I missed blogging about a ton of stuff that happened in late June and most of July while I was out.  I’m not going to try to recap is all.  You can find lots of it on the Visual Studio ALM blog or in the Team Services release notes.  I do want to highlight a few things though.

• VS/TFS 2015 Update 3 – Update 3 shipped.  It was a small update focused mostly on bug fixes.  It’s out, it’s solid and I encourage people to install it.
• Roadmap update – In late June, after VS/TFS 2015 Update 3 shipped, we updated the VS Team Services/Team Foundation Server roadmap.  We retired all of the Q2 work we completed and added our Q4 plans.  Some important items include agent based multi-machine deployments, Test impact analysis, the ability to parallelize build tasks (listed as multi-job builds), and much more.
• TFS V.next preview – In early July, we released our first preview of TFS “15”.  More than anything, this was a forcing function milestone for us to get everything installing, working together and tested for our upcoming on-prem release.  It was not a “go-live” release and really just provided a sneak peak at what is coming.  Next week, assuming all goes well, we’ll release RC1 of TFS “15”.  That will be a go-live release suitable for use in production scenarios.  All of our major new features are in and ready for prime time – release management, code search, package management, etc.
• Service updates – We had 2 sprint service updates – July 7 and July 29.  Both had tons of really cool stuff in them.  Among the most significant improvements are – iterative pull requests with comment tracking (so comments stay aligned with the right code as the code evolves) and release management improvements, like much improved Azure deployment.
• New extensions in the marketplace – One of the new dynamics for us is that lot’s of the value for TFS and Team Services is showing up as extensions in the marketplace.  Check out the recently added row to see all the new extensions.  On average, we are getting about one new extension per day – so that’s a lot of new extensions I missed while I was out 🙂
• Application Insights updates – You’ll find the list of Application Insights updates on the Azure blog.  In the past month or so, we’ve introduced tons of updates, including an AI widget for the VSTS dashboard, improvements to proactive detection and alerting, and improvements in Analytics.

Hopefully, now that I’m back, I’ll be able to keep up with all the news 🙂 Brian