Brian Harry's Blog

Visual Studio Online Update – Sept 4th

September 4, 2014 Sep 4, 2014 09/4/14

Brian Harry

We’ve recently started bring some larger Microsoft teams into VS Online.  That has been a very enlightening experience.  It has particularly highlighted issues with fit and finish for high bandwidth activities like bug triage, performance and scale issues with larger data sets, etc. This sprint (sprint 70), deploying today, we&...

How to purchase VS Online

August 27, 2014 Aug 27, 2014 08/27/14

Brian Harry

Brian Keller interviewed James Rice (he's on our business team) for Channel 9 about how to purchase Visual Studio Online.  This may clear up any uncertainty you have. https://aka.ms/HowToBuyVSO   Brian  ...

Stakeholder license is live

August 27, 2014 Aug 27, 2014 08/27/14

Brian Harry

About 6 weeks ago, I announced a plan to make some licensing changes to VS Online and Team Foundation Server that would make it easier for more people to participate in the development process.  A few weeks ago, we did part 1 by enabling Test Hub access for VS Online Advanced licenses.  Today we have completed step 2 by enabling the ...

Sending email to a Team Room

August 26, 2014 Aug 26, 2014 08/26/14

Brian Harry

Here's a very cool way to use our new VS Online extensibility (that will be available in TFS V.Next) to enable sending an email to a Team Room.  Our new REST, OAuth and Service Hooks support can be used in countless creative ways. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/slange/archive/2014/08/26/send-email-to-a-team-room-with-vso-service-hooks-and-zapier...

Visual Studio Online Update – Aug 18th

August 19, 2014 Aug 19, 2014 08/19/14

Brian Harry

Yesterday I rolled out the release notes for our sprint 69 deployment.  Check out the updates! P.S. the outage we had last Thursday was *not* caused by the rollout of updates (or, at best only tangentially so).  I’m hoping to get the outage retrospective written up tomorrow. Brian...

VS Online outage last week

August 18, 2014 Aug 18, 2014 08/18/14

Brian Harry

Let me start by apologizing for the pretty horrific outage we had last week.  I’ve been silent on it because I was on a “last family vacation” in Europe before my oldest son goes off to college.  Buck Hodges and others have been working hard on it.  I’ve been reading up on everything that happened and ...

Explanation of July 18th outage

July 31, 2014 Jul 31, 2014 07/31/14

Brian Harry

Sorry it took me a week and a half to get to this. We had the most significant VS Online outage we’ve had in a while on Friday July 18th.  The entire service was unavailable for about 90 minutes.  Fortunately it happened during non-peak hours so the number of affected customers was fewer than it might have been but I know that&...

The rest of the story (about sand)

July 23, 2014 Jul 23, 2014 07/23/14

Brian Harry

A month ago I wrote about our newly enabled capability to measure quality of service on a customer by customer basis.  In that post I mentioned that we had actually identified a customer experiencing issues before they even contacted us about them and had started working with them to understand the issues.  Well, the rest of that ...

Visual Studio Online Update – July 21

July 21, 2014 Jul 21, 2014 07/21/14

Brian Harry

Today we began deployment of our sprint 68 work.  There’s a bunch of really good stuff there.  I say “begun” because deployment is a multi day event now as we roll it out across instances.  Everyone should have the updates by tomorrow (Tue) afternoon.  You can read the release notes to get details. ...