedback on in TFS 2010 is that merging is still too complicated and/or too limited. We’ve made several significant improvements in the coming release: A new diff/merge experience – The one we’ve been shipping for the past 5 years is the original SourceSafe diff/merge tools – built while we were One Tree Software circa 1994. It had been enhanced over the years to support globalization, Unicode, etc but it was, in essenc...
Sequencing VS 2010 with App-V
For all of you who have been waiting to create App-V images of VS 2010, it’s finally possible. You’ll need VS 2010 + SP1 + 1 patch and App-V 4.6 SP1. Here’s some instructions for how to do it. You might wonder why it hasn’t just always worked. For an app to work just fine in an App-V image, it must not have any machine specific data coded in it’s configuration. Unfortunately, VS does – specifically in some of our licensing configuration data. The patch I mentioned above changes the way we encode license data so the it doesn’t contain any mach...
Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services
When you purchase Software Assurance along with your software purchases from Microsoft, you get Deployment Planning Services“ credits. These credits can be spent on deployment planning training/consulting on all manner of Microsoft software. This is nothing new. It’s been in place for a while. I don’t think it’s well understood but it’s not new. What’s new is that we now have some developer tools offerings that you can spend your credits on. These offerings are primarily designed for enterprises undertaking large scale or involved deployments (high...
August '11 TFS Power Tools are available!
Yesterday we released the latest version of the TFS Power Tools that I described here Here are the links: **UPDATE**: Here's a new "short" link to the main VS Power Tools landing page: https://aka.ms/tfpt It's another very nice upgrade of the Power Tools with some long awaited features. I want to thank the team for the hard work they put in getting it ready and our MVPs for all their help testing it, refining the features and helping find the remaining bugs. Enjoy and please give me any feedback you have. We'll turn our attention to thinking about the next release. We're roughly o...
What a week!
Every year, on the farm, I pick a few “big” projects to do. Earlier this year I built cattle handling facilities. I’m also building goat fencing - and if you think that’s a small feat, you just haven’t been around goats. A friend of mine says if a giraffe can’t get over it and water can’t get under it, it will hold goats :) But I digress. My big project for this summer is getting water out to all of our fields for the cows. For the past several years, we’ve been using hoses. I have over 1,000 feet of hoses and every week I have to...
TFS 2010 Cumulative Update republished
Finally. Yesterday we republished the TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative update. You'll find the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26211 You can read my original article about it to learn more: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/06/13/tfs-2010-sp1-cumulative-update-1-available.aspx To refresh your memory, the update was pulled due to two bugs: 1) Installing it on a TFS Proxy server broke the proxy server, requiring uninstall. 2) After installing it on a TFS server, subsequent imports of TFS 2008 servers into TFS 2010 project collections was broken. Both issues have now ...
Aug ‘11 TFS Power Tools coming soon
We’re in final testing for the August release of the TFS Power Tools. I’ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days and it’s looking really good. In this post I’ll give you a sneak preview of what is coming and then, as soon as the download is available (another week or two), I’ll blog the link. I hope you are really going to like it. We’ve managed to get in a bunch of long standing requests. Key improvements in this release include: Windows shell extension updates One of the complaints we get a lot on the shell extension is that if you are using anything other than a domain account, there...
18 Months of Developer Division Releases
I realized it’s not really right for me to say we’ve shipped 75 releases in the past 18 months and then leave you to guess what they were. I asked Jeff for the slide he presented and have copied the data here. It’s roughly categorized. I’m not promising the categorization is completely accurate or that we haven’t left out anything but it’s close enough. It would be nice if I had dates and download links for each one but that would be quite a bit of effort for me to track down. On my last post there was quite a lot of commentary on the VS update process a...
VS Release cadence question
In my post on MTM performance, Lachlan asked if we plan to start releasing VS more often. I wrote an answer but it got so long that I decided to turn it into a post instead. Here it is... As for release cadence, it's a complicated question. We've had a lot of conversations about it over the years and we want to release more frequently. I think the biggest thing we NEED to be able to do is to get experience improvements (rather than new features) in people's hands more quickly. Some random thoughts on what we do today. About a month ago I was in a discussion on how we improve our release ca...
A comment on performance
If you check out our User Voice site, 4 of the top 5 voted items have to do with performance. Over the next few months I’ll comment about some of the work we are doing around VS performance (and there has been a lot). But I just got some data that I wanted to share. About half way down the second page (with 73 votes currently) is a suggestion “Improve Test Manager performance”. This is feedback we’ve heard over the past year or so and have done a lot of investigation and work to improve it. As usual, when you start digging in to this kind of stuff, you find some bon...
Version Control Model Enhancements in TFS 11
One of the more difficult things for developers with TFS today is the “Workspace”. A workspace is a mapping of code out of a TFS server onto your hard drive and defines all of the rules of how your local operations on those files relate to what is on the server. We’ve heard feedback since 2005 that developers would like some improvements in this space and we’ve made some significant leaps in TFS 11. Some of the more common issues we’ve heard include: A little background before I talk about the improvements we are making. When we designed TFS 2005, ...
Developers are Raving Fans
Last month I wrote a post describing a cool, streamlined, web based Agile project management solution we are building. Over the next week or so I’m going to write a series of posts covering another area we’ve been working on. We call the scenario “Developers are Raving Fans”. In the 2010 release of Team Foundation Server, we spent a disproportionate share of our time working on infrastructure improvements. Scale up, scale down, scale out, disaster recovery, reliability, backup/restore, simplified install, flexible configuration, patching, administration, etc. etc. T...
Putting TFS on Port 80
Maarten asked me a couple of weeks ago if it was possible to put TFS on port 80 along with Sharepoint and if so, was there any documentation. I said, yes, I know it's possible because I know we've tested it but I didn't know if there was any documentation. After a little poking around the conclusion was "no", there isn't any documentation on this specific scenario. So Maarten decided to blaze the path and has documented his experience here for all who wish to follow: http://maartenvanstam.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/team-foundation-server-2010-on-port-80/ Brian
stpSoft Requirements Definer
stpSoft recently released additional support for Team Foundation Server with their Requirements Definer product. Check it out here: http://www.stpsoft.co.uk/definer/index.html. And make sure to watch the videos - they do a good job of showing the flow from creating a user story through flow definition, requirements, test cases, storyboarding, etc. Very nice!Brian
Unified UserVoice site
It pretty quickly became clear that having separate Visual Studio and Visual Studio ALM sites just wasn't going to be a good idea. It just wasn't clear to people which site to post ideas in. As a result, we have combined the two under the Visual Studio site. The ALM ideas and votes have been moved over. Please file your ideas there now. http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/filters/top Brian
UserVoice site for Visual Studio too
In addition to the UserVoice site that I recently blogged about for Visual Studio ALM features I blogged about recently, we've also created a UserVoice site for general Visual Studio feedback for areas other than the ALM features. I'm not 100% sure why we created 2 of them but I guess it gives you the ability to have 2 top 10 lists :) Brian
New Avenue for Feedback on VS ALM
UPDATE 7/18/11: We've combined the ALM UserVoice site with the Visual Studio one at http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/filters/top. Please file your ideas there. We recently created a UserVoice site for the world to make product suggestions and vote on them. As you can see from the site, it’s designed for feedback on: We’re definitely excited to have another avenue for collecting customer feedback on our products. Since the site is brand new, there’s not much on it yet. Please go populate it with your best ideas. One thing to keep in mi...
MSDN Subscribers can now upgrade their TFS 2010 SQLServer to SQL 2008 R2
A while ago we got some feedback from customers that something about our licensing of Team Foundation Server’s use of SQL under an MSDN subscription didn’t make sense. We’ve just fixed it. Let me start by explaining status quo. When you purchase TFS, you get a license to use SQLServer Standard Edition along with your TFS (but it can only be used for TFS). The version of SQL you get a license to is the version that was current when we released the version of TFS you are using. So, for example, TFS 2010 includes a license to use SQL 2008. Soon after TFS 2010 released, SQL release...
TFS Build Extensions published
Mike Fourie just published a bunch of workflow activities/actions for TFS builds. It’s a great set of extensions that makes TFS builds even more powerful with less work. You can get them on CodePlex here: http://tfsbuildextensions.codeplex.com/releases/view/67138 Check them out… Brian
OData Access to TFS
I’m criminally late in blogging about this and for that I apologize. Several months ago, the Microsoft platform evangelism team came to me and said they wanted to create a really good OData sample that would show people all the stuff you can do with OData and how easy it is. They told me that they thought creating an OData service running on Windows Azure and providing a public data feed for TFS on CodePlex would make for a great sample. They asked it I had any objections. Of course, I said no; that sounds like a great idea. A few months ago they published the service an...
Build service offering from Discount ASP.NET
A couple of weeks ago Discount ASP.NET released a build service offering to go along with their hosted TFS offering. This makes it possible for you to host even more of your development process in the cloud - a big benefit, particularly for highly distributed teams. Check it out here: http://www.discountasp.net/tfs/hosted-tfs-build-server.aspx Brian
New Visual Studio ALM Videos
Last week Esther Fan posted some great videos that can help you get the most out of VS ALM. It covers a wide range of ALM capabilities - testing, modeling, TFS and more... http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vstsue/archive/2011/06/15/videos-about-visual-studio-alm-team-foundation-server-2010-on-msdn.aspx Brian
The Importance of Feedback in Software Development
If you follow my blog, you know that I talk a lot about collaboration and the impact it has on the success or failure of modern software projects. In a recent post on Agile Project Management, I closed with a brief mention about feedback loops being a major initiative for us in our next release. Here I want to expand on that a bit. Let’s look at the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan I would argue that every one of these man...
New Rangers Guidance on Build Customization & Lab Management
This week, the Visual Studio Rangers released two new sets of guidance: Build Customization and Lab Management. They are some great resources for adopting TFS build and lab management automation. The content includes: The build customization guidance includes topics like build process customization, versioning, branching, deployment and more. The lab management guidance covers topics like hardware/capacity planning, setup & configuration and VM creation. You can learn more by visiting the Visual Studio Rangers blog or by downloading the guidance from the links above. Brian
Agile Project Management in Visual Studio ALM V.Next
When we first started designing Team Foundation Server, one of our mantras was “Your process, our process or no process”. What we meant by this was that TFS can play an important role in helping you automate your development process. Many teams already have a well establish process and aren’t particularly interested in changing it. TFS can be configured to fit with your process – whatever it is. Many teams don’t have a well established process and would like to adopt some “best practices” and then evolve them – TFS can do that to, and we provide 3 process templates today you can adopt (Agile, Scrum and CMMI)....
Looking ahead to the next version of VS Application Lifecycle Management
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about some announcements we made at TechEd on the next version of Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management. We did a pretty good overview demo and released a white paper that gave a pretty good overview of the work we are doing. It was not, by any means, complete. There’s a lot of stuff we are doing that didn’t get mentioned – because, quite honestly, there’s just too much to talk about in such a short period of time. For example, one of the things we didn’t talk too much about at TechEd was our work on TFS on Azure. I wr...
TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 Available
Last week, we released a cumulative update for TFS 2010 SP1. You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=bca68e8d-4612-48cd-9418-1b973d41073f. The KB article is in the process of being published and should be available soon. *UPDATE* - This update prereqs SP1 and should be installed on TFS application tiers and build servers. It need not be installed elsewhere (clients or proxies). *IMPORTANT UPDATE* - Don't install this patch on a TFS proxy! It will break the proxy. We'll fix the patch and address the issue but for now just don't install it on a ...
Team Foundation Server Dogfooding update – May 2011
It’s been a looong time since I published a detailed look at TFS dogfooding. I used to do them every month but then the server got so big and the reports monotonous enough that I decided to stop. I’ve had a number of queries about it in the past few months, so I figured it was time to do an update. I’ll start by talking about DevDiv. It’s more complicated than it used to be. We used to just have one TFS server for all of DevDiv and I could report one set of stats. Now we kind of have 3. Let me explain. In TFS 2010, we introduced Team Project Collections. In many ways a Team Project collection is like...
Growing TFS databases
I’ve seen a few reports lately of TFS customers whose databases were growing very rapidly. After investigation, it has often turned out to be that they were uploading a lot of large attachments to TFS as part of their testing process and then not cleaning them up when they were no longer needed. Our testing tools can upload screenshots, videos, Intellitrace logs, etc. and they can add up. Unfortunately, we don’t give you great tools today for examining your TFS disk space or managing it. It’s something that’s rising on my priority list. Grant Holiday recently did a ...
TFS and Project Server resources
We’re gradually adding to the resources available to understand what you can do with Team Foundation Server and Project Server using the Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Feature Pack to manage enterprise development projects. Here are 4 new online videos demonstrating various scenarios: Here’s a recording of a session from this year’s TechEd with a bunch more information about what you can do: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/OSP203 On June 8th, we’ve got a web cast coming up where you can learn more too: https://msevents.micro...
Update on TFS on Azure
It’s been a while since I last talked about our work on TFS on Azure and I’ve been feeling like it’s time to give some kind of an update. We made a bunch of new ALM announcements about our ALM roadmap at TechEd and we didn’t say too much about hosted TFS, so you may be wondering what we’ve been up to. We’ve continued to work hard on it along with the rest of our V.Next work. As you’ll recall, our initial port to Azure was pretty quick and easy. Azure – the technology stack isn’t all that different from the standard Microsoft on premises stack...
Connecting Development and Operations
For the last year or so I’ve been giving talks about trends in software development and particularly ALM. I’ve described one of the big upcoming trends as the need for better collaboration between development and operations. The state of that collaboration today is not great even given our current technology stacks. However, as cloud architectures become more and more common and the need for being “up to date” with short release cycles continue to accelerate, we are going to see ever increasing demand for the development and operations teams to work closely together. In some orgs we’ll even see some blurring ...
ALM Futures announced at TechEd yesterday
Yesterday was a big day for us! In his keynote at TechEd yesterday Jason Zander gave an overview of our ALM roadmap. In a follow up session Cameron Skinner did more of a deep dive, demonstrating many of the new features coming in the next version. You can read a really good overview here on Jason’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2011/05/16/announcing-alm-roadmap-in-visual-studio-vnext-at-teched.aspx I also want to particularly call out the whitepaper we put together: Visual Studio vNext- Application Lifecycle Management whitepaper. It’s a really good overview of t...
Announcing a Java SDK for TFS
From the beginning, extensibility of TFS was a core design principle – both to enable great 3rd party partners (like Ekobit, Urban Turtle, InCycle and more) and because almost all development shops have a need to customize the tools they use. As such we’ve provided a .NET library for interacting with and extending TFS from day one. And I’m always amazed with the things people are able to do with it. Today I am pleased to announce that we are now also extending this the Java side of the house. We have just made the Team Foundation Server SDK for Java available as a public download. Now you will...
discount ASP.net adds European data center option
discount ASP.net has added an option to their hosted TFS service for you to host your TFS in the UK. If you want to learn more, check it out here: http://www.discountasp.net/tfs/Brian
Team Foundation Server and Project Server virtual machine
With the release of the final Feature Pack of the TFS/PS connector, we’ve now released an updated virtual machine that contains full configured and ready to test drive bits with all the final software. You can read Brian Keller’s blog entry on it to get all the details on how to get the VM: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2011/04/15/getting-started-with-the-team-foundation-server-2010-and-project-server-2010-integration-virtual-machine.aspxBrian
Free Azure Trial
I ran across this today and thought you might find it useful. If you’d like to try our Azure with no-strings attached, no credit card, no commitment, there’s a cool offer available now. You can learn more about it here: http://windowsazurepass.com/ Enter the promo code: CRMIKEA to get access for 1 month. You’ll get… Brian
Team Explorer Everywhere is now available in 3 new languages
This week we released, both to the MSDN subscriber download site and to public downloads, a language pack for Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1. This language pack includes Japanese, French and German resources that can be added to your English Team Explorer Everywhere installation. After installing them, TEE will use the appropriate language based on your operating system locale. Of course you can override it if you want (there’s a link to http://www.eclipse.org/babel/ in the instructions for more on this). There is actually only one language pack and it includes all 3 additional language...
Build Folders
One of the fairly common requests we get is for some way to organize build definitions. If you have more than a dozen or two build definitions in a single Team Project, the Team Explorer starts to get unwieldy. At our MVP Summit a couple of months ago, one of our MVPs presented a cool Team Explorer extension he had built for organizing build definitions. I was really impressed with how simple it was. Basically he just recognizes a naming convention for build definitions and presents them as folders. So, for instance, a build definition called Foo.Bar.Baz would be rendered as: Foo Bar Baz The “....
A nice case study from InnovaSystems
We’ve just completed a nice case study with InnovaSystems on their adoption of Team Foundation Server in order to achieve CMMI Level 3 compliance. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-.NET-Framework-4/InnovaSystems-International/Defense-Contractor-Earns-CMMI-L3-Rating-Raises-Productivity-by-Up-to-25-Percent/4000009464 Brian
TFS Integration Platform Updated (Mar ‘11)
Last week, we released a new, tested, binary release of the integration platform (the source has been on CodePlex for a while). This release primarily contains a bunch of bug fixes. The bugs came from our internal use of server to server synchronization tools, customer reports and internal testing. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f854dd59-8eeb-4673-8d9a-ae012989bfa2 The list of bugs fixes is: Together, these represent a significa...
Professional Team Foundation Server 2010
A new book on Team Foundation server has just recently been released. It’s an in-depth view of using the breadth of TFS 2010 capabilities and includes a lot of information on customizing and extending TFS. I know the authors well (2 of them are on our team :)) and I can’t think of a better group of people to write the definitive work on TFS. I recommend it for everyone responsible for managing a development process with TFS. More here: http://www.edsquared.com/2011/03/05/Book+Professional+Team+Foundation+Server+2010+From+Wrox.aspx Brian
Mid-west visits by Ed Thomson
In early April, Ed Thomson, one of the TFS developers working on Team Explorer Everywhere will be making a tour through the mid-west US talking with customers and user groups. If you are interested in learning more about TFS and Java or non-Windows development, I strongly encourage you to see if you can make it. Ed’s a very sharp guy and knows the ins and outs of the product. I’m sure it will be an entertaining discussion. You can learn more about cities and dates here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/angelab/archive/2011/03/21/tfs-product-team-coming-to-chicago-milwaukee-in-april-to-t...
Discount ASP.net offers Urban Turtle add-on
As you may know Discount ASP.net has been offering hosted TFS for a while now. They’ve just launched an add-on of Urban Turtle that provides a great SCRUM experience on top of TFS. They are offering a free 30 day trial so it’s a great time for you to give it a spin. Learn more about it here: http://www.discountasp.net/tfs/ Brian
Team Explorer 2010 SP1 Bug viewing build summary
The dangers of late breaking changes :(. In the final weeks of 2010 SP1, we made a performance improvement for viewing build information from the build explorer. Unfortunately, this was after the Beta and after our compatibility test pass. The unfortunate result is that we missed a bug when you are using Team Explorer 2010 SP1 against a TFS 2008 TFS server. In this scenario, when viewing a build report, VS will experience a NullReferenceException and it will crash :( I hate that we missed this and we’re going to redouble our efforts to make sure we don’t miss compat breaks like...
Case Study on Team Foundation Server Project Server Integration Feature Pack
We’ve been working with some MSIT teams for many months on our integration between TFS and Project Server. They started dogfooding it as soon as we could say “it’s working” with a straight face. They’ve now run multiple projects with it and they’ve given us a ton of feedback. We’ve incorporated much of it in our final release. They’ve now released a case study documenting some of the benefits they got from integrating TFS and Project Server. You can read more here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Project-Professional-2010...
Installing all the new stuff
We released a ton of new stuff this week and this, of course, only adds to all the other stuff we have released. I got a request on one of my posts to clarify what is installed where and in what order. I’ll try to make sense of it all here. First a couple of principles: Now let’s look at what we’ve released. Now let’s look at what you have to install where… On the client Other than the restriction that you must install VS before any of the other things, there really aren’t any ordering requirements. I’ve seen requests to en...
Unlimited Load Testing
Today we announced the release of the Load Testing Feature Pack. This gives Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN users the ability to do unlimited load testing. Previously you had to separately purchase Load Test Packs that each included the ability to simulate a certain number of virtual users and could be stacked to simulate very high loads. This has now all been incorporated into Ultimate Edition (including the load agent software necessary to run a distributed load test simulation), enabling you to load test with as many virtual users as you want. This is a great step forward to making it simple...
VS/TFS 2010 SP1 and TFS-Project Server Integration Feature Pack have Released
Today is a big day of releases and announcements. Two of the big ones are that VS 2010 SP1 and TFS 2010 SP1 have shipped and that the Team Foundation Server Project Server Integration Feature Pack is now available for MSDN subscribers. As of today, both are available on the MSDN download site. On Thursday 3/10, the SP1 builds will become available to non-MSDN subscribers on the Microsoft download sites. I’ll update this post when I have the links. ***UPDATE*** Here are the public download links now: SP1 SP1 is not a huge service pack by VS 2008 SP1 standards but it’s a very nice on...
Mar ‘11 Team Foundation Server Power Tools are Available
Today we released an update to the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. You can download them here: The primary enhancements in this release are: Backup/Restore Power Tool We released the backup/restore Power Tool in the last Power Tools release and you can read about it in depth here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/08/18/backing-up-and-restoring-your-tfs-server.aspx and here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/08/19/backing-up-your-tfs-server-with-sharepoint-and-reporting.aspx. Unfortunately, we pretty quickly got feedback that there were enough bu...
ALM Summit Survey
Keith asked me to let you all know about a survey he is doing to help plan for a potential ALM Summit later this year. We did the first one last year and it went pretty well. It was clearly a V1 and had some rough edges but most of the feedback I got was very positive. If it's something you are at all interested in, please take the survey. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ALMSummit2011 Brian
Code metrics produced from your automated build
One of the things about our 2010 product line that has embarassed me from the beginning is that there's no way to use our code metrics tools to produce data from an automated build. Our tools only work in the VS IDE and on the loaded solution. No longer! We just released a Power Tool that enables you to run code metrics from the command line and therefore to integrate it into your build process. I wish I could say the data was put in the warehouse and was really easy to generate report from, but I can't. The data is emitted as an XML file and, for now, you are on your own to turn tha...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 is Available
Back in November I wrote about the first Beta of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1, and today I am proud to announce that the final version is available to download for MSDN Subscribers. **UPDATE 2/11/11** - the publicly available download (for licensed Team Explorer Everywhere customers) is now available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=53c27216-c4f0-48b6-9bed-fe1718a2e3b0 See my previous post for more information about what shipped in Beta 1. The feedback from the Beta was very good, so the team took the opportunity to add in a few new features into the final release based on ...
January 2011 ALM Documentation updates are available
A few days ago, we posted the latest updates to the online documentation. Below is a summary of the new and updated content. Perhaps the one I’ve gotten the mote requests for is information on configuring TFS for HTTPS. Team Foundation Administration: Planning and Tracking Projects Brian
Updated book for TFS Build and MSBuild
William Bartholomew and Sayed Hashimi just publised and updated book with great coverage of the 2010 versions of TFS Build and MSBuild. It covers both high level framing of build organization and detailed drill down into "how to". It's a great reference book if you are responsible for an involved build system. Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build Brian
Urban Turtle for Scrum and TFS
In November I started a series about “TFS as an open platform” and, as part of that I’m writing about some of the top tier 3rd party enhancements to TFS. I wrote about Tasktop/Mylyn and Team Companion. Today, I want to tell you about Urban Turtle. Unless you’ve been in a cave for the past 5 or 10 years, you’ve probably noticed the growth in popularity of Agile development practices. Of the various Agile development practices, the most popular is the SCRUM project management process. TFS has many native capabilities that support Scrum but not a great, fine tuned, Scrum focused user experience. Urban Turtle...
Getting back into it after the holidays
I hope you all had a great holiday break and new year. I just posted my first post since mid December. I actually took a pretty sizable break from work this year and really didn't do any work at home other than skim mail to avoid being buried when I got back :) It was a good break for me - lots of family time and plenty of farm work. We were trying to load a couple of cows into a trailer over the break and they went nuts and broke through a fence and rampaged around the farm. It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for me to finally start working on some new and effective c...
Japanese Team Explorer Everywhere SP1 Beta Available
In my post announcing the availability of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 Beta, I talked about the localization improvements we've made in this release. For the first time, you can experience it yourself. We have just released the Japanese language pack for the Beta. It was available on MSDN subscriber downloads just before the end of the year and it is available to everyone starting this morning. The public download site is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=cf900205-9617-4700-9e2f-fd5039c62550 The installation instructions are still English for the moment thou...
TFS Build Activity reference documentation is available
A few days ago we released the reference documentation for the TFS Build workflow activities. There are a lot of them and they are as multi-faceted as a swiss army knife - so having the reference documentation is darned handy. You can check out the docs here: Team Foundation Build Activities. You can also read the author's blog post about them to get a little more context on how to navigate the docs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andy-lewis/archive/2010/12/10/team-foundation-build-activity-reference.aspx Brian
Team Explorer Everywhere documentation is online
We've now published the Team Explorer Everywhere documentation online on MSDN. This will make it easier to find and search as it will be indexed by your favorite search engines :) You'll find the docs for the Eclipse plug-in here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg413285.aspx And the docs for the cross platform command line here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg413282.aspx Brian
A simple way to try out VS/TFS 2010
Brian Keller just released an update to his trial/demo VM. If you're interested in just kicking the tires on just about everything we offer but don't really want to try to cobble everything together, it's a great way to go. In addition to VS Ultimate and TFS, his trial VM includes: · Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 (which includes Feature Pack 1) · Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools (September 2010 Release) · Visual Studio 2010 Prod...
Improvements for Testing in VS/TFS 2010 SP1
Here's a blog post that details the improvements for testing in VS, TFS and Microsoft Test Manager in SP1. I've got an outstand ask to find the list of improvements in the Framework too. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/amit_chatterjee/archive/2010/12/10/visual-studio-2010-service-pack-1-beta-released-information-on-test-and-lab-management-changes.aspx Brian
Portfolio Management: TFS <-> Project Server Integration in Beta
Hot on the heels of announcing the release of Feature Pack 2 – the Testing Feature Pack, I’m excited to announce that the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack is now in Beta. To avoid being repetitive, if you are new to the concept of a Feature Pack, you can read a little more about them. The TFS-PS Feature Pack is being released to MSDN subscribers today as a “go-live” Beta. That means we believe it is ready to be installed and used in a production environment. Unlike the CTP that has been available for a while now, this i...
Portfolio Management: TFS <-> Project Server Integration in Beta
Hot on the heels of announcing the release of Feature Pack 2 – the Testing Feature Pack, I’m excited to announce that the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack is now in Beta. To avoid being repetitive, if you are new to the concept of a Feature Pack, you can read a little more about them. The TFS-PS Feature Pack is being released to MSDN subscribers today as a “go-live” Beta. That means we believe it is ready to be installed and used in a production environment. Unlike the CTP that has been available for a while now, this is not being released as a Virtual Ma...
VS/TFS 2010 SP1 Beta has Released
Today we released VS/TFS 2010 SP1 Beta and .NET 4 Update Beta to MSDN subscribers. On Thursday, they will be available to the general public. The Beta comes with a "go live" license which means that it can be installed in a production environment. Further, upgrading from the Beta to the final release of SP1, when it is available, will be very easy. Download links for MSDN Subscribers (Note all 3 of these links are the same. You’ll find the 3 downloads and more on the subscriber site at this link): Download links for everyone else (available on Thursday): All...
Color Printing Returns to VS 2010
This is going to be a very busy news week so keep your eyes peeled. I’ve got a lot of writing to do but I figured I’d start the action packed week with something light and fun :) A couple of months ago someone posted a comment on my blog about missing the ability to print source code from VS with color syntax highlighting. I looked into it and found that an extension was under development to do just that. About a week ago, we posted an add-in on VS Gallery for source printing with color syntax highlighting. It’s easy to install and works like a charm. Try it out and...
DotNet Rocks Episode with Martin Woodward
Check out the recent DotNet Rocks episode where our very own Martin Woodward, Program Manager and Developer for Team Explorer Everywhere talks about his experiences joining Microsoft, TFS for heterogeneous development and more. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=615 Brian
A new release of the Ranger’s WCF Load Test Tool
Yesterday, the Rangers released a Beta release of the next version of their WCF Load Test Tool. This tool enables you to use a trace file to generate a test that reproduces the trace. There’s a bunch of nice new features: You can download the tool off of CodePlex from here: WCF Load Test tool Brian
A new release of the Ranger’s WCF Load Test Tool
Yesterday, the Rangers released a Beta release of the next version of their WCF Load Test Tool. This tool enables you to use a trace file to generate a test that reproduces the trace. There’s a bunch of nice new features: You can download the tool off of CodePlex from here: WCF Load Test tool Brian
TeamCompanion and TFS
As part of my series on TFS and VS ALM as an open platform, I’m going to be posting about some of the premier add-on/extensions. There are lots of extensions, but these are ones that I’ve used myself and can attest to the quality of the products and the experiences. The first I want to talk about is TeamCompanion. You can read more about them in their own words on their blogs too: TeamCompanion is an Outlook plugin that integrates all your TFS work management in one place. It makes your TFS work item queries, reports, documents, etc show up in the Outlook content bar just like yo...
TeamCompanion and TFS
As part of my series on TFS and VS ALM as an open platform, I’m going to be posting about some of the premier add-on/extensions. There are lots of extensions, but these are ones that I’ve used myself and can attest to the quality of the products and the experiences. The first I want to talk about is TeamCompanion. You can read more about them in their own words on their blogs too: TeamCompanion is an Outlook plugin that integrates all your TFS work management in one place. It makes your TFS work item queries, reports, documents, etc show up in the Outlook content bar just like your mail, calend...
Tasktop Announces TFS and VS Support for Mylyn
Last week, at the ALM Summit, Tasktop made 2 exciting announcements. The first is that they are adding support for TFS to their Mylyn Eclipse plugin. The second is that they are building a Mylyn plugin for Visual Studio. This is the first in my series on the ALM ecosystem around Team Foundation Server (ok, the first, not counting the intro post :)). For those who aren’t familiar with Mylyn, it is a work management tool for developers. It allows developer to track their tasks, associate context with tasks and switch or share tasks and their corresponding context. For example, if...
TFS is an Open Platform
From the day we conceived TFS back in 2003, we knew that we wanted it to be an open platform upon which anyone could build their favorite development experiences. We started by building an architecture based on standard technologies – SQL Server for the datastore, Reporting Services and Analysis Services for analytics, web services for the protocols and a .NET object model for easy programmability on the client. I remember starting in the very early days with the rule that there’s nothing our clients can do that our customers can’t also build clients to do – no secret APIs, no ...
Feature Pack 2 is Available!
About a week ago, I wrote a post describing some cool stuff coming in Visual Studio ALM Feature Pack 2. I’m happy to announce that it is now available. A reminder that Feature Pack 2 is available to customers with VS Ultimate with MSDN, VS Premium with MSDN or VS Test Professional with MSDN. You can find the download on our Feature Packs page here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=192777 Being mindful of the number of things we suggest people install, we have made Feature Pack 2 cumulative with Feature Pack 1. One installer will get you both. If you already have Feature Pack 1 ...
Denali and Juneau
At SQL PASS last week, Microsoft gave some insights into the next version of SQL Server (Denali) and a new generation of database development tools (Juneau). You can read more about it here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2010/11/10/microsoft-dives-deeper-into-sql-server-code-named-denali-the-next-version-of-sql-server.aspx. Information is, of course, still a bit light because it’s still pretty early in the process. Already I’ve seen a few questions about how this relates to VS ALM capabilities. I wanted to say a few words to give my perspective on how I think...
Busy on the Farm
A couple of weeks ago I promised I’d post an update on the farm. It’s hard to believe but it’s been over 2 years since my last big post on the farm. It’s been busy but I still love it. In fact, I’m just finishing up a “farmcation”. I needed to stockpile hay for the winter and I can’t grow enough so I had 148 rolls delivered yesterday and today – and did a whole bunch of stuff in between deliveries We live on the farm now. In fact it will be 2 years this Christmas. In my pictures a few years ago, you could just see the beginnings of the house across the pond. Now, it looks like this. I still haven’t go...
Feature Pack 2 is Imminent
Back in June, I introduced the notion of a “Feature Pack”. Soon afterwards I announced the availability of the first Feature Pack – the Modeling Feature Pack. Now, it is my pleasure to give you a preview of the soon-to-be-released Testing Feature Pack (internally known as Feature Pack 2). It’s another VS 2010 family deliverable that has some totally terrific capabilities! As a reminder, Feature Packs are only available to customers with the proper level of MSDN subscription. The first Feature Pack (the modeling one) required a VS Ultimate + MSDN subscription for customers to qualify. This Test Feature Pack...
Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 Beta is available for download!
We strive to ensure that developers working with Team Foundation Server in the Eclipse and cross platform worlds enjoy as great an experience as their counterparts enjoy in Visual Studio. We also want to keep Team Explorer Everywhere up to date with the latest versions of Eclipse. Six months ago we shipped Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 on the same day as Team Foundation Server 2010. In the past six months the team has been hard at work on an update that will address many of the remaining gaps. Today, we released a Beta that you can find here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=4449ba...
TFS on Windows Azure at the PDC
**UPDATED May 18th 2001** - See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/05/18/update-on-tfs-on-azure.aspx Hosting of ALM in the cloud as software as a service is gradually becoming more and more popular. The vision, of course, is ALM as a seamless service – making it really easy to get started, easy to scale, easy to operate, easy to access, … You’ve seen me write from time to time about our work with 3rd party hosting and consulting companies offering TFS services. We did a bunch of work in TFS 2010 on both the technical and licensing front to enable a new generation of cloud based TFS services. Sev...
Help improvements in VS 2010 SP1
Jeff recently blogged about some pretty significant improvements that are coming in VS 2010 SP1: http://thirdblogfromthesun.com/2010/10/the-story-of-help-in-visual-studio-2010-part-3/ We've gotten some very strong feedback about local help viewing and we've gone a long way to try to address it. Check out his post to learn more. Brian
TFS Hosting at HostBasket
The other day, I alluded to one more TFS hosting announcement coming soon. Today, I can be more clear :) HostBasket, has announce TFS hosting with a free offer through the end of the year. Check it out at: http://www.hostbasket.com/en/applications/tfs/index.html I’m psyched to have another strong partner offering a first class service. As always, your one stop shop for learning about TFS hosting services is: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/team-foundation-server/hosting Brian
Praktik Hosting Updates their Hosted TFS Offering
One of our relatively long term hosting partners - Praktik Hosting, has just updated their hosting offering based on our TFS 2010 product and licensing changes. The result is a more affordable service with more features. They are also going beyond just TFS and providing an option of licensing Urban Turtle for Scrum team management on top of TFS. Definitely worth checking out. http://www.praktikhosting.com/PlansComparison/tabid/58/Default.aspx I know of one more hosting partner with a near term announcement in the works and I'm hoping to be able to let you know about that within the next week or ...
Addendum to the Farming Lesson
I forgot one thing about my experience with the round bale feeder (perhaps I blocked it out :)). As the calf started running off with the round bale feeder hooked on his hips, he was mooing in a total panicked frenzy. This, of course excited the other 60 cows that were in the field with him and they all started charging toward us, running around us and mooing in sympathy. It added a bit to the increased feeling of danger that set in upon me. In retrospect, it reminded me of a video I once saw. If you’ve ever wondered how threatening a heard of cattle can be, watch this video from Kruger National Park in So...
A Lesson in Farming
Take my advice. Don’t get in a round bale ring with a cow. It’s been a while since I’ve written about my alter-ego – farmer Brian. I’ve been meaning to write a general farm update post and still hope to in the next couple of weeks (with pictures and all). But something happened this last week that was funny enough that I just had to take a few minutes and write about it. Our summer this year was extremely dry and, as a result, all the grass went dormant in Aug/Sept. Because of this I’ve been feeding hay for the last several weeks to try to give the grass a chance to recover now that the fall rains have star...
Urban Turtle 3.5 Released
Urban Turtle is a TFS add-on that adds a Taskboard and Scrum management abilities to TFS Team Web Access. I recently visited them in Montreal and got an up close look at the work they are doing and it’s very cool. I strongly recommend it for people who are doing Scrum with TFS. Check out their latest release at: http://urbanturtle.com/blog/Brian
Urban Turtle 3.5 Released
Urban Turtle is a TFS add-on that adds a Taskboard and Scrum management abilities to TFS Team Web Access. I recently visited them in Montreal and got an up close look at the work they are doing and it’s very cool. I strongly recommend it for people who are doing Scrum with TFS. Check out their latest release at: http://urbanturtle.com/blog/Brian
Discount ASP.net launches a hosted TFS service
Yesterday, Discount ASP.net launched a TFS Software as a Service offering. It’s great to have a large scale, experienced, global hoster providing hosted TFS services. Their offering starts at $20 per user per month. You can read more about it here: http://www.discountasp.net/press/2010_10_discountasp.net-launches-team-foundation-server-hosting.aspx If you try it out, let me know about your experience. Brian
Discount ASP.net launches a hosted TFS service
Yesterday, Discount ASP.net launched a TFS Software as a Service offering. It’s great to have a large scale, experienced, global hoster providing hosted TFS services. Their offering starts at $20 per user per month. You can read more about it here: http://www.discountasp.net/press/2010_10_discountasp.net-launches-team-foundation-server-hosting.aspx If you try it out, let me know about your experience. Brian
TFS 2010 SCOM Management Pack is Available
I know it’s been a long time coming but it is now here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=97ca3b31-3653-4d60-bdad-3f2017febdc3&displaylang=en I think (and hope) you will find it worth the wait. It is a substantial upgrade from the TFS 2008 Management Pack. Among other things, we’ve added auto discovery of complex TFS server topologies and monitoring of application tiers, build machines and proxy servers. We also put more effort into this one than any previous one to make sure it provides a comprehensive view on a TFS server’s health. Part of what h...
Scrolling menus are dead!
OK, maybe not quite but a big step forward. This week we released a hotfix for both VS and WPF that changes menu placement to eliminate scrolling menus when there actually is enough vertical real estate to avoid them. In the screen shot below (with the patch applied), you can see that menu has been moved up (relative to the right click target – Program.cs) to avoid clipping the menu at the bottom of the screen and having a scrolling menu. Pre-hotfix the menu would have been vertically aligned with Program.cs and you would have seen a little scrolling arrow at the bottom of the menu in place of the last 5 or so...
Visual Studio 2010 Survey
As part of our preparation for Service Pack 1 of VS 2010, we are running a general product satisfaction survey to understand how people feel about the product and what areas, if any, they feel need to be improved. This is primarily targeted at the kind of improvements we would make in a service pack (not big new features :)). We'd appreciate it if you'd take the survey and leave specific comments about the kinds of things you feel need short term improvement. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=203459 Thank you, Brian
Visual Studio 2010 Survey
As part of our preparation for Service Pack 1 of VS 2010, we are running a general product satisfaction survey to understand how people feel about the product and what areas, if any, they feel need to be improved. This is primarily targeted at the kind of improvements we would make in a service pack (not big new features :)). We'd appreciate it if you'd take the survey and leave specific comments about the kinds of things you feel need short term improvement. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=203459 Thank you, Brian
BizTalk 2009 and TFS 2010
After we released TFS 2010, I started to hear some complaints from BizTalk users that trying to build a BizTalk 2009 project using TFS Build associated with a TFS 2010 server did not work. The principle we strive for is that our various platform technology versions are independent of the version of TFS you use. You should be able to use new or old TFS and build based on newer or older platform releases. Obviously, there are limits to how far we can (or should) take this but that's the general goal. So once these reports that BizTalk 2009 wasn't working with TFS 2010 surfaced, I worked with the B...
A new generation of Hosted TFS
In TFS 2010, we did a bunch of work in the product to make it more "hostable" - meaning flexible, manageable, scalable, etc. In the months after the release of TFS 2010, we also worked on some new licensing plans to help make hosted TFS more affordable. Finally we are starting to see some of the fruits of that labor coming to light. The first of several hosting partners have announced new hosted TFS offerings at new, much lower, price points. Saas Made Easy has refreshed their line of hosted TFS offerings and added a new entry level offering that roughly equates to the "TFS Basic" level of funct...
Dogfooding TFS Build in Developer Division
I think, in a post a few months ago, I wrote about the latest evolution of dogfooding TFS within Developer Division - adoption of TFS build for much of our build automation needs. It's been a large undertaking because our build process is huge and incredibly complex. Also, I'm talking about build in a large sense here - everything from checkin automation systems to the big "official" nightly build (there are actually about 80 of them every night). The man behind the effort is William Bartholomew. William is a former MVP turned Microsoft employee and has brought his extensive knowledge of the VS ...
Dogfooding TFS Build in Developer Division
I think, in a post a few months ago, I wrote about the latest evolution of dogfooding TFS within Developer Division - adoption of TFS build for much of our build automation needs. It's been a large undertaking because our build process is huge and incredibly complex. Also, I'm talking about build in a large sense here - everything from checkin automation systems to the big "official" nightly build (there are actually about 80 of them every night). The man behind the effort is William Bartholomew. William is a former MVP turned Microsoft employee and has brought his extensive knowledge of the VS ...
Dumping the contents of all of your TFS groups
A few days ago, a customer asked me for a way to display all of the TFS groups and their membership. We really don't have a way other than navigating through the dialogs. However, the TFS APIs to do this aren't all that hard to use. One of the developers here wrote up a sample on how do to it and I figured I share it for others who may want it. The command line wrapper on the sample is a bit cheezy but it gives you a pretty good starting point. I've attached the sample to this blog post. Brian DisplayGroups.zip
VS ALM September documentation updates are available
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vstsue/archive/2010/09/27/vsalm-library-updates-on-msdn-for-september-2010.aspxBrian
VS ALM September documentation updates are available
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vstsue/archive/2010/09/27/vsalm-library-updates-on-msdn-for-september-2010.aspxBrian
Known Issues with the Backup/Restore Power Tool
The Backup/Restore Power Tool we shipped in the most recent Power Tools release was an ambitious project. It’s one of the larger and more involved Power Tools we’ve ever shipped. We knew that despite the fact that we did a fair amount of testing and MVP pre-viewing, it would inevitably ship with some undiscovered issues. It’s been out there long enough and enough people have tried it that I think we are getting to critical mass in terms of identifying the issues that people are likely to hit. Below I’ve documented the issues that have been discovered and any work-ar...
Known Issues with the Backup/Restore Power Tool
The Backup/Restore Power Tool we shipped in the most recent Power Tools release was an ambitious project. It’s one of the larger and more involved Power Tools we’ve ever shipped. We knew that despite the fact that we did a fair amount of testing and MVP pre-viewing, it would inevitably ship with some undiscovered issues. It’s been out there long enough and enough people have tried it that I think we are getting to critical mass in terms of identifying the issues that people are likely to hit. Below I’ve documented the issues that have been discovered and any work-ar...
Security Vulnerability Patch Available
Last week, I blogged about an ASP.NET security vulnerability that affected TFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/09/23/security-vulnerability.aspx Yesterday, the ASP.NET team released a patch to fix the vulnerability: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/28/asp-net-security-update-now-available.aspx You can install the patch and remove the work arounds that I described in my previous post. As you can see from Scott's post, they released updates for every version of the Framework since 1.1. You will need to install the appropriate patch on any server that has any version of TFS or ...
ALM Summit in Redmond – Nov 16 – 18
This fall we will be holding an ALM Summit from November 16 to 18 on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington. The summit will bring industry leaders in application lifecycle management together with leading companies focused on using ALM to improve how their engineering and R&D resources deliver value and competitive advantage. It’s a great opportunity to network with peers, share best practices and learn from experts. You’ll hear about Agile methodologies, software development in the Cloud, the future of Application Lifecycle Management and much more. I be there and will keynote d...
Case Study on TFS 2010 and CodePlex
We've published a case study on our experiences of transitioning CodePlex from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. There were some pretty substantial benefits. If you find yourself using some kind of shared TFS service and are contemplating upgrading to TFS 2010, I recommend you check it out. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008270 Brian
Update on backing up TFS with Sharepoint
A few weeks ago we released a new Power Tool to help you with backing up your TFS server. I blogged about it, including how you can backup Sharepoint and Reporting Services as well. Someone asked me if we had verified with the Sharepoint team that the transaction marking we do doesn't invalidate Sharepoint supportability. The early feedback we had from the Sharepoint team was that it was not a problem. We've done a deeper review with them and they've concluded that the changes we make to Sharepoint DO, in fact, violate the Sharepoint support agreement. As such, I encourage you to unc...
Security Vulnerability
On Friday, a security researcher unveiled a new attack vector against ASP.NET applications. You can read more about it on Scott's blog or on the Microsoft Security Advisory. Because TFS is based on ASP.NET, it is affected by the vulnerability. The ASP.NET team is working hard on a fix and assures me a patch will be available soon. In the mean time, they have recommended a set of configuration/application changes that can be made to eliminate the vulnerability. Unfortunately, the provided steps don't work on all aspects of TFS (in part due to the level of ASP.NET behvior customization...
Security Vulnerability
On Friday, a security researcher unveiled a new attack vector against ASP.NET applications. You can read more about it on Scott's blog or on the Microsoft Security Advisory. Because TFS is based on ASP.NET, it is affected by the vulnerability. The ASP.NET team is working hard on a fix and assures me a patch will be available soon. In the mean time, they have recommended a set of configuration/application changes that can be made to eliminate the vulnerability. Unfortunately, the provided steps don't work on all aspects of TFS (in part due to the level of ASP.NET behvior customization...
A TFS 2010 Task Board from AIT
AIT, in Germany, has just released a Beta of a new task board that works with TFS 2010. It is process template agnostic and looks very cool. Check it out: www.aitgmbh.de/index.php
In India this week
I just got to Bangalore a few hours ago and will be going to Hyderabad in a couple of days. I can tell you that the ~24 hours of flying to get here has been exhausting. It's early morning here but bed time at home. I left Friday evening and arrived Sunday morning. It's my first time to India. Unfortunately, it's going to be mostly business so I won't get to see too much but the drive through the city from the airport to the hotel this morning was a lot of fun. The rule seems to be that who ever has the loudest horn has the right of way :) Oh and traffic signals are merely...
Bugs Fixed in the Sept Power Tools Release
Since I’ve gotten a few questions about it, I decided I’d post the list of bug fixes. This doesn’t include any bugs associated with new functionality that showed up in this release – only functionality that was in previous releases:Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) Team Members Create Team Project Misc Brian
Sept 2010 TFS Power Tools Release Available
You find the download for the latest version of the Power Tools here: As with the previous release, these require a TFS 2010 client. If you want Power Tools with a previous TFS client, you will need the 2005 or 2008 Power Tools. There are 3 “new features” in this Power Tools release: Admin Console Backup/Restore Wizard I blogged about this in detail recently here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/08/18/backing-up-and-restoring-your-tfs-server.aspx and here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/08/19/backing-up-your-tfs-server-with-sharepoint-and-reporting.aspx. This Power...
New MSDN Version Selector
This week, we added a new version selector for the default view of the MSDN library. I’ve seen numerous cases in recent months of people being confused by finding help topics for the wrong version of VS and not realizing it. This new selector makes it much clearer which version you are looking at and how to navigate to corresponding content for the version you are interested in: To learn more about this, check out Jeff Braaten’s post on the MSDN blog: http://thirdblogfromthesun.com/2010/08/improved-topic-versions-now-in-msdn-library/ Brian
New MSDN Version Selector
This week, we added a new version selector for the default view of the MSDN library. I’ve seen numerous cases in recent months of people being confused by finding help topics for the wrong version of VS and not realizing it. This new selector makes it much clearer which version you are looking at and how to navigate to corresponding content for the version you are interested in: To learn more about this, check out Jeff Braaten’s post on the MSDN blog: http://thirdblogfromthesun.com/2010/08/improved-topic-versions-now-in-msdn-library/ Brian
Visual Studio Database Guide
Just recently, the Visual Studio Rangers published a new guidance document on best practices for using database projects in Visual Studio 2010. The guidance focuses on: If you are interested, you can get it here: http://vsdatabaseguide.codeplex.com/ Brian
Visual Studio Database Guide
Just recently, the Visual Studio Rangers published a new guidance document on best practices for using database projects in Visual Studio 2010. The guidance focuses on: If you are interested, you can get it here: http://vsdatabaseguide.codeplex.com/ Brian
Database Permissions Required to Configure TFS
***UPDATED Dec 22 2014*** We now have official documentation that replaces this post. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb552341.aspxRecently a question came up through a customer about exactly what permission were needed to SQLServer in order to install/configure Team Foundation Server. One of the developers put together a list of exactly what the configuration process does to SQL and what permissions are required. Of course, many people just install with admin access to SQL and everything just works but in more structured organizations, sometimes the DBAs are different people than t...
Lab Management in Visual Studio 2010 is Now Final!
Today, we released the final update to the Lab Management features for the Visual Studio 2010 product family. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post with a bunch of details on the Lab Management capabilities and also explained recent licensing changes. Today I am announcing that the final bits are now available for download to licensed customers. Here are some useful links: Knowledge Base Article describing the update Lab Management Trial page with lots of useful content and links The patch you need to install on your clients and servers As I mentioned in my previous post (referenced above), this update...
Backing up your TFS Server with Sharepoint and Reporting
Yesterday, I wrote a post on a new upcoming PowerTool to make backing up and restoring your TFS server easier than ever. The post focused on a TFS Basic install that had no associated Sharepoint or Reporting data. The great news is that if you do have a more sophisticated install with those additional capabilities, this tool can help you too. Today’s post is an addendum to highlight that experience a little. The main difference is that if you have Sharepoint and/or Reporting Services configured, another tab will show up in the Backup Plan Wizard. That tab allows you to optionally include the Sharepoint and...
Backing up and Restoring your TFS Server
Backing up and restoring a TFS server can be daunting. There are potentially a lot of services and a lot of steps. As soon as we shipped TFS 2010, I knew we had to do something to improve it and we began talking about how we were going to simplify the process. For a thorough understanding of what is involved, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb552295.aspx. The primary customer I have been concerned about is the small team who doesn’t have a data center operations team and SQL DBAs who know the ins and outs of SQL backup. A few months ago, we hatched a plan to build a new Power Tool that would g...
Backing up and Restoring your TFS Server
Backing up and restoring a TFS server can be daunting. There are potentially a lot of services and a lot of steps. As soon as we shipped TFS 2010, I knew we had to do something to improve it and we began talking about how we were going to simplify the process. For a thorough understanding of what is involved, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb552295.aspx. The primary customer I have been concerned about is the small team who doesn’t have a data center operations team and SQL DBAs who know the ins and outs of SQL backup. A few months ago, we hatched a plan to build a new Power Tool that would g...
Customizing TFS 2010 Process Guidance
We’ve just released 3 packages that will enable you to start with one of the 3 base TFS 2010 Process Guidance sets and customize it and deploy it to your installation. Read Allen’s blog post on a way to do this with WebMatrix.The download links are here: Brian
Some detail behind the CodePlex move to TFS 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a short post about the move of CodePlex from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 and some of the benefits you’ll see from that. Today, I want to drill a bit deeper into the infrastructure changes that went along with it and some additional benefits. As you know making TFS more hosting friendly (whether it’s being hosted publicly or being hosted by an IT department for internal use) was one of our big investments in TFS 2010. The move of CodePlex to TFS 2010 is really highlighting some of those benefits. Let’s look at this with a picture: Here’s the CodePlex architecture on TFS 2008: ...
Another option to get data from Quality Center into TFS
Just recently, a new tool called Scrat was released. It enables migrating artifacts from HP Quality Center to TFS. It is the most comprehensive tool I know of, handling Requirements, Bugs, Test Cases, Attachments, History and Links between items). I haven’t had a chance to try it myself but I’ve known and worked with one of the authors (Shai Raiten) for quite some time and always been impressed with his work. Your alternative to this would be either using HP’s or Juvander’s tools to migrate Bugs and Requirements and then using our Excel based test case import tool and I s...
TFS Integration Platform Updated
We’ve just released a new version of the TFS Integration Platform. This is the first “official, finished” release that contains the new synchronization architecture and adaptors for: Previous versions made available were “pre-release”. We’ve been using the new tool kit for several months now to synchronize between internal TFS servers and we’ve been running a number of customer pilots. The new architecture makes it much easier to build adaptors to other systems. In fact, we’ve got someone coming in for an “internshi...
Update on the TFS Upgrade Fix
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a moderately rare problem with upgrading from TFS 2005/2008 to TFS 20010. Although the number of people affected is modest, the severity of the issue is bad enough that we decided to re-release all TFS images so that the upgrade fix is automatically included and no one who downloads new images will get “bitten” by missing the step to install the patch. Today, we have released the new TFS media. As of today if you download TFS from MSDN subscriber downloads, the TFS trial from microsoft.com or order TFS through a reseller, you will get the updated TFS i...
Windows and SQL Patches for TFS
My post on TFS updates a couple of weeks ago generated an internal discussion that resulted in the collection of all of the SQL and Windows updates we’ve had to apply to our Dogfood server to get it running well. Now, you have to remember that our dogfood server runs at incredibly high scale and many of the issues we’ve hit are unlikely to affect you. However, if you really want to be sure you are running your production server as optimally as we run ours, here’s some information that may be useful to you: App Tier on Windows 2008 R2 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981898 – The...
Windows and SQL Patches for TFS
My post on TFS updates a couple of weeks ago generated an internal discussion that resulted in the collection of all of the SQL and Windows updates we’ve had to apply to our Dogfood server to get it running well. Now, you have to remember that our dogfood server runs at incredibly high scale and many of the issues we’ve hit are unlikely to affect you. However, if you really want to be sure you are running your production server as optimally as we run ours, here’s some information that may be useful to you: App Tier on Windows 2008 R2 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981898 – The...
Configuring Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server with TFS 2010
I’ve heard numerous times from customers that getting MOSS configured properly to work with TFS 2010 in order to get the best dashboard and analytics experience is VERY difficult. I have to say, I’ve done it myself a few times and there are a lot of steps and without a MOSS expert watching over my shoulder, I think I would have ended up in the ditch every time. To help with this we built a tool that can be used to configure MOSS for use with TFS. You would generally use this tool after a default install of MOSS and of TFS (same machine or not). You install and run this tool on the co...
Configuring Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server with TFS 2010
I’ve heard numerous times from customers that getting MOSS configured properly to work with TFS 2010 in order to get the best dashboard and analytics experience is VERY difficult. I have to say, I’ve done it myself a few times and there are a lot of steps and without a MOSS expert watching over my shoulder, I think I would have ended up in the ditch every time. To help with this we built a tool that can be used to configure MOSS for use with TFS. You would generally use this tool after a default install of MOSS and of TFS (same machine or not). You install and run this tool on the co...
Lab Management News
There’s some exciting news about Visual Studio Lab Management today. You may recall that when we released VS/TFS 2010, we declared the Lab Management capability to be “Release Candidate” quality rather then “Released” quality. I’ve mentioned before that the reason for this was that we just hadn’t gotten enough customer feedback to feel really confident that it was 100% ready for prime time. In truth, it really wasn’t usable in Beta 1. In Beta 2, it wasn’t bad but it relied on adoption of TFS and the new Visual Studio Test Professional capabilities and we just didn’t see enough people get that far before VS wa...
TFS2010 on CodePlex
In the last week, we completed the upgrade of all TFS servers in Codeplex to TFS 2010. As part of this, we consolidated from 10 individual TFS 2008 servers to a single TFS 2010 load balanced farm. This makes management of the service even better than before. I’m really excited about this milestone in the internal deployment of TFS 2010. So what does this mean for you as a Codeplex user? It means all the cool new TFS 2010 goodness is now available on Codeplex. For instance, you can now do hierarchical work items, branch/merge visualization, etc. If you are a Codeplex user, get V...
Announcing Visual Studio LightSwitch!
Today at VSLive!, Jason Zander announced a new Visual Studio product called LightSwitch. It’s been in the works for quite some time now, as you might imagine. Beta 1 of LightSwitch will be available on August 23rd – I’ll post again with a link as soon as I have it. You can check out this link to learn more: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/lightswitch Basically LightSwitch is a new tool to make building business applications easier than ever before. It allows you to build local or browser hosted applications using SilverLight. Your apps can run on premise or in...
July 2010 Doc Updates for VS ALM
I suspect I’m eventually going to get bored with posting about the doc updates every month :) But, I think it’s really cool that the doc team is now updating the online docs every month. I’ve gotten a number of very positive customer comments on how much they appreciate the new vigor with which new content is coming out. If you have thoughts (either on what you’ve seen or on what you’d like to see), I’d love to hear them too.Here’s a summary of what is available in the July update…Team Foundation ServerAdministering Team FoundationUpdating your de...
Another Milestone in TFS Internal Adoption
On July 21st, we hit another important milestone in adoption of TFS within Developer Division. If you’ve followed my blog over the years, you know that our own use of TFS is an important part of our process of ensuring the product is a great product. We first started using it in 2004 and have gradually been increasing the scope and magnitude. For the last couple of years, most of the division has been using most of the features of TFS 2008. In the spring we upgraded to TFS 2010 but we didn’t really expand the set of features being used. The one feature that’s been in the ...
TFS 2010 updates coming to a download site near you
This is a heads up that we have some important servicing things happening. Within the next few weeks we’ll be releasing: #1 is critical to be aware of and deal with. There is a QFE available today (see the blog post above for a link) and we are working hard on the setup refresh. #2 contains some nice fixes (like reinstating the ability to branch from a label) but none of them critical. #3 will be a superset of #2 so if you want to wait a bit longer to minimize their servicing burden, you can choose to do that. Install/Upgrade TFS Build Version Control ...
Administrative Report Pack for Team Foundation Server 2010
A couple of weeks ago we released a new set of administrative reports for managing the TFS data warehouse. This is more than most customers will ever need but if you are running a large TFS installation (particularly if you are hosting a TFS installation for multiple constituents) these reports can provide valuable insight into the status of the data warehouse. Grant has two blog posts about the reports. The first gives an overview and a download link and the second explains how to interpret the reports: This is a good example of how we can share assets we create for our own dogf...
Administrative Report Pack for Team Foundation Server 2010
A couple of weeks ago we released a new set of administrative reports for managing the TFS data warehouse. This is more than most customers will ever need but if you are running a large TFS installation (particularly if you are hosting a TFS installation for multiple constituents) these reports can provide valuable insight into the status of the data warehouse. Grant has two blog posts about the reports. The first gives an overview and a download link and the second explains how to interpret the reports: This is a good example of how we can share assets we create for our own dogf...
Scrum taskboard for the new Scrum template
And simultaneous with the release of the final Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 template, Pyxis announced, with a cute blog post, the availabilty of Urban Turtle Team Web Access add-on that provides a Scrum task board. I've played with pre-release versions of the Urban Turtle tool and I recommend it. It's a nice tool!Brian
Scrum taskboard for the new Scrum template
And simultaneous with the release of the final Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 template, Pyxis announced, with a cute blog post, the availabilty of Urban Turtle Team Web Access add-on that provides a Scrum task board. I've played with pre-release versions of the Urban Turtle tool and I recommend it. It's a nice tool!Brian
Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 is Final
Yesterday we shipped version 1.0 of our new Scrum template for Team Foundation Server. I wrote a post about it a month or so ago when we released a Beta. Since then we’ve been collecting feedback and refining it. Now it is done and available on Visual Studio Gallery and referenced via our Process Templates and Tools page. Most of the changes since the Beta are pretty small. The biggest feedback we got was that people wanted some of the reports from the MSF Agile template to be included in the Scrum template. We’ve obliged by adding 4 reports to the Scrum template in addit...
Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 is Final
Yesterday we shipped version 1.0 of our new Scrum template for Team Foundation Server. I wrote a post about it a month or so ago when we released a Beta. Since then we’ve been collecting feedback and refining it. Now it is done and available on Visual Studio Gallery and referenced via our Process Templates and Tools page. Most of the changes since the Beta are pretty small. The biggest feedback we got was that people wanted some of the reports from the MSF Agile template to be included in the Scrum template. We’ve obliged by adding 4 reports to the Scrum template in addit...
Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools Updated
We’ve just released an update the the very popular Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools. We’ve incorporated bug fixes, some key user feedback and some cool new features. The first key user feedback worth mentioning is the ability to independently turn off extensions that might conflict with something you already have. You can get to this through Tools –> Options. One of the cool new features is a new window that can act as a replacement for “Solution Explorer” called “Solution Navigator”. It looks a lot like Solution Explorer and includes all that capability and more. You can see the simple fil...
Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools Updated
We’ve just released an update the the very popular Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools. We’ve incorporated bug fixes, some key user feedback and some cool new features. The first key user feedback worth mentioning is the ability to independently turn off extensions that might conflict with something you already have. You can get to this through Tools –> Options. One of the cool new features is a new window that can act as a replacement for “Solution Explorer” called “Solution Navigator”. It looks a lot like Solution Explorer and includes all that capability and more. You can see the simple fil...
News on PDC10
Microsoft just announced this year’s PDC. It’s actually going to be on the Redmond campus this year! It’s October 28th & 29th. Read more about it here: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/Brian
June ALM Documentation Update Available
The documentation team continues with their plan to ship documentation updates every month to address the biggest areas of user feedback. New content in the June update includes: Planning and Tracking Projects Tracking Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items New and updated topics about work item tracking can help you manage and track tasks, bugs, and other information about your team project. Scheduling Tasks and Assigning Resources Using Microsoft Project Modeling the Application Visualization and Modeling SDK – Domain-Specific Languages You’ll find a lot of changes in ...
TFS 2010 Support for Project Server
We have just released a CTP demonstrating integration between Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server 2010 (the final product will also support Project Server 2007 but the CTP is 2010 only). This CTP is provided as a Virtual Machine and is not intended to be used in a production environment. The integration work is not yet complete but there’s enough that it’s very much worth it for us to get some feedback. I think there’s a few months of development work left to be done and then we’ll ship a Beta as soon as we can. You can download the CTP here: http://go.microsof...
VS 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance
The Ranger team has released a new CodePlex project that contains some good guidance for using the architecture tools in VS 2010. It is very scenario oriented and includes hands on labs that walk you through using the tools to solve some real world problems. http://vsarchitectureguide.codeplex.com/ Brian
New Visual Studio ALM Developer Center on MSDN
We’ve recently published a new MSDN section focusing on the ALM aspects of Visual Studio. There’s some pretty good content there to help you learn about our offerings and over time we’ll be adding more. We’ve got a bunch of “How-To” videos in the works. My hope is that, over time, this becomes kind of a “command center” for finding everything you want to know about VS ALM. Check it out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudioalm Brian
Last Call: TFS 2010 Beta 2 and RC Expiring June 30th
Yep, that’s right TFS 2010 Beta 2 and RC are expiring in 2 days. When June 30th comes, they will completely stop working. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen an increasing number of customers who’ve let the deadline sneak up on them and now find themselves in a situation where they don’t have the time necessary to plan and execute an upgrade from the Beta 2 or RC builds to the RTM build before it is going to expire. Luckily, we anticipated this would happen and built in an escape valve for the procrastinators of the world :) To extend the beta2/RC beyond 6/30 you can ...
TFS 2010 Upgrade Issue
We have discovered a potentially serious issue that can affect upgrades from TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. The issue is triggered by a specific pattern of labels, renames, deletes and/or branches that existed before the upgrade. Once the upgrade is complete the contents of the affected labels could be incorrect. Also some internal merge tracking data could be incorrect, resulting in the need to reapply previous merges. Under no circumstance will it cause the contents of any source code to be modified or lost. You can read more about the issue in this KB article: http://support.m...
BizTalk 2010 Beta is available
I've had numerous conversations with customers about the frustrations of lack of synchronization of products coming out of Microsoft. For instance, the fact that you can't use VS 2010 to do BizTalk 2006 development. I continue to advocate inside the company for us to be better about this. I won't bore you now with a list of examples of progress that we've made but we have made some and we are working on more. In the meantime, with the coming BizTalk 2010 and the currently available Beta, you can now do BizTalk development with VS 2010. Here's the Beta in case you are interested: http...
Update to the WCF Load Test tool is available
Yesterday, the Rangers released an update to the WCF Load Test tool that fixed some bugs and added support for integrating with VS 2010 Ultimate. Check it out: http://wcfloadtest.codeplex.com/Brian
Visual Studio Modeling Feature Pack Available!
In a post a week or so ago, I introduced the notion of Feature Packs. Now I get to tell you about the availability of the first one! I intended to post the same day but I sat down to play with the feature pack to make sure I understood what all it could do and I realized that my impressions didn’t quite match reality. I wanted to spend some time with the team making sure I understood how I should be thinking about these abilities. Then between Tech Ed presentations, travel, etc – it’s now a week later :( Last week we released the first Feature Pack called the Visual Studio Modeling Feature Pack. It is an ...
InRelease from InCycle
I’ve heard increasing interest from customers in tools to help them plan, manage and execute the release management process. I was thrilled when, a few months ago, Claude stopped by and demoed for me a new tool that InCycle is building called “InRelease”. It is an add on to Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server that helps address this important area of application lifecycle management. InRelease 2010 is for Microsoft development teams that are seeking to reduce the complexity, cost, and risks of release management. It provides a number of features to accelerate and reduce the cost of the release process: ...
May ALM Documentation Update Available
In recent years, we have tried to move to a model of producing updates to the documentation on a more frequent basis rather than just synchronizing it with the product schedule. Inevitably the documentation lags behind the product a bit (you can’t write the docs until you have something to document :)) and they get squeezed at the end of the product cycle. Instead we’ve moved to a model where we produce the highest priority content for RTM and then, using customer feedback, we stage out additional content over time. Right now we publish updates about once a quarter but would like to ...
Announcing the first Visual Studio Pro Power Tools!
I’m VERY pleased to announce the latest addition to the Visual Studio Power Tools line-up – the Visual Studio Pro Power Tools. Over the past few years, Power Tools have been such a successful way to deliver compelling value to customers quickly that more and more teams are adding it to their repertoire. Today, we are releasing the first delivery for VS Pro customers. These tools are focused on core developer productivity. I think you will find some of them tremendously exciting! To avoid barraging you with too many independent Power Tool delivery vehicles, we have standardized on the Visual Studio Gallery ...
TFS Integration Tools Beta Available!
Long ago, we created something called the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit. The purpose was to enable TFS to interoperate with other systems. We got a ton of feedback that it was WAY too hard to use. It required WAY too much work to build even relatively simple integrations. The docs were slim to non-existent, etc. Last fall, I asked Bill Essary (an architect on my team) to take the lead on the project and really revamp it and turn it into a great tool for integrating with TFS. Along the way he decided to rename it to the TFS Integration Platform. Today we are releasin...
What on Earth is a Feature Pack?
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, then you’ve heard about these things we call “Power Tools”. You might have even tried them out and found out they could be darned useful :) We’ll if you’ve been following my blog long enough, you’ll know that at one point they were called Power Toys but we changed the name to Power Tools because we got a bunch of feedback that “Toy” was disturbing to people. Back in Sept 2006, I wrote a post that described the Power Toy philosophy (the philosophy didn’t change when we changed the name). ...
A Scrum Process Template for TFS
Since TFS 2005, we have delivered two process templates with TFS: MSF Agile and MSF for CMMI. Our goal with MSF Agile was to create a relatively simple process template for teams doing Agile software development. We designed it to enable a wide range of iterative development processes without too much process control. In doing so, it doesn’t match any existing process directly but rather is pretty flexible to adapt to your process. Over the past couple of years, Scrum has evolved as an extremely popular iterative development process and we’ve been getting feedback that our Agile template feels unnatural for...
Security Development Lifecycle for TFS 2010
Just recently, the SDL team at Microsoft released an update for their Secure Development Lifecycle process template for TFS 2010. You can download the new MSF Agile + SDL template for free and give it a spin. You can read the details on the SDL blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sdl/archive/2010/05/27/announcing-the-msf-agile-sdl-process-template-for-tfs-2010.aspx Let us know what you think! Brian
VS 2010 and SourceSafe
Several times in recent days I’ve been asked whether or not SourceSafe 2005 works with VS 2010. I thought I had blogged about this before but couldn’t find it. The answer is yes. However, you should install this hot fix. It is a cumulative hot fix (so it includes all previous hot fixes). You shouldn’ t need to install any others. This hot fix addresses a problem with VSS 2005’s open from source control dialog when used with VS 2010. Hopefully this clears up the question. BrianTechnorati Tags: TFS,VS2010
A Plethora of VS 2010 ALM Guidance
The Rangers have been hard at work updating existing guidance and adding new sets as well. Check out Willy’s post on recently released and near future guidance here: http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2010/04/07/visual-studio-alm-rangers-embracing-the-exciting-new-visual-studio-2010-product-with-practical-guidance.aspx I’ve been getting a lot of questions in the last couple of months about various scenarios for upgrading to TFS 2010. Hopefully this will help: Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide The branching guidance for TFS has also been very popular and they have updated i...
TFS 2010 Beta 2 & Release Candidate expiration date approaching!
If you installed and are using TFS 2010 Beta 2 or the Release Candidate and have not found the time to upgrade to RTM yet, you’ll want to get going on that soon. The expiration date for both Beta 2 and the Release Candidate is June 30, 2010 – that’s just over a month away as I write this. You can upgrade either to a purchased copy of TFS for to a trial version (which will give you an extra 90 – 120 days). The process is pretty easy: 1. Uninstall TFS Beta2 or RC 2. Install TFS 2010 RTM release 3. Select the "Upgrade from Previous Version" wizard (Note: Always be sure to have a g...
Migrating your Dynamics AX development from SourceSafe to TFS
The Dynamics team has just published a whitepaper to help people Migrate from SourceSafe to TFS. Check it out here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e651de10-5e5c-4748-bf41-d7e98221f42e&displaylang=enBrian
Extending Trials of TFS 2010,TFS 2012 and beyond
***UPDATE Nov 2, 2016*** Starting in TFS 2015 Update 3 and beyond, this trial extension process has been removed. We have moved to and "honor based system". A trial will expire and the product will inform you of that but it is up to you to stop using it at that point. The old process for TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 is no more. It’s now baked into TFS 2010 and later. The TFS 2010 and later trial period is 90 days. However, after the first 30 days, you will start getting this dialog every time you run the admin console to remind you how much time you have left on your trial and allowing you to enter the product key ...
Visual Studio Wallpapers
We recently sponsored a site where the community can upload Visual Studio wall paper. You'll find it at: http://vs2010wallpapers.com/ There are some very nice wall papers up there. I've just chosen "Shoot for the Moon" for my desktop. Just right click on the image and choose "Set as Background". There are some clever, beautiful and cool backgrounds up there! Check it out! Brian
Visual Studio Wallpapers
We recently sponsored a site where the community can upload Visual Studio wall paper. You'll find it at: http://vs2010wallpapers.com/ There are some very nice wall papers up there. I've just chosen "Shoot for the Moon" for my desktop. Just right click on the image and choose "Set as Background". There are some clever, beautiful and cool backgrounds up there! Check it out! Brian
SCRUM Project Management with Urban Turtle
A few weeks ago I got a demo of the latest release of Urban Turtle - a SCRUM project management add on for TFS. It is very nicely done. Our Agile Project Management workbooks provide a nice SCRUM like planning tool but Urban Turtle takes it to the next level by making it even more visual and fit more seamlessly into a SCRUM regimen. If you are doing SCRUM with TFS, I encourage you to have a look. Here's their blog where you can learn about Urban Turtle: http://urbanturtle.com/blog/Brian
Addressing some TFS 2010 client connectivity issues
We've seen some reports of client connectivity problems when people upgrade a previous version of TFS to TFS 2010 and configure it to you the same URL. This is the result of some stale client cache info. Bryan Krieger has written a post on recognizing and fixing the issues. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bkrieger/archive/2010/04/27/visual-studio-client-connection-issues-after-upgrading-to-tfs-2010.aspxBrian
Your Visual Studio 2010 Dream Machine
Now that Visual Studio 2010 has shipped, people are asking about preferred hardware configurations. Customers want to know how to take advantage of all the cool new features that we have packed into this release. We have published minimum hardware and software requirements, of course. You can install and run Visual Studio 2010 on almost any machine running 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7 with at least 1 GB of RAM. (We recommend at least 2 GB of RAM on a 64-bit flavor of the OS.) You can install on any release of Windows Server 2003 or 2008, and install on a virtual machine...
Configuring TFS to work with MOSS
I've seen a few questions lately about configuring TFS with MOSS. The official MSDN documentation isn't quite ready yet. In the mean time, Jon has written a blog post describing the steps necessary to configure it. http://blogs.msdn.com/team_foundation/archive/2010/03/06/configuring-sharepoint-server-2010-beta-for-dashboard-compatibility-with-tfs-2010-beta2-rc.aspx Brian
Office 2003 -> TFS integration breaks when you install VS 2010
When we were planning the requirements for TFS 2010, we decided to take a dependency on Office 2007 and later. This enabled us to make some significant improvements to the TFS integration due to extensibility improvements in Office 2007. However, I've seen a few customers who are stuck on Office 2003 and have been disappointed to see that Excel and Project integration with TFS stops working when they install VS/Team Explorer 2010. It is possible to get it working again (with the 2008 client). John explains how here: http://blogs.msdn.com/team_foundation/archive/2010/04/24/vs-2010-and-tfs-with-of...
TFS 2010 Power Tools have released
Updated 4/27 because I forgot the tfpt addprojectportal and tfpt addprojectreports TFS Power Tools April 2010 release http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/3e8c9b68-6e39-4577-b9b7-78489b5cb1da TFS MSSCCI Provider 2010 release http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bce06506-be38-47a1-9f29-d3937d3d88d6 TFS Build Extension Power Tool April 2010 release http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/2d7c8577-54b8-47ce-82a5-8649f579dcb6 Finally, the first RTM’d version of the TFS 2010 Power Tools are available! It’s been a long journey and I’m gla...
First wave of localized VS 2010 releases
Yesterday we released the first wave of localized releases (Japanese, German and French) for VS 2010 on MSDN. You will find the following downloads currently available:· .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (x86 and x64) LangPack - Japanese, German, French· .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (x86) LangPack - Japanese, German, French· .NET Framework 4 Full (x86 and ia64) LangPack - Japanese, German, French· ...
First wave of localized VS 2010 releases
Yesterday we released the first wave of localized releases (Japanese, German and French) for VS 2010 on MSDN. You will find the following downloads currently available:· .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (x86 and x64) LangPack - Japanese, German, French· .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (x86) LangPack - Japanese, German, French· .NET Framework 4 Full (x86 and ia64) LangPack - Japanese, German, French· ...
Home at last
Well, kinda. I'm actually at work :) But I made it back to North Carolina finally this morning. It was another delay packed trip with about 11 hours of waiting in the Moscow airport and another 7 hours of waiting in New York (due to the missed connection caused by the Moscow waiting). Another night of lost sleep but I'm finally home and can sleep in my own bed tonight. I can't wait. The flight from Moscow went north for a good while (maybe an hour) and then turned west and passed north of Iceland and then back south down to New York. Brian
Early read on TFS 2010 installs
I've written quite a bit about how hard we worked in this release to improve the TFS installation process. All through the pre-release process we tracked success rates and issues using telemetry. In every release (beta, ctp, rc, etc), we tried to learn and get better. Once we RTM'd that telemetry became "opt in" rather than "opt out". However we now have enough data reported to give some semi-statistically significant success rate data. At this point we've had a few hundred users agree to share their install data (I expect many times that have actually installed TFS). We look at the ...
Travel update
After two canceled flights and countless hours of waiting over the weekend, I have, sadly, decided to throw in the towel on the rest of this trip. I lost out on going to Croatia and it was not looking good to get to Prague. Today, they closed Bulgarian airspace. After already having two 36 hour runs of being awake this week due to travel problems and uncertainty about travel and ability to get home, I've decided I'm going to try to get home directly from Russia. I feel really bad about missing the events in Croatia, Czech Republic and Bulgaria but travel is just crazy. I just heard I guy o...
Typemock Conference
If you are interested in learning more about unit testing and mocking with Typemock, check out http://site.typemock.com/typemock-academy/ That is if you can get to Norway with all of this volcanic ash :) Brian
WPF Performance
A few months ago I was writing a great deal about the performance issues that were uncovered in Beta 2 and our efforts to address them. As a result of your feedback and help the product we have now released is TREMENDOUSLY better. Thank you. In those posts I talked a bit about work we were doing to improve drawing performance. Some of the issues were sub optimal code in VS and others were missing optimizations in WPF. Moving VS to be a heavy WPF user certainly put a lot of strain on WPF and was really a great way to help mature WPF quickly. Jossef has written a blog post on a bunch a of th...
VM Prep Tool for Lab Management
All through the 2010 Beta cycle, we got feedback that the new lab management capabilities were really cool but just too dang hard to get configured (sound familiar? :)). Well, we’ve been working hard on it since about July of last year and each pre-release got better: Beta 2, RC, RC2. We’ve officially made available the released version of one more important piece to making using the Lab Management capabilities quick and easy – a tool for preparing VM images to be used with VS Lab Management. You can download the new version of the tool here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslabmgmt ...
TFS and Azure
We’ve started an investigation effort to see how hard it would be to get TFS running on Azure. The thing we thought would be hardest was getting our extensive SQL Server code working. It turns out we were wrong. It was really easy. We’ve already gotten the TFS backend up and running on SQL Azure. One of the guys on our team has a local App Tier (in North Carolina) talking to a SQL Azure hosted database that contains all the TFS data. Of course it’s all prototype right now and you’d never actually run a server that way but it’s very cool to see how ...
VS2010 has Shipped
I expect you know this by now :) It’s all we’ve been talking about since Monday. It and all of the related products are available here: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/download. This link also has a bunch of pointers to related add-ons. You will notice that the RTM TFS Power Tools are not available yet. The good news is that the RC Power Tools still work with RTM (though you may need to uninstall them and reinstall them if you are upgrading from RC to RTM). The RTM Power Tools should be available within the next week or so. I’ve spent the whole wee...
Volcanic Ash
Well the cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland that is covering much of Europe currently has me grounded in Moscow. I’m supposed to be on my way for the rest of my launch presentations but I suppose that will have to wait. In the mean time, I think I’ll catch up on a little blogging.Brian
Been quiet a while
Sorry about that. It's been a busy time. Right now I'm in Russia (and have been for the past week). I'm doing VS 2010 launch events across Eastern Europe. Before that I had to take some time off to handle the spring farm work :) And then I was busy getting ready to leave for this trip. The last week has been a ton of fun. I've never been to Russia (or Eastern Europe for that matter) before. I've been impressed by many things. The people I've met have been incredibly friendly. They've been eager to get the opportunity to talk with me and excited about what we are doi...
TeamConf 2010 in Germany
If you live in Germany – or happen to be there in early May – then do not miss TeamConf 2010, Germany’s biggest conference on Application Lifecycle Management and Test/Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010, May 5th– 6th 2010 (plus deep-dive-workshops on May 4th). – Keynotes by Jason Zander and Jeff Sutherland Day 1 – May 5th – consists of three major tracks and is perfect for development leads, ALM professionals, project leads, testers/QA professionals, senior developers, IT leads, decision makers, software architects and software development managers: (1) Perspectiv...
TeamConf 2010 in Germany
If you live in Germany – or happen to be there in early May – then do not miss TeamConf 2010, Germany’s biggest conference on Application Lifecycle Management and Test/Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010, May 5th– 6th 2010 (plus deep-dive-workshops on May 4th). – Keynotes by Jason Zander and Jeff Sutherland Day 1 – May 5th – consists of three major tracks and is perfect for development leads, ALM professionals, project leads, testers/QA professionals, senior developers, IT leads, decision makers, software architects and software development managers: (1) Perspectiv...
2010 Release Candidate VPCs Available
I’ve gotten a few questions recently about the availability of VPCs with more recent builds (than Beta 2). Brian Kelly has come to the rescue in his typical style. He’s put together some VPCs with the Release Candidate on them. They also have some sample data so that you don’t have to create it yourself to see how it works. Check out: http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2010/03/18/now-available-visual-studio-2010-release-candidate-virtual-machines-with-sample-data-and-hands-on-labs.aspx Brian
2010 Release Candidate VPCs Available
I’ve gotten a few questions recently about the availability of VPCs with more recent builds (than Beta 2). Brian Kelly has come to the rescue in his typical style. He’s put together some VPCs with the Release Candidate on them. They also have some sample data so that you don’t have to create it yourself to see how it works. Check out: http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2010/03/18/now-available-visual-studio-2010-release-candidate-virtual-machines-with-sample-data-and-hands-on-labs.aspx Brian
Work item visualization
One of our MVP, Jeff Levinson, has been hard at work on some tools to turn work item relationship information into DGML graphs that can then be viewed in the new architecture visualization tools. He’s now put his work on CodePlex. I recommend you check it out: http://visualization.codeplex.com/ Here’s a teaser picture of his output… Brian
Work item visualization
One of our MVP, Jeff Levinson, has been hard at work on some tools to turn work item relationship information into DGML graphs that can then be viewed in the new architecture visualization tools. He’s now put his work on CodePlex. I recommend you check it out: http://visualization.codeplex.com/ Here’s a teaser picture of his output… Brian
Team Explorer 2005 update for interoperating with TFS 2010 is now available!
This morning we delivered the final version of the patch to Team Explorer 2005 that enables it to work well with a TFS 2010 server. Of course, it will also still work well against a 2005 or 2008 server. You can download the update here:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22215e4c-af6f-4e2f-96df-20e94d762689and, of course, the update for Team Explorer 2008 has been available for a while:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d Good luck with it and let me know if I can help you,Brian
Team Explorer 2005 update for interoperating with TFS 2010 is now available!
This morning we delivered the final version of the patch to Team Explorer 2005 that enables it to work well with a TFS 2010 server. Of course, it will also still work well against a 2005 or 2008 server. You can download the update here:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22215e4c-af6f-4e2f-96df-20e94d762689and, of course, the update for Team Explorer 2008 has been available for a while:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d Good luck with it and let me know if I can help you,Brian
Delays delivering mail alerts in TFS 2010
I've seen a few people complain about longer delays delivering mail alerts in TFS 2010. The reason is that, by default, we batch all notifications and process them every 2 minutes. This was done to accomplish higher scale on very high volume servers. In retrospect a 2 minute delay was not the best default. We will look at changing this for SP1. In the meantime, you can change the default yourself. You can set the delay to 0 if you want, in which case you'll get the same behavior you saw in TFS 2008. Chris Sidi wrote a post giving some details of how this works. Also, we a...