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DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps
April 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19It’s a gorgeous long weekend here in England – it’s warm and the sun is shining, two things that don’t happen here all the time. I’m heading outside to enjoy it, and I hope you’ve got some nice weather, too. But if you’re stuck with the dreary end of winter,
April 12, 2019Apr 12, 201904/12/19 We've been recommending for a while that customers use the open source tools Selenium and Appium tools, therefore the Visual Studio 2019 release marks their final deprecation.
We recommend using Selenium for testing web-applications and Appium with WinAppDriver for testing desktop (WPF, WinForms, Win32) and UWP apps. For testing Dynamics 365 apps, we recommend using the EasyRepro framework that is built on top of Selenium.
April 12, 2019Apr 12, 201904/12/19I’m back from a few weeks of travelling – a fun mix of conferences and holiday – and I’m happy to be home. I’m particularly excited that I’ll be here in England for the Global Azure Bootcamp in just a few weeks.
April 11, 2019Apr 11, 201904/11/19Sprint 149 has just finished rolling out to all organisations today and you can check out all the cool features in the release notes. Here is just a snapshot of some of the features that you can start using today.
Navigate to Azure Boards work items directly from mentions in any GitHub comment
Want to mention a work item in a GitHub comment?
April 9, 2019Apr 9, 201904/9/19For the April security release, we are releasing fixes for vulnerabilities that impact Azure DevOps Server 2019, TFS 2018, TFS 2017, and TFS 2015. These vulnerabilities were found through our Azure DevOps Bounty Program. Thanks to everyone who has been participating in this program.
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19The big news this week is the launch of Visual Studio 2019. If you weren’t able to watch the video keynote live, don’t worry. It was all recorded for you so you can watch it on-demand. And don’t forget my favorite part: all the projects that you can build with Visual Studio 2019?
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19Analytics for Azure DevOps Services is Now Generally Available! Read this blog to learn more about the exciting features that you can start using!
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19At the Microsoft Reactor in London this morning, Donovan Brown announced that customers can now create Azure DevOps organizations and choose that their data will be hosted in the UK Azure geography.
April 4, 2019Apr 4, 201904/4/19You can now edit and delete comments in your work item's discussion! Read this blog to learn more about the experience.
April 2, 2019Apr 2, 201904/2/19We recognize that throughout the years, Azure Boards's workflows have accumulated smaller issues and usability nitpicks which have failed to become part of bigger product initiatives. This is where Project Paper Cuts comes in.
Admin & Licensing
October 23, 2018Oct 23, 201810/23/18Today we are excited to announce that Azure DevOps is now available over Azure ExpressRoute. Customers who typically operate in the government and financial services sectors have requested this support because they want private connections that don’t go over the public Internet for security reasons. ExpressRoute also typically offers them more reliability, faster speeds, and lower latencies than typical Internet connections.
September 27, 2018Sep 27, 201809/27/18Azure DevOps now supports AzureAD (AAD) users accessing organizations that are backed by Microsoft accounts (MSA). For administrators, this means that if your organization uses MSAs for corporate users, new employees can use their AAD credentials for access instead of creating a new MSA identity.
August 8, 2018Aug 8, 201808/8/18On the 24th of July 2018, we notified some customers via e-mail and on this blog about a planned action that we would start taking in relation to the malicious ESLint NPM package incident. This action is now underway.
July 24, 2018Jul 24, 201807/24/18As promised in the Protecting our users from the ESLint NPM package breach blog post last week, we have deployed new REST APIs to allow administrators of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) accounts to centrally revoke Personal Access Tokens (PAT) and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) created by users in their accounts.
July 5, 2018Jul 5, 201807/5/18Today, we’re excited to announce that users with the Stakeholder access level can now be administrators in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). With these upcoming changes, Stakeholders can administer access levels, permissions, and settings – if they have been granted permissions to do so.
April 27, 2018Apr 27, 201804/27/18Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers a suite of DevOps capabilities to developers including Source control, Agile planning, Build, Release, Test and more. But until now all these features require the user to first login using a Microsoft Account before they can be used.
March 28, 2018Mar 28, 201803/28/18On January 5, 2018, I announced that Visual Studio Team Services will no longer allow creation of new MSA users with custom domain names backed by AzureAD. While most customers agree with the direction of this change, I got clear feedback that they could not connect their VSTS to AzureAD by the March 31 deadline.
January 30, 2018Jan 30, 201801/30/18In February 2017, VSTS announced support for Azure Active Directory Conditional Access Policy (CAP). One caveat that was called out in that announcement was that alternate authentication mechanisms, such as personal access tokens, would not enforce CAP.
As I discussed previously,
January 29, 2018Jan 29, 201801/29/18A few weeks ago, I posted about a change coming to organizations managing their identities with Microsoft Accounts (MSAs); as of March 30th, you will no longer able to create new MSAs with a custom domain name that is linked to an Azure Active Directory tenant.
January 5, 2018Jan 5, 201801/5/183-28-2018 UPDATE : The deadline listed below has been extended to the end of September. Read my latest blog post for more information.
On September 15, 2016, the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) team blocked the ability to create new Microsoft accounts using email addresses in domains that are configured in Azure AD.
Agile
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19Analytics for Azure DevOps Services is Now Generally Available! Read this blog to learn more about the exciting features that you can start using!
April 4, 2019Apr 4, 201904/4/19You can now edit and delete comments in your work item's discussion! Read this blog to learn more about the experience.
April 2, 2019Apr 2, 201904/2/19We recognize that throughout the years, Azure Boards's workflows have accumulated smaller issues and usability nitpicks which have failed to become part of bigger product initiatives. This is where Project Paper Cuts comes in.
February 14, 2019Feb 14, 201902/14/19Our new Basic Process is now available in Azure DevOps. This process is light and simple so you can get started working immediately without having to understand any complex concepts. Give it a try today.
November 12, 2018Nov 12, 201811/12/18With the Azure DevOps Sprint 143 Update, we’re excited to announce the availability of our new rich text editor on the work item form in Azure Boards. The work item form can be accessed in Azure Boards from the work items hub,
September 14, 2018Sep 14, 201809/14/18In the new 5.0 (preview) version we combined the two inherited REST API's under a single domain. Making it much easier to determine what REST API endpoints to use. What domain you need depends on the process model used by your projects.
June 22, 2018Jun 22, 201806/22/18In our recent post “New navigation for Visual Studio Team Services” we shared an early look at our plans for the upcoming year. For the Work hubs in VSTS, we’re investing in ways that address usability issues many of you have shared with us.
June 19, 2018Jun 19, 201806/19/18I’m excited to share the new navigation we’re working on for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to modernize the user experience and give you more flexibility. As Lori mentioned in her blog post, our goal to create an integrated suite that also gives the flexibly to pick and choose the services that work best for you.
June 18, 2018Jun 18, 201806/18/18The New Queries Hub streamlines many of the existing features from the old hub and provides new capabilities to make it easier to get to the queries that are important to you. It is now generally available for VSTS customers and coming to TFS in the next major version.
May 21, 2018May 21, 201805/21/18Updated contents on April 2, 2018
Since the first version of Team Foundation Server (TFS) in 2005, we have provided a set of SOAP APIs for programmatic interaction with Work Items and Tests. In recent years, REST has replaced SOAP as the preferred method for building integrations offering a simpler and more flexible programming model,
Azure & Cloud
April 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19It’s a gorgeous long weekend here in England – it’s warm and the sun is shining, two things that don’t happen here all the time. I’m heading outside to enjoy it, and I hope you’ve got some nice weather, too. But if you’re stuck with the dreary end of winter,
April 12, 2019Apr 12, 201904/12/19I’m back from a few weeks of travelling – a fun mix of conferences and holiday – and I’m happy to be home. I’m particularly excited that I’ll be here in England for the Global Azure Bootcamp in just a few weeks.
April 9, 2019Apr 9, 201904/9/19For the April security release, we are releasing fixes for vulnerabilities that impact Azure DevOps Server 2019, TFS 2018, TFS 2017, and TFS 2015. These vulnerabilities were found through our Azure DevOps Bounty Program. Thanks to everyone who has been participating in this program.
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19At the Microsoft Reactor in London this morning, Donovan Brown announced that customers can now create Azure DevOps organizations and choose that their data will be hosted in the UK Azure geography.
March 12, 2019Mar 12, 201903/12/19For the March security release, we are releasing a fix for a cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in release management (CVE-2019-0777). This impacts TFS 2017 and TFS 2018. We are releasing patches for TFS 2018 Update 3.2, TFS 2018 Update 1.2,
March 5, 2019Mar 5, 201903/5/19Today, we announced the release of Azure DevOps Server 2019, the evolution of Team Foundation Server. This is the first release of our new brand and new navigation. You can read about the new features in our release notes.
Here are some key links:
Azure DevOps Server 2019 ISO
Azure DevOps Server 2019 Web Install
Release Notes
Thanks to everyone who installed our release candidates and sent us feedback.
March 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19I don’t know why but it seems like some weeks are just busier than others for everybody. And y’all have obviously been busy, because this week I got so many notifications about Agile, DevOps, GitHub and Azure DevOps articles in my inbox that it was hard to keep up.
February 20, 2019Feb 20, 201902/20/19Modern software moves quickly and demands more from developers than ever. New CI/CD tools can help developers deliver value faster and more transparently, but the need for customized scripts that address different kinds of edge solutions still presents a challenge for some CI/CD pipelines.
February 15, 2019Feb 15, 201902/15/19I hope you had another great week – I certainly did! I had the good fortune to spend time building out some fun container-based Azure Pipelines builds for open source projects. Expect a blog post on that soon! In the meantime,
February 13, 2019Feb 13, 201902/13/19We're pleased to announce that we now have a public preview of Azure DevOps extension for the Azure CLI which is available cross platform. The extension allows you to experience Azure DevOps from the command line, bringing the capability to manage Azure DevOps right to your fingertips!
Azure DevOps Server
April 9, 2019Apr 9, 201904/9/19For the April security release, we are releasing fixes for vulnerabilities that impact Azure DevOps Server 2019, TFS 2018, TFS 2017, and TFS 2015. These vulnerabilities were found through our Azure DevOps Bounty Program. Thanks to everyone who has been participating in this program.
March 5, 2019Mar 5, 201903/5/19Today, we announced the release of Azure DevOps Server 2019, the evolution of Team Foundation Server. This is the first release of our new brand and new navigation. You can read about the new features in our release notes.
Here are some key links:
Azure DevOps Server 2019 ISO
Azure DevOps Server 2019 Web Install
Release Notes
Thanks to everyone who installed our release candidates and sent us feedback.
February 12, 2019Feb 12, 201902/12/19We announced the Azure DevOps Bounty Program a few weeks ago. We’re excited that this effort has already helped us on our mission to provide the highest level of security for our customers. Thanks to everyone who is participating in the Bounty program.
February 1, 2019Feb 1, 201902/1/19The search feature of Team Foundation Server (TFS) uses Elasticsearch, which depends on Java SE. Until now, Oracle Java SE was the supported version of JRE for TFS search. With the change in Oracle licensing terms, there will be no more “free public Java updates” and users are required to buy a subscription to continue to get JRE updates for commercial use.
January 22, 2019Jan 22, 201901/22/19Today, we released Azure DevOps Server 2019 RC2. This is our last planned prerelease before our final release of Azure DevOps Server 2019. RC2 includes some new features since RC1. You can upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2019 RC1 or previous versions of TFS. You can find the full details in our release notes.
January 15, 2019Jan 15, 201901/15/19Today, we are releasing updates for a cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability and an issue where in some instances task groups may incorrectly show variables that are marked as secret. Team Foundation Server 2017 and 2018 are impacted. We have released patches for TFS 2017 Update 3.1 and TFS 2018 Update 1.2. We have also released TFS 2018 Update 3.2, which is a full install that includes these fixes.
November 21, 2018Nov 21, 201811/21/18Yesterday, we announced Azure DevOps Server 2019 RC1. This is the evolution of TFS and the first release with our new brand and new navigation. We've added a ton of new features which you can read about in our release notes.
November 5, 2018Nov 5, 201811/5/18Today, we are releasing a fix for a potential cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. This impacts Team Foundation Server 2017 and 2018. We have released patches for TFS 2017 Update 3.1, TFS 2018 Update 1.1, and TFS 2018 Update 3. We have also released TFS 2018 Update 3.1, which is a full install that includes this fix.
September 24, 2018Sep 24, 201809/24/18If you are using Azure DevOps – we want to hear what reporting metrics are important to you. We've authored a short survey to gather this data.
September 18, 2018Sep 18, 201809/18/18Last week, we released both TFS 2018 Update 3 and TFS 2018 Update 1.1. Update 3 is a roll up of bug fixes on top of Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 2. You can see a list of the bugs that were fixed in the release notes.
CI/CD
March 13, 2019Mar 13, 201903/13/19Many of our customers use Slack channels to manage Azure Pipelines. Today, we're making it even easier for you, with a tighter integration that lets you be more productive - even when you're on the go!
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19Hosted Agents in Azure Pipelines are getting a Windows Server 2019 image with VS 2019 installed, macOS agents are upgrading to Mojave (OS X 10.14), and we share a few upcoming road map items!
February 21, 2019Feb 21, 201902/21/19This is a follow-up to Matt Cooper’s earlier blog post, “Using containerized services in your pipeline“. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read that post to understand the new container syntax in the pipeline definition.
As a program manager for Azure DevOps,
February 20, 2019Feb 20, 201902/20/19Modern software moves quickly and demands more from developers than ever. New CI/CD tools can help developers deliver value faster and more transparently, but the need for customized scripts that address different kinds of edge solutions still presents a challenge for some CI/CD pipelines.
February 12, 2019Feb 12, 201902/12/19I am excited to announce the availability of the Azure Pipelines app for Slack. If you use Slack, you can use the Azure Pipelines app for Slack to easily monitor the events for your pipelines. Set up and manage subscriptions for completed builds, releases, pending approvals and more from the app and get notifications for these events in your Slack channels.
February 5, 2019Feb 5, 201902/5/19For a long while, Azure Pipelines users have been asking to improve performance on the hosted build agents by adding caching for common scenarios like package restore. The issue came up in a recent popular Hacker News item, so we wanted to share an update.
January 25, 2019Jan 25, 201901/25/19When I became a Program Manager, I gave up writing software for a living. So I did what many programmers do when faced with such a dilemma: I started working on open source software in my spare time. One of the projects that I work on is called libgit2.
January 25, 2019Jan 25, 201901/25/19Do you own a GitHub repository? Do you create releases on GitHub to distribute software packages? Do you manually compile a list of changes to be included in release notes? If yes, you will be excited to know that you can now automate creation and modification of GitHub Releases directly from Azure Pipelines. This can be done through the GitHub Release task that is now rolled out to all users.
January 16, 2019Jan 16, 201901/16/19In DevOps ecosystem, choice of systems and collaboration between cross-functional teams is critical. Incidence response and change management are key DevOps activities. ServiceNow is a market leader for IT service management, and we are delighted that Azure Pipelines and ServiceNow have partnered together for an integration of Azure Pipelines with ServiceNow Change Management.
January 7, 2019Jan 7, 201901/7/19This article provides a solution for running Azure DevOps agents (Build/Release agents) on Windows Server Core based containers, hosted on Azure Container Instances (ACI). A solution like this might be useful, when the default Microsoft-hosted agents don't fit your requirements, and you don't prefer using "traditional" IaaS VMs for running your self-hosted agents.
Community
April 11, 2019Apr 11, 201904/11/19Sprint 149 has just finished rolling out to all organisations today and you can check out all the cool features in the release notes. Here is just a snapshot of some of the features that you can start using today.
Navigate to Azure Boards work items directly from mentions in any GitHub comment
Want to mention a work item in a GitHub comment?
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19The big news this week is the launch of Visual Studio 2019. If you weren’t able to watch the video keynote live, don’t worry. It was all recorded for you so you can watch it on-demand. And don’t forget my favorite part: all the projects that you can build with Visual Studio 2019?
March 29, 2019Mar 29, 201903/29/19One of the embarrassing things that can happen to you when you travel a lot is that you start to forget what day of the week it is. When you fly out on a Sunday, spend some time in one place,
March 15, 2019Mar 15, 201903/15/19I’ve been building tools for Azure DevOps for fifteen years and yes, in case you were wondering, saying that does make me feel old. But more importantly: I’m still learning new things about it that I didn’t know. That’s why I’m so happy to read all these articles every week.
March 8, 2019Mar 8, 201903/8/19It’s been a busy week here on the Azure DevOps team – we’ve been busy putting the finishing touches on Azure DevOps Server 2019 and getting it out the door. Azure DevOps Server is the new name for Team Foundation Server –
February 22, 2019Feb 22, 201902/22/19Here in England, we’ve got some lovely spring-like weather coming for the weekend. I can’t wait to put the computer away, get the grill out and enjoy the sunshine. But before I unplug, I wanted to share with you some of the great articles that I found this week around DevOps.
February 13, 2019Feb 13, 201902/13/19And... the new DevOps blog is live! The blog has a new and improved look and functionality - easily share posts, follow authors and a fresh new look! Check it out and let us know what you think!
February 12, 2019Feb 12, 201902/12/19I am excited to announce the availability of the Azure Pipelines app for Slack. If you use Slack, you can use the Azure Pipelines app for Slack to easily monitor the events for your pipelines. Set up and manage subscriptions for completed builds, releases, pending approvals and more from the app and get notifications for these events in your Slack channels.
February 8, 2019Feb 8, 201902/8/19Happy Friday! I hope you've had a great feel full of finding bugs, improving performance and keeping your services online. Now that you're cruising into the weekend, it's a good time to take a moment and read up on the state of DevOps. Here's some great articles (and a podcast) that I found this week.
February 6, 2019Feb 6, 201902/6/19In this update, you can now simplify the organization of your work using the Basic process, wiki updates, and updates to Azure Pipelines. Check out the video to learn more about these features.
Directions
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19At the Microsoft Reactor in London this morning, Donovan Brown announced that customers can now create Azure DevOps organizations and choose that their data will be hosted in the UK Azure geography.
February 22, 2019Feb 22, 201902/22/19We plan on closing down the corresponding Azure DevOps cloud-based load testing service on March 31st, 2020.
October 29, 2018Oct 29, 201810/29/18In order to provide you with visibility into several of our key investments, we post quarterly updates to the roadmap on our Features Timeline page.
September 24, 2018Sep 24, 201809/24/18Back in June of this year, we rolled out the first iteration of our new navigation model for Azure DevOps. We’ve spent the summer improving that experience based on the feedback many of you have provided. Thank you! Our next step is to move from the new model being a preview, to becoming the navigation for the product. In this post, I’ll walk through some of the key feedback we’ve addressed and lay out the schedule you can expect going forward.
June 4, 2018Jun 4, 201806/4/18Today, Satya announced the exciting news – our intent to acquire GitHub!
GitHub and Microsoft have been partnering on several levels for years. Specifically, the VSTS team has worked closely with GitHub on Git at a technical level and on other open source projects such as libgit2,
April 27, 2018Apr 27, 201804/27/18Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers a suite of DevOps capabilities to developers including Source control, Agile planning, Build, Release, Test and more. But until now all these features require the user to first login using a Microsoft Account before they can be used.
Git & Version Control
October 5, 2018Oct 5, 201810/5/18Today, the Git project has announced a security vulnerability: there is a security issue in recursively cloning submodules that can lead to arbitrary code execution. The Azure DevOps team encourages you to examine whether you are on an affected platform and, if so, upgrade your Git clients to the latest version.
July 16, 2018Jul 16, 201807/16/18We’ve been discussing the commit-graph feature in Git 2.18 and how we can use generation numbers to accelerate commit walks. One area where we can get significant speedup is when presenting output in topological order. This allows us to walk a much smaller list of commits than before.
July 9, 2018Jul 9, 201807/9/18Earlier, we announced that Git 2.18 contains a new commit-graph feature, and we discussed the commit-graph file format. As shipped in Git 2.18, this file only speeds up commit walks by a constant multiple, due to parsing structured data from the commit-graph file.
July 2, 2018Jul 2, 201807/2/18Earlier, we announced the commit-graph feature in Git 2.18 and talked about some of its performance benefits. Today, we’ll discuss some if the technical details about how the commit-graph feature works, including some helpful properties of its file format. This file speeds up commit-graph walks so much that we were able to identify other ways to speed up these walks using small optimizations.
June 25, 2018Jun 25, 201806/25/18Have you ever run gitk and waited a few seconds before the window appears? Have you struggled to visualize your commit history into a sane order of contributions instead of a stream of parallel work? Have you ever run a force-push and waited seconds for Git to give any output?
June 19, 2018Jun 19, 201806/19/18I’m excited to share the new navigation we’re working on for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to modernize the user experience and give you more flexibility. As Lori mentioned in her blog post, our goal to create an integrated suite that also gives the flexibly to pick and choose the services that work best for you.
May 10, 2018May 10, 201805/10/18One of our DevOps “habits” is to Shift Left and move quality upstream. Including additional validations earlier in the DevOps pipeline means identifying potential issues before they become a problem. For teams using pull requests, catching issues while the PR is active is ideal –
May 1, 2018May 1, 201805/1/18One of the favorite parts of my job is curating a web site with the stories of how we work. Those experience reports and more of our guidance are now consolidated at https://aka.ms/devops.
In addition to our own stories, this center offers content to help your team learn DevOps practices,
April 19, 2018Apr 19, 201804/19/18Whenever I talk to somebody about Git and version control, one question always comes up:
How do you do your branching at Microsoft?
And there’s no one answer to this question. Although we’ve been moving everybody in the company into one engineering system,
March 25, 2018Mar 25, 201803/25/18Now you can publish markdown files from a git repository to the VSTS Wiki. Developers often write SDK documents, product documentation, or README files explaining a product in a git repository. Such pages are often updated alongside code in the code repository.
Open Source
November 28, 2018Nov 28, 201811/28/18We are making a change to Azure DevOps to block the harmful flatmap-stream 0.1.0 package and the versions of event-stream newer than version 3.3.4 which make use of the flatmap-stream package.
November 12, 2018Nov 12, 201811/12/18With the Azure DevOps Sprint 143 Update, we’re excited to announce the availability of our new rich text editor on the work item form in Azure Boards. The work item form can be accessed in Azure Boards from the work items hub,
July 16, 2018Jul 16, 201807/16/18We’ve been discussing the commit-graph feature in Git 2.18 and how we can use generation numbers to accelerate commit walks. One area where we can get significant speedup is when presenting output in topological order. This allows us to walk a much smaller list of commits than before.
July 9, 2018Jul 9, 201807/9/18Earlier, we announced that Git 2.18 contains a new commit-graph feature, and we discussed the commit-graph file format. As shipped in Git 2.18, this file only speeds up commit walks by a constant multiple, due to parsing structured data from the commit-graph file.
July 2, 2018Jul 2, 201807/2/18Earlier, we announced the commit-graph feature in Git 2.18 and talked about some of its performance benefits. Today, we’ll discuss some if the technical details about how the commit-graph feature works, including some helpful properties of its file format. This file speeds up commit-graph walks so much that we were able to identify other ways to speed up these walks using small optimizations.
June 25, 2018Jun 25, 201806/25/18Have you ever run gitk and waited a few seconds before the window appears? Have you struggled to visualize your commit history into a sane order of contributions instead of a stream of parallel work? Have you ever run a force-push and waited seconds for Git to give any output?
April 27, 2018Apr 27, 201804/27/18Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers a suite of DevOps capabilities to developers including Source control, Agile planning, Build, Release, Test and more. But until now all these features require the user to first login using a Microsoft Account before they can be used.
March 8, 2018Mar 8, 201803/8/18Git was originally designed for Unix systems and still today, all the build tools for the Git codebase assume you have standard Unix tools available in your path. If you have an open-source mindset and want to start contributing to Git,
January 11, 2018Jan 11, 201801/11/18Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) hosts the largest Git repository in the world: the Windows source code. Keeping a primary copy of the code available in the cloud and having it be performant while being updated by over 4000 users at the same time is a monumental achievement,
September 22, 2017Sep 22, 201709/22/17A DevSecOps best practice is root cause analysis, so that we can learn from live site incidents and prevent their recurrence. Equifax made news recently with the exfiltration of data from half the US population. This is a sobering opportunity to look at the root cause.
Package Management
February 5, 2019Feb 5, 201902/5/19For a long while, Azure Pipelines users have been asking to improve performance on the hosted build agents by adding caching for common scenarios like package restore. The issue came up in a recent popular Hacker News item, so we wanted to share an update.
October 5, 2018Oct 5, 201810/5/18At the end of last sprint we flipped the switch on a new feature for Azure Artifacts called Universal Packages. With Universal Packages teams can store artifacts that don’t neatly fit into the other kinds of package types that we support. A Universal Package is just a collection of files that you’ve uploaded to our service and labelled with a name and version.
August 8, 2018Aug 8, 201808/8/18On the 24th of July 2018, we notified some customers via e-mail and on this blog about a planned action that we would start taking in relation to the malicious ESLint NPM package incident. This action is now underway.
November 20, 2017Nov 20, 201711/20/17Until now, we’ve focused on making Package Management in Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server the best place to store your private NuGet and npm packages, but we haven’t focused as much on the packages you use from public sources like NuGet.org.
November 15, 2017Nov 15, 201711/15/17As far back as 2012, Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server users have been asking for a Symbol Server. Symbols are crucial to debugging Windows applications, esp. applications written in native languages like C and C++, because they map from the built binary back to the source code: the classes and functions needed to step through an application line-by-line.
September 29, 2017Sep 29, 201709/29/17NuGet (both the command-line tool and the accompanying tools built into Visual Studio) continues to iterate rapidly and add support for new .NET Core and .NET Standard target frameworks, among other improvements. Naturally, many users of Team Build in Visual Studio Team Services want to build those apps,
May 22, 2017May 22, 201705/22/17To demonstrate our continued commitment to support Java developers and their full lifecycle DevOps needs with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS), I want to share some of our recent and exciting Java-related feature announcements. Our teams are working with large and small Java teams every day to better understand their needs and to solicit recommendations for improvements of our tools.
August 19, 2016Aug 19, 201608/19/16Each month, we bring you the insiders view into Visual Studio Team Services – how the product is developed, how we dogfood it and use it every day, who are the people behind it and tips and tricks on becoming a power user
This month,
May 26, 2016May 26, 201605/26/16This is the third and final post in a series covering strategies for versioning a NuGet package. If you missed part 1 or part 2, you should read those first. Today’s post walks through a specific workflow that Git users could adopt,
May 18, 2016May 18, 201605/18/16This is part 2 in a series of blog posts covering strategies for versioning a NuGet package. If you missed part 1, pick it up here. Today’s post talks about future improvements we’d like to make to the versioning and releasing flows.
Reporting
April 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19Analytics for Azure DevOps Services is Now Generally Available! Read this blog to learn more about the exciting features that you can start using!
October 25, 2018Oct 25, 201810/25/18Keeping the pipeline healthy and making it effective is KEY to your DevOps ongoing journey. Some time back we introduced Analytics in Azure Pipeline with Top failing tests report to help you do just that.
October 1, 2018Oct 1, 201810/1/18Analytics is the new reporting platform for both Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Azure DevOps. Analytics will be available with TFS 2019 RC1, which should be available later this year. We are looking for TFS customers who are planning to install RC1 when its released and would be willing to participate in a test program for Analytics.
September 24, 2018Sep 24, 201809/24/18If you are using Azure DevOps – we want to hear what reporting metrics are important to you. We've authored a short survey to gather this data.
August 30, 2018Aug 30, 201808/30/18If you are using Team Foundation Server (TFS) and SSRS Reporting today, we want to hear from you! We want to know which of the TFS Reports we offer today are most valuable to you.
August 21, 2018Aug 21, 201808/21/18Analytics is the new reporting platform for both Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). We are starting a Limited Private Preview of Analytics for TFS 2018 Update 2 in preparation for a full release in TFS 2019.
August 9, 2018Aug 9, 201808/9/18Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) Dashboards help keep track of your project and drive collaboration with your team. Starting today, you can bring your VSTS dashboards right where the conversation is happening in Microsoft Teams (MS Teams).
August 8, 2018Aug 8, 201808/8/18On the 24th of July 2018, we notified some customers via e-mail and on this blog about a planned action that we would start taking in relation to the malicious ESLint NPM package incident. This action is now underway.
July 18, 2018Jul 18, 201807/18/18We’re excited to announce updates to the new dashboard experience. This new experience lets you:
Easily switch between your team’s dashboards
Fine tune team permissions on individual dashboards
Find and favorite the dashboards you need
It is now generally available for VSTS customers and coming to TFS in the next major version.
April 16, 2018Apr 16, 201804/16/18We are excited to announce an easy-to-use solution for integrating Power BI with VSTS Analytics. You don’t have to know how to write OData queries anymore!
Our new feature Analytics views makes getting VSTS work tracking data into Power BI simple,
Security
September 27, 2018Sep 27, 201809/27/18Azure DevOps now supports AzureAD (AAD) users accessing organizations that are backed by Microsoft accounts (MSA). For administrators, this means that if your organization uses MSAs for corporate users, new employees can use their AAD credentials for access instead of creating a new MSA identity.
September 13, 2018Sep 13, 201809/13/18Basic authorization is now enabled on the communication between the TFS and Search services to make it more secure.
August 21, 2018Aug 21, 201808/21/18Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is a critical DevSecOps practice. As engineering organizations accelerate continuous delivery to impressive levels, it’s important to ensure that continuous security validation keeps up. To do so most effectively requires a multi-dimensional application of static analysis tools. The more customizable the tool, the better you can shape it to your actual security risk.
August 8, 2018Aug 8, 201808/8/18On the 24th of July 2018, we notified some customers via e-mail and on this blog about a planned action that we would start taking in relation to the malicious ESLint NPM package incident. This action is now underway.
July 24, 2018Jul 24, 201807/24/18As promised in the Protecting our users from the ESLint NPM package breach blog post last week, we have deployed new REST APIs to allow administrators of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) accounts to centrally revoke Personal Access Tokens (PAT) and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) created by users in their accounts.
July 18, 2018Jul 18, 201807/18/18On the 12th of July 2018, malicious code was detected in two popular open-source NPM packages, eslint-scope (version 3.7.2) and eslint-config-eslint (version 5.0.2). As a result, developers who downloaded and installed these packages may have had credentials stored in their .npmrc file compromised.
July 5, 2018Jul 5, 201807/5/18Today, we’re excited to announce that users with the Stakeholder access level can now be administrators in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). With these upcoming changes, Stakeholders can administer access levels, permissions, and settings – if they have been granted permissions to do so.
May 29, 2018May 29, 201805/29/18The Git community has disclosed an industry-wide security vulnerability in Git that can lead to arbitrary code execution when a user operates in a malicious repository. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE 2018-11235 by Mitre, the organization that assigns unique numbers to track security vulnerabilities in software.
April 27, 2018Apr 27, 201804/27/18Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers a suite of DevOps capabilities to developers including Source control, Agile planning, Build, Release, Test and more. But until now all these features require the user to first login using a Microsoft Account before they can be used.
March 28, 2018Mar 28, 201803/28/18On January 5, 2018, I announced that Visual Studio Team Services will no longer allow creation of new MSA users with custom domain names backed by AzureAD. While most customers agree with the direction of this change, I got clear feedback that they could not connect their VSTS to AzureAD by the March 31 deadline.
Test
April 12, 2019Apr 12, 201904/12/19 We've been recommending for a while that customers use the open source tools Selenium and Appium tools, therefore the Visual Studio 2019 release marks their final deprecation.
We recommend using Selenium for testing web-applications and Appium with WinAppDriver for testing desktop (WPF, WinForms, Win32) and UWP apps. For testing Dynamics 365 apps, we recommend using the EasyRepro framework that is built on top of Selenium.
February 22, 2019Feb 22, 201902/22/19We plan on closing down the corresponding Azure DevOps cloud-based load testing service on March 31st, 2020.
October 25, 2018Oct 25, 201810/25/18Keeping the pipeline healthy and making it effective is KEY to your DevOps ongoing journey. Some time back we introduced Analytics in Azure Pipeline with Top failing tests report to help you do just that.
June 19, 2018Jun 19, 201806/19/18I’m excited to share the new navigation we’re working on for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to modernize the user experience and give you more flexibility. As Lori mentioned in her blog post, our goal to create an integrated suite that also gives the flexibly to pick and choose the services that work best for you.
March 7, 2018Mar 7, 201803/7/18We often get asked how to do CI/CD for IoT apps using Win10 IoT Core. If you’ve been considering or using Win10 IoT Core, then read on.
The Visual Studio Test Platform that ships with Visual Studio 15.6 RTW now supports Testing on Win10 IoT Core.
January 30, 2018Jan 30, 201801/30/18Introduction
MSTest V2 v1.3.0 Beta2 now supports in-assembly parallel execution of tests – the top most requested/commented issue on the testfx repo.
The feature can dramatically reduce the total time taken to execute a suite of tests. To get started, install the framework and adapter from NuGet.
September 4, 2017Sep 4, 201709/4/17As you are already aware, we announced the plan for deprecating XAML builds sometime back.
TFS 2018 RC1 is now available and with that XAML builds are no longer supported. Consequently, Lab Management and automated testing capabilities in Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) are no longer supported starting from TFS 2018 RC1.
September 1, 2017Sep 1, 201709/1/17MSTest V2 has crossed 1 Million downloads. Congratulations! Hats off to the community! MSTest V2 is seeing robust usage. We ourselves use it heavily. If you are still using an earlier version of the MSTest framework, we encourage you to upgrade.
August 24, 2017Aug 24, 201708/24/17Having executed a test – at a minimum – we want to know the outcome. But beyond that, we may want to know more. Data collectors and loggers are the key extension mechanisms intended to provide this and other such details for rich reporting.
August 18, 2017Aug 18, 201708/18/17Updating off pre-RTM bits once RTM ships ought to be routine. But if you have not already done so in the case of the .NET Core based Test projects, let me give you a reason to do so.
vstest delegates discovery and execution of tests to test-framework-specific adapters.
Uncategorized
January 23, 2019Jan 23, 201901/23/19Azure Pipelines has supported container jobs for a while now. You craft a container with exactly the versions of exactly the tools you need, and we'll run your pipeline steps inside that container. Recently we expanded our container support to include service containers: additional, helper containers accessible to your pipeline.
October 23, 2018Oct 23, 201810/23/18Today we are excited to announce that Azure DevOps is now available over Azure ExpressRoute. Customers who typically operate in the government and financial services sectors have requested this support because they want private connections that don’t go over the public Internet for security reasons. ExpressRoute also typically offers them more reliability, faster speeds, and lower latencies than typical Internet connections.
October 19, 2018Oct 19, 201810/19/18It's another Friday, and I've spent another week talking to customers about their DevOps journey. And it's another week of amazing content about DevOps on the Microsoft cloud from the community.
October 12, 2018Oct 12, 201810/12/18I'm back! One of the great privileges of my job is that I get to spend a lot of time talking to customers about DevOps. But that often means a lot of time on the road, and stepping away from drinking at the firehose of great content coming from the Azure DevOps community. But now that I'm back in the office, I've found a great bunch of DevOps links.
October 5, 2018Oct 5, 201810/5/18Today, the Git project has announced a security vulnerability: there is a security issue in recursively cloning submodules that can lead to arbitrary code execution. The Azure DevOps team encourages you to examine whether you are on an affected platform and, if so, upgrade your Git clients to the latest version.
October 5, 2018Oct 5, 201810/5/18At the end of last sprint we flipped the switch on a new feature for Azure Artifacts called Universal Packages. With Universal Packages teams can store artifacts that don’t neatly fit into the other kinds of package types that we support. A Universal Package is just a collection of files that you’ve uploaded to our service and labelled with a name and version.
October 1, 2018Oct 1, 201810/1/18Analytics is the new reporting platform for both Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Azure DevOps. Analytics will be available with TFS 2019 RC1, which should be available later this year. We are looking for TFS customers who are planning to install RC1 when its released and would be willing to participate in a test program for Analytics.
September 27, 2018Sep 27, 201809/27/18Azure DevOps now supports AzureAD (AAD) users accessing organizations that are backed by Microsoft accounts (MSA). For administrators, this means that if your organization uses MSAs for corporate users, new employees can use their AAD credentials for access instead of creating a new MSA identity.
September 24, 2018Sep 24, 201809/24/18Back in June of this year, we rolled out the first iteration of our new navigation model for Azure DevOps. We’ve spent the summer improving that experience based on the feedback many of you have provided. Thank you! Our next step is to move from the new model being a preview, to becoming the navigation for the product. In this post, I’ll walk through some of the key feedback we’ve addressed and lay out the schedule you can expect going forward.
September 24, 2018Sep 24, 201809/24/18If you are using Azure DevOps – we want to hear what reporting metrics are important to you. We've authored a short survey to gather this data.
Wiki
March 25, 2018Mar 25, 201803/25/18Now you can publish markdown files from a git repository to the VSTS Wiki. Developers often write SDK documents, product documentation, or README files explaining a product in a git repository. Such pages are often updated alongside code in the code repository.
January 12, 2018Jan 12, 201801/12/18Happy new year to all Wiki lovers. We are learning a lot with each passing day and in this blog I will share our learning and value that we delivered in the past few sprints. Few of these features are coming up in this sprint (Jan end).
December 1, 2017Dec 1, 201712/1/17Search wiki pages
Over time as teams document more content in wiki pages, finding relevant content becomes increasingly difficult. To maximize collaboration, you need the ability to easily discover content across all your projects. Now you can use wiki search to quickly find relevant wiki pages by title or page content across all projects in your VSTS account.
October 16, 2017Oct 16, 201710/16/17It has been 3 months since Wiki went live and thanks to your feedback, we believe this is the right time to remove preview tag from Wiki.
Wiki* will be Wiki in the coming days.
I would like to give a shout out to everyone in the developer community ,
September 5, 2017Sep 5, 201709/5/17It has been exactly 2 months since Wiki went live on VSTS. Wiki is also available in TFS 2018 RC1 now. We have received tons of great feedback and we also learnt a lot from usage patterns. I wanted to talk about some of our learnings and the improvements in Wiki.
July 6, 2017Jul 6, 201707/6/17Last updated 1/4/2017: Wiki was released to all in October. Read more.
Each project in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) now supports its own Wiki. Now you can conveniently write pages that help your team members and other users understand, use,
