VSTS - Brian Harry's Blog

VSTS Update – Mar 5

March 7, 2018 Mar 7, 2018 03/7/18

Brian Harry

This week we began rolling out the sprint 131 updates. You can get the details in the release notes. There are some good things in this sprint payload (a good start at a new Work items hub, Azure DevOps projects support for VMs, improved GitHub integration, release badges and more). At the same time, this isn't the most value packed ...

A good incident postmortem

March 2, 2018 Mar 2, 2018 03/2/18

Brian Harry

I wanted to call your attention to a good incident postmortem done by Taylor Lafrinere this week. Taylor sits in my team room and, for a week, I saw him bent over his keyboard, often with two or three people staring over his shoulders trying to figure out what had caused this incident and what we needed to do to prevent it in the future. ...

Merging conflicts in the browser

January 29, 2018 Jan 29, 2018 01/29/18

Brian Harry

One of the cool things about having VSTS used across all of Microsoft is that when there's some useful missing feature, one of the many teams using it might fill the gap and we get to harvest it and make it available to all VSTS customers. Exactly that has just happened. I've written several times about GVFS and the adoption of Git by our...

Twitter sentiment as a release gate

December 15, 2017 Dec 15, 2017 12/15/17

Brian Harry

I'm really excited to talk about a new Twitter sentiment release gate extension in the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) marketplace today. Before I say more, let me step back and give some context... Any responsible DevOps practice uses techniques to limit the damage done by bugs that get deployed into production. One of the common ...

A VSTS Release Gate with ServiceNow

December 11, 2017 Dec 11, 2017 12/11/17

Brian Harry

Tarun has written a great post on creating a VSTS Release Gate that will gate deployments on approvals registered in ServiceNow. This is a great example of how you can use the extensibility of Release Gates to automate and integrate your release pipeline. Check it out! Brian...

VSTS Update – Nov 28

November 28, 2017 Nov 28, 2017 11/28/17

Brian Harry

This week we will be deploying our sprint 126 work. This deployment is probably one of the most complicated in a while. Quite a lot of it actually rolled out at our Connect(); event the week before Thanksgiving and then Thanksgiving week stalled the completion of the deployments so we are just getting back to it this week. All the ...

DevOps at Microsoft – lots of videos

November 13, 2017 Nov 13, 2017 11/13/17

Brian Harry

My team is responsible for many of the engineering tools we use at Microsoft (affectionately called the One Engineering System or 1ES - paralleling Satya's "One Microsoft" mantra). As part of that responsibility we get to interact deeply with teams across the company and learn from what they are doing. We try to take the best ideas and ...

DevOps @ Connect(); 2017

November 9, 2017 Nov 9, 2017 11/9/17

Brian Harry

I am excited…There will be lots of news…at Microsoft Connect(); 2017 happening Wednesday Nov 15th in New York City. Please join the live stream starting at 10:00 AM EST for Scott Guthrie’s keynote, where he will showcase lots of new innovations across Azure, .NET, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services and more. At 3:00 PM EST...

Visual Studio Team Services in Hong Kong

November 9, 2017 Nov 9, 2017 11/9/17

Brian Harry

Today we opened a new VSTS instance in Hong Kong - the Azure "East Asia" region. This adds to our instances in US, Europe, Brazil, India and Australia, giving us reasonably short distance access to every part of the world - except Africa. We will continue to build out local support in new regions and make sure we have capacity around the ...

Oh my – some dashboard candy that is life changing

November 1, 2017 Nov 1, 2017 11/1/17

Brian Harry

A month or so ago we opened a Visual Studio Team Services instance in Canada and yesterday it occurred to me to wonder how that was going. I sent mail to someone who "owns" that scenario and after a little back and forth I had the answer. He then asked me if I wanted to see that data on a regular basis for all our instances and I said no, ...