Brian Harry's Blog

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TFService - Brian Harry's Blog

What are “Off-times”?

December 13, 2013 Dec 13, 2013 12/13/13
Brian Harry
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’...

Visual Studio Online Update – Dec 11

December 12, 2013 Dec 12, 2013 12/12/13
Brian Harry
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 ...

Load Testing VSOnline/TFS

December 2, 2013 Dec 2, 2013 12/2/13
Brian Harry
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...

Application Insights invitation

November 15, 2013 Nov 15, 2013 11/15/13
Brian Harry
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 ...

Launching Visual Studio 2013

November 13, 2013 Nov 13, 2013 11/13/13
Brian Harry
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, ...

Listen to your service – it is talking to you

November 12, 2013 Nov 12, 2013 11/12/13
Brian Harry
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. ...

Team Foundation Service Update – Nov 8

November 8, 2013 Nov 8, 2013 11/8/13
Brian Harry
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 ...

Team Rooms in Visual Studio

October 26, 2013 Oct 26, 2013 10/26/13
Brian Harry
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 ...

Team Foundation Service Update – Oct 21

October 22, 2013 Oct 22, 2013 10/22/13
Brian Harry
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.  ...