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