Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

Moving TFS to cloud cadence and Visual Studio Online

February 27, 2015 Feb 27, 2015 02/27/15
Buck Hodges
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. ...

Visual Studio Online reliability improvements

December 15, 2014 Dec 15, 2014 12/15/14
Buck Hodges
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 ...

How to provide non-admins access to activity and job pages

September 15, 2014 Sep 15, 2014 09/15/14
Buck Hodges
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 ...

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

August 20, 2014 Aug 20, 2014 08/20/14
Buck Hodges
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 ...

Ten years of blogging

May 16, 2014 May 16, 2014 05/16/14
Buck Hodges
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 ...

Patch for issue with Visual Studio 2013 Queue Build dialog

November 13, 2013 Nov 13, 2013 11/13/13
Buck Hodges
In Visual Studio 2013 and Team Explorer 2013 there is a bug that will cause the “What do you want to build?” combo box to be disabled and the entire Parameters tab to be blank. We have now released a patch to fix this bug: KB 2898341. This bug occurs when using VS or TE 2013 with a TFS 2013 server. We introduced the bug at the very...

Visual Studio and Team Explorer 2013 no longer require IE 10 for installation

November 8, 2013 Nov 8, 2013 11/8/13
Buck Hodges
When Visual Studio 2013 and Team Explorer 2013 were originally released, the installation process required that Internet Explorer 10 or newer was installed. Today we released updated installers that no longer require IE 10. You will get a warning at the beginning of your installation that looks like the screen shot below. For VS 2013 there ...

Updated Team Foundation Server 2013 download addressing web and installation path issues

November 8, 2013 Nov 8, 2013 11/8/13
Buck Hodges
Today we have updated the TFS 2013 installation packages both on the web download page and in MSDN subscriber downloads. The reason is that we found two bugs that we wanted to address broadly. We’ve made changes to be able to catch these types of issues in the future. Here are details on the two fixes. Fixed: Red error box when using ...