Azure DevOps Blog
DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps
Latest posts
Cloud-load testing service is hyper-scale ready: lessons from generating 1M concurrent user load
Every now and then we hear of a business-critical app failing during major promotional or seasonal events such as holiday sales. More often than not it turns out that the app is not ready for the massive demand created on such occasions - causing the servers to fail and resulting in dissatisfied customers and lost opportunity. To ensure that your app doesn’t make the headlines for the wrong reasons, we recommend that you use the cloud-load testing (CLT) service to validate that your app can handle massive spikes. :-) It also means that the tool or service that you use for load testing be able to generate the loa...
Team Foundation Server (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 ...
Get the most out of your PRs with Branch Policies
Pull requests have been widely accepted as a best practice for teams using Git to peer-review code changes. Peer reviews are a great practice for discussing how to improve code and for spreading knowledge about a codebase amongst team members. Contrary to popular belief, code reviews are not particularly good at finding bugs even if that's what developers expect from their code reviews. So then, how can you ensure you are finding bugs before they're introduced into your codebase while still ensuring you have the right people reviewing? Branch policies can go a long way to helping. Require peer reviews The firs...
Run cloud-based load tests using your own machines (a.k.a. Bring your own subscription)
When you run a cloud-based load test, the load testing service automatically provisions the necessary machines (load agents) for generating the load to your application. Once the load test run has completed, these resources are torn down. This works well for the most part for a large set of customers. However, some customers want to be able to run load tests using their own machines - be it virtual machines in Azure that they provision in their own subscription or other machines, virtual or physical, that may be living on-premises. This blog looks at the two primary scenarios where such a configuration may be us...
Pricing for Release Management in TFS “15”
[Update on Nov 16, 2016] This article is now outdated. With the RTM version of TFS 2017, we have the final pricing model for Release Management. For more information, see our official documentation. Since the new version of Release Management was introduced in TFS 2015 Update 2, it has been in "trial mode". Any user with Basic access level was able to access all features of Release Management. For the last few months, we have been hard at work to finalize the pricing model for Release Management in time for the release of TFS "15" RTM. We wanted a model that: Based on all of these, ...
Using physical boards alongside your Team Services/TFS Kanban and Taskboards – Agile Cards by Spartez
Agile transformation and ongoing process maintenance are often not as easy as they would seem. Despite the very open nature of Agile Manifesto it is important to maintain consistency between selected methods and the tools. This may become increasingly difficult with the growth of organisations, complexity of projects and internal team dynamics. One of Microsoft partners, a company called Spartez, offers a unique solution to Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server (TFS) users, which might be helpful in combining the benefits of using modern digital Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions...
TFVC Support in Preview for Team Services Plugin for IntelliJ and Android Studio
We are proud to announce that Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) support is being added to the Team Services plugin for IntelliJ and Android Studio. Currently, the 1.106.0 version of the plugin will contain preview functionality to support TFVC repositories in the IDEs. Android Studio developers stuck with no TFVC support to create mobile apps now have an alternative to the command line. You made your needs known on User Voice and now we are here to meet them! The initial functionality available for preview is: To start using the TFVC features, download the latest version of th...
Microsoft discontinuing Project Server/TFS Integration. Partner to provide solution
As Agile practices continue to evolve and become our customer’s primary choice for work management, we are changing how TFS and Project Server integrate. With the next major version of TFS, TFS '15', we will no longer provide an out-of-box integration experience between Project Server and Team Foundation Server. Nor will we be providing an out-of-box integration for Project Online and Visual Studio Team Services. We will continue to support our existing integration solution, which supports the following versions Going forward, we are turning to a partner that provides an integration solution for bo...
Team Services September Extensions Roundup – App Stores!
Windows, iOS, and Android, oh my! This month the roundup focus is on app stores. Whether you're building apps for the Windows Store, the iOS App Store, or Google Play, these extensions provide build & release tasks to automate many facets of publishing your app. Whether you're releasing updates to a production app, upgrading from alpha to beta, or managing your rollout, we've got you covered here. Apple App Store See it in the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vsclient.app-store With this extension, you'll need to do a one time manual publish of your app to the store and ...