Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

All Orcas Beta 1 downloads are now available

It has taken a while to get all of the downloads finalized but they are done.  In addition to the VPCs that were available a week or two ago, we now have all of the installation packages for those that want to install it themselves.  The main Beta 1 page has not yet been updated with the last link but you'll find the final down load...

Visual Studio Code Name Orcas Available!

Orcas Beta 1 is now available for download.  I don't think all of the SKUs are available yet - they will be dribbling out over the next week or so but the VPCs for VSTS Team Suite and TFS server are available now.  To a first approximation (the primary difference being minor bug fixes) these TFS server bits are the same ones deployed...

Managing Quality (part 6) – Community Feedback

I touched on one aspect of customer involvement in our quality efforts in my last post about Dr. Watson.  There are a variety of other metrics we track and measure ourselves against that are more overtly community oriented.  Before I drill into the metrics we track, let's talk a bit about what aspects of community we think about. Pre...

Microsoft Announces Silverlight

Check out Soma's blog today: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/04/15/silverlight-the-next-generation-web-media-experiences.aspx He announced a new project called Silverlight that enables amazingly cool cross browsers, cross platform web apps to be written.  I've seen some of the demos and they are stunning.  I suspect over...

Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain!

Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System.  TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser.  The focus of TeamPlain is on work item tracking but it also ...

Visual Studio SP1 Refresh Releases!

Yesterday we released VS 2005 SP1 refresh (this is what we have, in the past, called the Vista GDR).  Primarily it is a set of bug fixes to make VS 2005 work really well on Vista.  You can read more about it here:  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/mar07/03-06VisualStudio.mspx And you can download it here: http://...

Updated VS 2005 SDK Available

Wow, it's hard to keep up with all of the cool stuff for me to talk about!  Yesterday we released an updated version of the VS SDK and it's full of lots of cool new stuff.  You can download it here if you want to check it out.  You can also read more about it in eWeek. I won't list the wide array of improvements, but we (the TFS...

Visual Studio Orcas March CTP is Available!

The Visual Studio "Orcas" March CTP is available and now contains TFS.  In this you will find the majority of the feature work we plan to do for our Orcas release.  I appreciate those of you who can look it over and give us feedback.  Use http://connect.microsoft.com to give us the feedback (or, if you want, you can comment on ...

Managing Quality (part 5) – Dr. Watson

We receive a lot of quality feedback directly from customers and we use that information help direct our investments in bug fixing and testing.  One of the tools we use to collect customer feedback is called "Dr. Watson".  All of our applications are instrumented to observe any unexpected condition - crash, exception, internal ...

SourceSafe on Vista

Richard Berg has some news to share about SourceSafe and Vista support and he asked that I help get some eyes on it.  If you are interested in SourceSafe, please take a look at: Thanks Brian...