Azure DevOps Blog
DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps
Latest posts
Project Welcome Pages
We recently deployed a new feature to Visual Studio Online to help people get new team members started with a project and for people browsing the server to understand what a project is for and how to use it. We call the feature “Project Welcome Pages”. It’s very easy to tell when the feature had been enabled for your account, simply go to your project homepage and you’ll see a new “Welcome” tab has appeared next to the “Overview” page that you are used to. Don’t worry if you don’t see it quite yet, the way that our deployments work it may take while to roll out to everyone’s account but it is coming to yours ver...
IntelliTrace standalone collector is back!
As you probably already know, Visual Studio Ultimate offers an enhanced live debugging experience (F5 or Attach) through the use of IntelliTrace. Your application’s execution is recorded by IntelliTrace and you can navigate through time, both backwards and forwards, and examine your code as you normally would during a debugging session by interacting with the Locals and Call Stack windows. Since there is a balance to be found between the performance of the application and the verbosity of the debugging information, we give you two options to choose from: Once your desktop application is deployed to a clie...
Restrict Team Foundation Build permissions
Do you have code that should be seen by only a subset of members of your on-premises team project collection? Do you use Team Foundation Build (TFBuild)? If so, you must create some custom groups to reduce the risk that unauthorized team project collection members can use a build process to bypass team project permissions. Problem For example, you administer the following team projects: You want only the members of each team project to be able to read the code it contains, as shown above. However, by default, TFBuild controllers are collection-scoped resources, and so have permission to acces...
Work-items tracking using Release Management
Tracing what is new in a given release for a product is often tiresome and time taking task. With Microsoft Release Management 2013 Update 3 RC/RTM, you can achieve this easily through its “Change Summary” feature. Details of this feature is described below Change Summary feature details Manual Release When you start a new manual release from the Release Management client, it takes you to the Release page. Now, on this Release page, there is a new tab – Change Summary: Click on the Change Summary tab and it shows you the list of work-items that are new or changed in the current release (in progress). Th...
Microsoft’s journey to Cloud Cadence
Last week the Visual Studio product owner Sam Guckenheimer keynoted the Agile 2014 Conference. In his presentation he went through our teams changes/learning's to adopt a DevOps workflow. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend as we had several conferences here in Redmond/Seattle but luckily we can check it out online here: KEYNOTE: Journey to Cloud Cadence Also love the conversation about the session! https://twitter.com/lynnecazaly/status/493762682089406464/photo/1 Description: Sam describes a ten-year transformation at Microsoft Developer Division from a waterfallian box product ...
Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 now available
With around 60 new features Visual Studio Update 3 has value through the entire development process from the new SDKs and emulators for Windows Phone and Windows Store development to the ~20 new features for Web developers including updates to ASP.NET Identity and Entity Framework. For team members focused on Application Lifecycle workflows there is a ton of new value for you too! If you are in a rush to get started you can skip directly to: Download Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 (also available on MSDN subscriber downloads). For an end to end view of Visual Studio Update 3 please see: http://blogs.msdn.co...
Driving Unit Tests from Cloud Load Test
** Visual Studio Load Testing has always made it easy to create Load Tests. Now with Visual Studio Online it is also easy to verify the performance capacity of your software of 1,000s of users external to your data centers using the Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It has been noted that Visual Studio Load Testing is widely used inside of Microsoft from its inception back in 2005; which begs the question since many of Microsoft development teams are NOT working on web pages, how are they using Visual Studio Load Test? Many (most?) Microsoft developers are writing services and since Visual Studio Load Test can also...
Deploying using PowerShell Desired State Configuration in Release Management
With Microsoft Release Management 2013 Update 3 RC, you can now use Windows PowerShell or Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for deploying and managing configuration data. > Windows PowerShell (PS) > > Refer to Scripting with Windows PowerShell (PS) for more details. These scripts can be same as what you might have been already using to deploy using Microsoft Deployment Agent. > > RM 2013 Update 3 “Deploy using PowerShell” requires PS version on the target servers to be of version 4.0 or higher. > > Windows PowerShell Desired State Configur...
Where is the field on the work item form to order the backlog?
In our latest deployment to Visual Studio Online on July 1, we have removed the Stack Rank (Agile / CMMI) or Backlog Priority (Scrum) field from the work item form. The backlog uses that field to order the items and updates the field to arbitrary values, which caused confusion. If you are interested in the detailed background, please read a previous post called “Behind the scenes: the Backlog Priority or Stack Rank field”.When we introduced the field in TFS 2012, the intention was to make it a system field, hidden to the user. But for a variety of reasons, such as keyboard accessibility, we added it t...