{"id":283,"date":"2014-11-12T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2014\/11\/12\/news-from-connect\/"},"modified":"2024-03-13T11:42:21","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T18:42:21","slug":"news-from-connect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/news-from-connect\/","title":{"rendered":"News from Connect();"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week we had our \u201cConnect();\u201d developer event in New York.\u00a0 We made a ton of announcements.\u00a0 You\u2019ll find a bunch on <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/somasegar\/\">Soma\u2019s blog<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/visualstudio\/\">Visual Studio blog<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/visualstudioalm\/\">Visual Studio ALM blog<\/a> and in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visualstudio.com\/news\/news-overview-vs\">release notes<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>At the highest level, we announced:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/go.microsoft.com\/fwlink\/?linkid=390465\">Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 4<\/a> are available.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visualstudio.com\/news\/vs2013-update4-rtm-vs\">Release notes\u2026<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The first public <a href=\"http:\/\/go.microsoft.com\/fwlink\/?linkid=517106\">preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015<\/a> are available.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visualstudio.com\/news\/vs2015-preview-vs\">Release notes\u2026<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The .NET Framework is going <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/dotnet\/corefx\">open source<\/a> and cross platform<\/li>\n<li>A free <a href=\"http:\/\/go.microsoft.com\/fwlink\/?LinkId=518338\">Visual Studio Community 2013<\/a> \u2013 a new edition of Visual Studio that combines everything in all the Express products and adds extensibility support.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visualstudio.com\/news\/vs2013-community-vs\">Learn more\u2026<\/a><\/li>\n<li>A bunch of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visualstudio.com\/news\/news-overview-vs\">new improvements to Visual Studio Online<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also previewed some features that will be coming to VS Online &amp; TFS in the not too distant future.<\/p>\n<p>We did *not* release a preview of TFS 2015 today \u2013 not because we aren\u2019t working on it but rather because we\u2019ve found that shipping these capabilities to VS Online is <em>by far<\/em> the fastest way to provide you with a preview of what is coming in TFS 2015 and for you to provide us with rapid feedback to impact our development plans.\u00a0 We will release a preview version of TFS 2015 in the coming months.<\/p>\n<p>As usual, I\u2019ll focus here more on the ALM news and let others focus on the broader Visual Studio news.\u00a0 What I\u2019ve written here is, by no means, everything we\u2019ve done \u2013 there\u2019s just too much to detail it all.\u00a0 One of our big areas of focus is on improving the DevOps workflow.\u00a0 The first several items below are related.<\/p>\n<h3>Release management service preview<\/h3>\n<p>We added a release management capability to TFS over a year ago and I\u2019ve been getting increasingly ardent requests for us to bring release management to VS Online as well.\u00a0 I\u2019m happy to say that we have now done just that.\u00a0 As of today, release management is available on VS Online.\u00a0 You just need Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 or later (Premium, Ultimate or Test Professional) for the release management client UI to configure your release pipelines.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7571.image_thumb_1FFC82F7.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15668\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7571.image_thumb_1FFC82F7.png\" alt=\"Image 7571 image thumb 1FFC82F7\" width=\"804\" height=\"511\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7571.image_thumb_1FFC82F7.png 804w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7571.image_thumb_1FFC82F7-300x191.png 300w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7571.image_thumb_1FFC82F7-768x488.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 804px) 100vw, 804px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The current preview only supports releases targeting Azure environments.\u00a0 In the next few months we\u2019ll add support for releasing to other environments (like on-prem).<\/p>\n<p>Cloud Deployment Projects<\/p>\n<p>To round out a compelling deployment and release management solution, we\u2019ve also added some new features to help you provision infrastructure and deploy your app.\u00a0 The core of this is a new feature in Visual Studio called Cloud Deployment Projects, shipping in the Azure SDK 2.5 (it works with VS 2013 &amp; 2015).\u00a0 Cloud Deployments Projects enable you to describe both the topology and the configuration of your application with an Azure Resource Manager Template and a PowerShell\/DSC script.\u00a0 With these, you can reliably and repeatably provision infrastructure for your app and install it.\u00a0 Cloud Deployment Projects help you to organize all of this.<\/p>\n<p>To manage all of the deployments of your application, we\u2019ve added an Environments tab in Team Explorer that tracks all of your deployed environments and allows you to manage them.\u00a0 It also allows you to share environments with your team.\u00a0 This initial preview is focused on Azure but, in the next year, we also plan unify this with our current TFS lab management offering to provide seamless, ALM integrated infrastructure provisioning and application deployment to both public and private clouds.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve also added a really nice wizard in Visual Studio that allows you to create an instant pipeline in the Release Management service for Visual Studio Online based on the same infrastructure and configuration as code artifacts in your Cloud Deployment Projects. This can then be customized with the release management client, such as to specify approval workflows or other orchestration steps.<\/p>\n<h3>Application Insights<\/h3>\n<p>Of course, if you really want to complete the DevOps loop, you also need a telemetry solution.\u00a0 Application Insights helps you ensure your application is available, performing and succeeding by providing a 360 degree view of your app.\u00a0 Application Insights is hosted in the <a href=\"http:\/\/portal.azure.com\/\">Azure Preview Portal<\/a> but will work for applications hosted in the cloud or on premises.\u00a0 There\u2019s no particularly massive change this week in what\u2019s available in Application Insights \u2013 it just keeps getting better every sprint.\u00a0 In recent sprints we\u2019ve improved the diagnostic search experience, added support for aggregated metrics and improved the \u201cmetrics explorer\u201d for mining your application metrics.<\/p>\n<h3>CodeLens on VS Online<\/h3>\n<p>With Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Update 4 and later, you can now use CodeLens with Team Foundation Version Control hosted on VS Online.\u00a0 We added support for Git (both on-prem &amp; hosted) in an earlier update.<\/p>\n<h3>Smart Unit Tests<\/h3>\n<p>As your release cadence increases, your ability to spend endless hours on integration testing evaporates.\u00a0 You have to focus on developers getting it right and, among other things, that means reliance on unit testing.\u00a0 To help make it easier to ensure you have great coverage on your unit tests, we\u2019ve introduced a new tool we\u2019re calling \u201cSmart Unit Tests\u201d (though I\u2019m banking on coming up with a better name before it ships :)) that will analyze your code and generate unit tests that will give you 100% branch coverage.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very cool way to make sure you are getting great coverage on your code.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/5707.image_thumb_4AD777BA.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15670\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/5707.image_thumb_4AD777BA.png\" alt=\"Image 5707 image thumb 4AD777BA\" width=\"775\" height=\"543\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/5707.image_thumb_4AD777BA.png 775w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/5707.image_thumb_4AD777BA-300x210.png 300w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/5707.image_thumb_4AD777BA-768x538.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 775px) 100vw, 775px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Smart Unit Tests is based on work previously provided by Microsoft Research \u2013 called Pex, and is now going to be an official part of the Visual Studio 2015 product.<\/p>\n<h3>Git Improvements<\/h3>\n<p>We\u2019ve made quite a few improvements to the Git experience.\u00a0 We are releasing Pull Request support in TFS 2013 Update 4.\u00a0 We\u2019ve also made numerous improvements in the VS 2015 preview, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>New branches page with folder hierarchies based on namespaces (i.e. users\/mmitrik\/foo)<\/li>\n<li>show remote branches and make it easier to create local branches from remote, delete remote branches, etc<\/li>\n<li>Git history has a integrated graph view for visualizing the version graph<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Agile Project Management<\/h3>\n<p>We\u2019ve also added some new features to our VS Online Agile Project Management solution (they will first appear on-prem in TFS 2015).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Bugs on the task board<\/strong> \u2013 We recently added the ability to have bugs (in addition to user stories\/requirements) on the back log.\u00a0 With the most recent VS Online update, you can also have them on the kanban board and the task board.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Better link browsing experience<\/strong> \u2013 We added a new work item browsing dialog to the linking experience so that you don\u2019t have to go look up the work item number and paste it into the new link dialog \u2013 instead you can browse for work items directly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Sneak Peak \u2013 Web based editing<\/h3>\n<p>One of our simplest and yet satisfying improvements is our new web based editing experience.\u00a0 It is most pronounced in our Welcome page experience.\u00a0 To remind you, you can check in markdown files into the root of your repositories and they will show up on the Welcome tab of your project home page.\u00a0 You\u2019ll notice that, at the upper left of the markdown page, there is now an \u201cEdit\u201d button.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3527.image_thumb_239FBF36.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15671\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3527.image_thumb_239FBF36.png\" alt=\"Image 3527 image thumb 239FBF36\" width=\"804\" height=\"391\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3527.image_thumb_239FBF36.png 804w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3527.image_thumb_239FBF36-300x146.png 300w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3527.image_thumb_239FBF36-768x373.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 804px) 100vw, 804px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That will enter an edit mode on the raw markdown.\u00a0 You can make changes directly, switch back and forth between markdown and preview and ultimately commit your changes to the repo.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/1488.image_thumb_70D24972.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15672\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/1488.image_thumb_70D24972.png\" alt=\"Image 1488 image thumb 70D24972\" width=\"724\" height=\"382\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/1488.image_thumb_70D24972.png 724w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/1488.image_thumb_70D24972-300x158.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 724px) 100vw, 724px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Not only do you get this in the Welcome page experience, you also get it in the source browser \u2013 you can edit, update and commit any text file directly in the web browser.\u00a0 You can also add new files and delete and rename existing ones.\u00a0 This makes quick tactical edits, from anywhere you are, easy.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/0880.image_thumb_4DA4DEC0.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15673\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/0880.image_thumb_4DA4DEC0.png\" alt=\"Image 0880 image thumb 4DA4DEC0\" width=\"804\" height=\"371\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/0880.image_thumb_4DA4DEC0.png 804w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/0880.image_thumb_4DA4DEC0-300x138.png 300w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/0880.image_thumb_4DA4DEC0-768x354.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 804px) 100vw, 804px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And while we were messing around with previewing markdown and editing files, we went ahead and added previewing of images as well.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3750.image_thumb_7F9F0FFB.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15674\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3750.image_thumb_7F9F0FFB.png\" alt=\"Image 3750 image thumb 7F9F0FFB\" width=\"644\" height=\"332\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3750.image_thumb_7F9F0FFB.png 644w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/3750.image_thumb_7F9F0FFB-300x155.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 644px) 100vw, 644px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h3>Sneak peek \u2013 Updated build service<\/h3>\n<p>I showed a preview of a major update to the VS Online\/TFS build service that we\u2019ve been working on.\u00a0 We believe it will address a large portion of the suggestions to improve it that we\u2019ve received.\u00a0 Improvements include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A <strong>much<\/strong> simpler customization experience that doesn\u2019t require XAML\/Workflow \u2013 just a simple sequence of tasks to execute.<\/li>\n<li>A real time build output window to easily track the progress on your build<\/li>\n<li>Build definition versioning\/auditing so you can know who changed your build definition, what changes they made and why.<\/li>\n<li>A web based editing\/administration experience<\/li>\n<li>The ability to share build agents across projects and collections, making shared build pools far more viable.<\/li>\n<li>A cross platform build agent so that you can automate builds for Mac and Linux too (or even builds than span a PC, Mac and Linux).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course your existing build definitions will continue to work too.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t a complete list of all of the build improvements but it\u2019s a big chunk of what we hope to have in TFS 2015 (and on VS Online well before then).\u00a0 Look for a VS Online preview early next year.<\/p>\n<h3>Sneak Peek \u2013 Code Search<\/h3>\n<p>It\u2019s been pointed out to me for years that even SourceSafe had a code search capability.\u00a0 It was simple and wouldn\u2019t scale (it actually downloaded all the code to the client to grep it) but it worked.\u00a0 We, finally, are building a code search experience for VS Online and TFS \u2013 and it\u2019s an enterprise scale solution built on Elastic Search.\u00a0 It enables efficient search across all of the code on your TFS server or your VS Online account.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, here I\u2019ve searched for the word \u201ctodo\u201d in all .js files in the project VSOnline in the repo Tfs.\u00a0 I see the searc\nh results and can browse the code with the matches highlighted.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7127.image_thumb_5CDDD83E.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-15675\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7127.image_thumb_5CDDD83E.png\" alt=\"Image 7127 image thumb 5CDDD83E\" width=\"804\" height=\"449\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7127.image_thumb_5CDDD83E.png 804w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7127.image_thumb_5CDDD83E-300x168.png 300w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/11\/7127.image_thumb_5CDDD83E-768x429.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 804px) 100vw, 804px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is, as I say, just a peek into the future.\u00a0 We hope to have a preview of the new search feature available to everyone within a few months.<\/p>\n<h3>Summary<\/h3>\n<p>We\u2019ve made some great progress on our DevOps capabilities with a Release Management Service preview, Cloud Deployment projects, Application Insights and Smart Unit Testing.\u00a0 We\u2019ve continued to improve the product across the breadth of the feature set and shown some sneak peeks at some very cool improvements coming soon.\u00a0 It\u2019s very exciting to see all of this coming together.<\/p>\n<p>I hope you all like it as well.<\/p>\n<p>Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week we had our \u201cConnect();\u201d developer event in New York.\u00a0 We made a ton of announcements.\u00a0 You\u2019ll find a bunch on Soma\u2019s blog, the Visual Studio blog, the Visual Studio ALM blog and in the release notes. At the highest level, we announced: Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 4 are available.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":14617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,4,8],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tfs","tag-visual-studio","tag-vsonline"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>This week we had our \u201cConnect();\u201d developer event in New York.\u00a0 We made a ton of announcements.\u00a0 You\u2019ll find a bunch on Soma\u2019s blog, the Visual Studio blog, the Visual Studio ALM blog and in the release notes. At the highest level, we announced: Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 4 are available.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}