Connect() Day 1, How to get caught in a photo on Twitter!

I got the lucky straw and I’m just back in my hotel room in NY after being in the audience to hear the raft of announcements about our Developer Tools at Microsoft. This is such an exciting time for me and for Microsoft as we open our platform up to many new developers and empower existing ones too! Whilst Jan my colleague focussed on the general developer announcements in his blog here, I wanted to highlight some of the enhancements in our ALM Story!

clip_image002

On the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) side, we noted following announcements:

  • As of today, release management is available on VS Online.  You just need Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 or later (Premium, Ultimate or Test Professional) for the release management client UI to configure your release pipelines.
  • A new feature in Visual Studio called Cloud Deployment Projects which enable you to describe both the topology and the configuration of your application with an Azure Resource Manager Template and a PowerShell/DSC script.  With these, you can reliably and repeatably provision infrastructure for your app and install it. clip_image004
  • There’s no particularly massive change this week in what’s available in Application Insights – it just keeps getting better every sprint.  In recent sprints we’ve improved the diagnostic search experience, added support for aggregated metrics and improved the “metrics explorer” for mining your application metrics.
  • A preview of a major update to the VS Online/TFS build service was shown, including:
  • A much simpler customization experience that doesn’t require XAML/Workflow
  • A real time build output window to easily track the progress on your build
  • Build definition versioning/auditing so you can know who changed your build definition, what changes they made and why.
  • A web based editing/administration experience
  • The ability to share build agents across projects and collections, making shared build pools far more viable.
  • A cross platform build agent so that you can automate builds for Mac and Linux too (or even builds than span a PC, Mac and Linux).
  • We, finally, are building a code search experience for VS Online and TFS – and it’s an enterprise scale solution built on Elastic Search.  It enables efficient search across all of the code on your TFS server or your VS Online account.

I’m really excited to attend the breakout sessions tomorrow and look forward to updating you about those!