Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
Original Surface RT is a great digital photo frame
I have four Surfaces: the original RT, Surface 2 RT, Surface Pro, and Surface 3. When I got the original Surface RT, which Microsoft gave to every full time employee shortly after it came out, I bought the Type keyboard and stopped using my iPad. The device was sluggish, though, particularly with Outlook. I bought a Surface 2 RT when it came out because it’s a much better machine (faster and even better display), and I carry it as a backup machine when I travel (I use my Surface 2 frequently). A couple of months ago, I bought a new digital photo frame (the one that I had died). The display on it wasn&rsquo...
Mainstream support for TFS 2010 ends in July
Time flies, and the end of mainstream support for Team Foundation Server 2010 is July 14th. Yep, we’re celebrating it on Bastille Day. If you are still using TFS 2010, now is a great time to upgrade to TFS 2013 Update 4. Also, our next public pre-release of TFS 2015 will be “go-live” (the current CTP is not), meaning you can use it in production.Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/tfsbuck
Moving TFS to cloud cadence and Visual Studio Online
We get quite a few questions from customers on how we made the transition to shipping both an on-premises product and a cloud service. We moved from shipping every 2-3 years to shipping Visual Studio Online every three weeks and TFS every 3-4 months. You’ve probably seen the great set of vignettes at Scaling Agile across the Enterprise. It was also recently covered in a report from McKinsey and in an interview on Forbes.com. What’s missing is a deeper description of what changes we’ve made to how we work. A couple of years ago, we wrote document on how the team changed to meet the new deman...
Visual Studio Online reliability improvements
We’ve had a number of outages and other serious incidents in recent months. It’s clear we haven’t done enough to invest in reliability of the service, and I want to give you some insight into what we are working on that will be coming in January and beyond. First I want to give you a very brief description of the the Visual Studio Online (VSO) service topology. VSO consists of a set of scale units that provide services like version control, work item tracking, and load testing. Each scale unit consists of a set of Azure SQL Databases with customer data and virtual machines running the applicati...
How to provide non-admins access to activity and job pages
When we shipped TFS 2012, we introduced a feature in the web UI that makes it easy to look at the activity and job history. In the post I mentioned that you had to be an admin to be able to see the information. A question about this came up last week, and Sean Lumley, one of the folks who built the feature, pointed out there is a specific permission for this. The permission is called Troubleshoot and it is in the Diagnostic security namespace. These are not exposed in the web UI for setting permissions, so you have to use the tfssecurity.exe tool. Here’s an example command line that gives a TFS group call...
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
Yesterday, Brian took ALS Ice Bucket Challenge after being challenged by both Scott Guthrie and Adam Cogan. Brian then challenged me, James Phillips, and David Treadwell. I didn’t want to turn down a challenge from Brian. I happen to be in Redmond this week, so I thought why not do it with my team here. I mentioned it to Jessica, who is my great admin, and she then got a bunch of the DevDiv admins in on it (the level of excitement among the admins was through the roof). My whole day was booked, so I had no idea when I would do this. Then my 2 PM meeting got canceled. It was on! Then the admin team sent email to...
Ten years of blogging
This past week was the tenth anniversary of blogging here. Over that time I’ve written 560 blog posts. There’s clearly been a drop in my blogging frequency, unfortunately, in recent years. I’ve spent more time interacting with folks on Twitter over the last couple of years than on blogging because of the Visual Studio Online service. I started using Twitter to keep an eye on feedback and to look for problems that customers hit that we don’t know about (someday, I’d love that to be zero, but reality is that you can never have enough telemetry). I started at Microsoft in 2003, and whe...
Azure Portal Preview and Visual Studio Online: Adding a user
Today at the Build Conference, we showed a preview of the new Azure Portal, and that includes a preview of deep integration with Visual Studio Online. As with any preview, it has some rough edges and limitations. One of the limitations is that you have to create a new Visual Studio Online account through the new Azure Portal Preview. Your existing account will not work right now. All new accounts created through the new portal will be backed by Azure Active Directory. In the near future we will provide an experience to convert your existing Visual Studio Online account. This also means that adding a user is diff...