Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
VSTS: Lessons Learned Doing DevOps at Microsoft at Scale
Last week I gave a keynote on DevOps at VS Live! 2017 in Orlando. In this talk I cover four main things. The video is now online, and you can find the slides here. For more depth and topics on how we do DevOps with VSTS, go to aka.ms/LearnDevOps. Enjoy! Follow me at twitter.com/tfsbuck
Brand new office in North Carolina
Right after Thanksgiving we moved the North Carolina team to a brand new office in Morrisville, just two miles from our old location. We were at the previous location for more than 12 years. When we moved in there, we took the office space as it was. That meant a lot of randomly shaped offices of widely varying sizes. It served us well, but we were overcrowded with the expansion that had been happening over the last couple of years. We’ve now grown the VS Team Services team here to about 110 people, and we’re hiring more. For comparison, the TFS team in Redmond and NC combined was 130 people in the summer of 2012...
How to configure a TFS proxy to work with Team Services
If you are using Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) with Visual Studio Team Services, you can configure the Team Foundation Server Proxy to cache files for version control for your account. It’s very straightforward as the TFS configuration app will do the work for you. Let’s take a look at how to do that. I’m going through this with TFS 2015 Update 3. It will be similar for newer versions of TFS. You will need to install the TFS Proxy on a server OS such as Windows Server 2012 R2. The entry point to configure the proxy in the TFS configuration UI will only show up when it is running on a server OS. If you ha...
Controlling exposure through feature flags in VS Team Services
One question that I often get from customers is how we manage exposing features in the service. Features may not be complete or need to be revealed at a particular time. We may want to get early feedback. With the team working in master and deploying every three-week sprint, let’s take a look at how we do this for Team Services. Goals Our first goal is decoupling deployment and exposure. We want to be able to control when a feature is available to users without having to time when the code is committed. This allows engineering the freedom to implement the feature based on our needs while also allowing control for...
TFS 15 RC2 is available and ready for production use
We have now released TFS "15" RC2. We are using it in production internally. It is fully supported for production use. You can upgrade from TFS 2012 or newer to RC2. You can also upgrade the RC1 release to RC2, and you will be able to upgrade from RC2 to RTM (that should be a very fast upgrade, since there will be very few changes between RC2 and RTM). Check out the Getting Started page as well as the Release Notes page, which also lists out the very long feature list. Here are the requirements links. Here are direct links to the downloads. I'd love to get as many servers using it as possible for folks to ...
Would you like SSH turned on for your Team Services account?
[Update 5/29/2016] We will be turning on SSH for all existing accounts once we finish deploying sprint 100 (hopefully by the end of this week). We are beginning to roll out SSH for Team Services accounts. If you would like SSH enabled for your account, please email me your account URL. We still need to implement support for brand new accounts (new accounts won’t work with SSH until DNS entries propagate, and we’re working on a solution to eliminate that delay), but it’s otherwise complete. We also have documentation for configuring SSH available. Follow me at twitter.com/tfsbuck
TFS 2015 Update 2: Gated checkin for the new build system (build vNext)
When we shipped the new build system with TFS 2015, we ran out of time to add gated checkin. A lot of customers depend on gated checkin for their workflows, and as a result they’ve been unable to move to the new build system. I’m happy to say we’ve now fixed that. Among the many features in TFS 2015 Update 2, including the new release management service and extensions, we’ve added support for gated checkin with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) for the new task-based build system (previously called build vNext to distinguish it from the old XAML-based build system). When you create a new build definition for...
How to create a team project in the web UI in TFS 2015 Update 2
You no longer have to use the version of Visual Studio Team Explorer that matches your server to create a team project. For the first time ever, you can now create a team project from the web UI with Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 or newer. This is something you’ve been able to do in Visual Studio Team Services for years, and we’ve finally added it to TFS. The entry point to create a team project is different in TFS right now and is hard to find for creating the first team project on a freshly installed server. This is something we’ll address in the future. When you install a fresh TFS server and connect to...
Using VS Team Services Web Hooks with Azure Functions
Today at the Build 2016 conference, Azure announced a new feature called Azure Functions. Here’s a quick description from the main page. Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems. Azure Functions allows developers to take action by connecting to data sources or messaging solutions, thus making it easy to process and react to events. Azure Functions scale based on demand and you pay only for the reso...