Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...