Ed Blankenship

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Deploying to On-Premises Environments with Visual Studio Team Services or Team Foundation Server

April 10th, 2017
I hear this particular question frequently as a reason teams are concerned about adopting Visual Studio Team Services when their applications still run on-premises.  The good news is that it is typically a quick walkthrough on how build & deployment pipelines work.  I want to give a big thanks to Sachi Williamson from Northwest Cadence ...

Integrating Smoke Tests into your Continuous Delivery Pipeline

April 4th, 2017
We're really glad to have Abel Wang help us out for #SpringIntoDevOps with this awesome blog contribution about verifying whether your deployment finished successfully by integrating smoke tests into your pipeline.  Thank you Abel!  -- Ed Blankenship Having a Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline in Visual ...

Import your TFS Database into Visual Studio Team Services

November 16th, 2016
Since I have started in role on the Visual Studio Team Services & Team Foundation Server teams, I have been looking forward to the day that we could help TFS customers successfully migrate all of their data to our SaaS-based hosted TFS service:  Visual Studio Team Services.  It has been by far one of our more popular feature requests on ...

Effective Patterns for Feature Flags

June 24th, 2016
Today, we are inviting Edith Harbaugh from LaunchDarkly as a guest writer for the ALM Blog to talk a little bit about the different patterns of Feature Flag implementations which has been a common topic I get asked about from many of you.  If you didn't see it, Edith joined us on stage at Build 2016 earlier this year to launch a new ...

New Build 2016 Partner Extensions in the Visual Studio Team Services Marketplace

March 30th, 2016
Today at Build 2016, we featured two new extensions from our Partners that are now live in the Visual Studio Team Services Marketplace. It’s been fantastic to see the growth of the extensions since we introduced the Marketplace at Connect(); // 2015 a few months ago.  If you didn’t catch the live session today, we’ll have the recording ...

Microsoft Engineering Stories – How We Build Software at Microsoft

May 13th, 2014
(image) Before I joined Microsoft, I worked with many companies over many years helping them with transforming & improving their application lifecycle management practices.  I was also very fortunate to have been awarded as a Microsoft MVP for many of those years and had the opportunity to interact closely with the ALM Tools product teams...

Migrating Your Data from TFS to Visual Studio Online with New Free Utility from OpsHub

May 12th, 2014
Update (November 16, 2016):   We have released a new high-fidelity migration solution for TFS customers migrating to Visual Studio Team Services directly from Microsoft.  You can find out more at this announcement blog post:  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/import-your-tfs-database-into-visual-studio-team-services/     ...

Visual Studio Online Guidance for Consulting Teams and Systems Integrators

March 27th, 2014
If you are a consulting team or systems integrator partner this post is for you. In the Visual Studio Online team we are aware that many of you are looking for ways to more efficiently deliver projects for your customers. It has been a very popular scenario in the adoption of Visual Studio Online. We are also aware that many of you are ...

Set Local Workspaces as Default when Upgrading to TFS 2012

October 5th, 2012
I was reminded yesterday by a customer about something in the upgrade process that I thought was a helpful reminder for all the TFS administrators.  If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Team Foundation Server to the recently released Team Foundation Server 2012, you’ll want to make sure you add one more step to your post-upgrade ...