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