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DevOps, Git, and Agile updates from the team building Azure DevOps
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.
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.
February 1, 2019Feb 1, 201902/1/19It's been a busy week for me, I've been at the fabulous NDC London conference where I had the pleasure of seeing some amazing speakers like Microsoft's very own Seth Juarez, Jon Galloway and Scott Hanselman. The NDC family of conferences are amazing and if there's one in your neck of the woods, I encourage you to check it out. But now I'm on the train back home, so I'm catching up on what I missed in the news this week. Here's some of the great stories that I found.
February 1, 2019Feb 1, 201902/1/19Last week we updated the Features Timeline to provide visibility on our key investments for this quarter. The features listed below link to the public roadmap project where you can find more details about each item.
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 25, 2019Jan 25, 201901/25/19Whew, in addition to the day job, I've been hacking on some open source this week. So I've been thinking a lot about my favorite things about Azure Pipelines that helps out with OSS. So it's been a busy week, and I'm looking forward to the weekend. But first, I wanted to share some of this week's great stories from the community.
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 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.
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.
Admin & Licensing
May 6, 2019May 6, 201905/6/19We are constantly working to improve our experience end-to-end, including how our products are purchased. In response to feedback from our customers, we are pleased to announce some changes that will simplify how some Azure DevOps services are purchased.
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.
Agile
May 7, 2019May 7, 201905/7/19While you’ve been able to get started with Azure Boards from azure.com/boards for several months now, the new app in the GitHub Marketplace streamlines the acquisition of the service and configuration of your GitHub repository connections.
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.
Azure & Cloud
May 17, 2019May 17, 201905/17/19The weekend’s nearly here, so it’s almost time to relax. Don’t tell your boss that I suggested it, but maybe you should knock off a little early and catch up on the DevOps news. Lucky for me, I’m not in the office next week: I’ll be at Techorama Belgium and GitHub Satellite.
May 14, 2019May 14, 201905/14/19For the May security release, we are releasing fixes for vulnerabilities that impact Azure DevOps Server 2019, TFS 2018, TFS 2017, and TFS 2015. Thanks to everyone who has been participating in our Azure DevOps Bounty Program.
We have now added the ability to patch TFS 2015,
May 13, 2019May 13, 201905/13/19 Monitor pipelines in 'Azure Pipelines' from your 'Microsoft Teams' channel.
May 10, 2019May 10, 201905/10/19Whew, what a week! Microsoft Build 2019 has come and gone, and what an amazing conference it was. There were so many great announcements for Microsoft products, and for Azure and DevOps in particular. I absolutely cannot wait to get home and start playing with the new features.
May 8, 2019May 8, 201905/8/19Today, we are enabling developers to sign in with their existing GitHub account to Microsoft online services, on any Microsoft log in page. Using your GitHub credentials, you can now sign in via OAuth anywhere a personal Microsoft account does, including Azure DevOps and Azure.
May 7, 2019May 7, 201905/7/19Today, we are announcing new features for Azure Pipelines, including multi-stage YAML pipelines (for CI and CD), environments and deployment strategies, and Kubernetes support.
May 6, 2019May 6, 201905/6/19We are announcing new features features designed to help our customers build applications with Docker containers and deploy them to Kubernetes clusters, on all cloud providers and on-premises.
May 6, 2019May 6, 201905/6/19We are constantly working to improve our experience end-to-end, including how our products are purchased. In response to feedback from our customers, we are pleased to announce some changes that will simplify how some Azure DevOps services are purchased.
May 3, 2019May 3, 201905/3/19It’s Friday – which means that Microsoft Build 2019 starts Monday! I’m literally writing this on my way to the airport and I couldn’t be more excited to be able to talk to so many passionate, creative developers next week. If you’re there,
April 29, 2019Apr 29, 201904/29/19Last week we published an update to the Features Timeline. The features listed below link to the public roadmap project where you can find more details about each item. Here are a few highlights on some of the features for Q2.
Azure DevOps Server
May 6, 2019May 6, 201905/6/19We are constantly working to improve our experience end-to-end, including how our products are purchased. In response to feedback from our customers, we are pleased to announce some changes that will simplify how some Azure DevOps services are purchased.
April 30, 2019Apr 30, 201904/30/19Today, we are releasing Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 RC. This is a go-live release, meaning it is supported on production instances, and you will be able to upgrade to our final release.
Azure DevOps Server 2019.0.1 includes bug fixes for Azure DevOps Server 2019.
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.
CI/CD
May 14, 2019May 14, 201905/14/19Use Azure DevOps to build iOS and macOS apps now on macOS Mojave and High Sierra
May 13, 2019May 13, 201905/13/19 Monitor pipelines in 'Azure Pipelines' from your 'Microsoft Teams' channel.
May 7, 2019May 7, 201905/7/19Today, we are announcing new features for Azure Pipelines, including multi-stage YAML pipelines (for CI and CD), environments and deployment strategies, and Kubernetes support.
May 6, 2019May 6, 201905/6/19We are announcing new features features designed to help our customers build applications with Docker containers and deploy them to Kubernetes clusters, on all cloud providers and on-premises.
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.
Community
May 15, 2019May 15, 201905/15/19Sprint 151 finished rolling out to all organisations end of last week 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, as well as some of the key announcements that we made at Microsoft Build last week.
May 13, 2019May 13, 201905/13/19 Monitor pipelines in 'Azure Pipelines' from your 'Microsoft Teams' channel.
April 26, 2019Apr 26, 201904/26/19Whew, it’s been a busy week! The team is getting ready for the Microsoft Build 2019 conference, in just two weeks! We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on, so if you’re there, be sure to stop by the Azure DevOps breakout sessions and at our booth to chat with us!
April 22, 2019Apr 22, 201904/22/19In this update, you can now use the Task assistant for editing YAML files, share your team's board using the Azure Boards badge, and the general availability of the Analytics Service as well as the dark theme! Check out the video to learn more about these features.
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 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 –
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
May 15, 2019May 15, 201905/15/19In previous posts I’ve talked about performance improvements that our team contributed to the Git community. At Microsoft, we’ve been pushing Git to its limits with the largest and busiest Git repositories on the planet, improving core Git as we go and sending these improvements back upstream.
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,
Open Source
May 15, 2019May 15, 201905/15/19In previous posts I’ve talked about performance improvements that our team contributed to the Git community. At Microsoft, we’ve been pushing Git to its limits with the largest and busiest Git repositories on the planet, improving core Git as we go and sending these improvements back upstream.
May 8, 2019May 8, 201905/8/19Today, we are enabling developers to sign in with their existing GitHub account to Microsoft online services, on any Microsoft log in page. Using your GitHub credentials, you can now sign in via OAuth anywhere a personal Microsoft account does, including Azure DevOps and Azure.
May 7, 2019May 7, 201905/7/19While you’ve been able to get started with Azure Boards from azure.com/boards for several months now, the new app in the GitHub Marketplace streamlines the acquisition of the service and configuration of your GitHub repository connections.
May 7, 2019May 7, 201905/7/19Today, we are announcing new features for Azure Pipelines, including multi-stage YAML pipelines (for CI and CD), environments and deployment strategies, and Kubernetes support.
May 6, 2019May 6, 201905/6/19We are announcing new features features designed to help our customers build applications with Docker containers and deploy them to Kubernetes clusters, on all cloud providers and on-premises.
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.
Package Management
May 8, 2019May 8, 201905/8/19Azure Artifacts introduces pay-per-GB pricing and is available to all users in your organization - no license needed. Also, Python and Universal Packages are generally available and ready to use at scale.
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,
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.
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,
