Brian Harry's Blog

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October 2013 - Brian Harry's Blog

Visual Studio 2012 tools for Git RTM

October 30, 2013 Oct 30, 2013 10/30/13
Brian Harry
We released the first drop of our Visual Studio tools for Git about a year ago as a plugin for VS 2012.  Our ultimate goal was to release them as part of VS 2013 RTM (and we did).  At the same time, we wanted to iterate quickly on VS 2012 because we could get a lot more feedback and because there’s always an adoption curve for ...

Team Rooms in Visual Studio

October 26, 2013 Oct 26, 2013 10/26/13
Brian Harry
In TFS 2013, we introduced a new feature called “Team Rooms” that keep a record of things that happen in your team – checkins, work item updates, build failures, code reviews, etc.  And you can have conversations about the activity directly in the team room.  This keeps a durable record of what’s happening in the team and makes it ...

Team Foundation Service Update – Oct 21

October 22, 2013 Oct 22, 2013 10/22/13
Brian Harry
If you check out the news post yesterday, you’ll see that the big change in this sprint’s deployment was to the project and account home pages.  Quite honestly the account home page was mostly useless and not very visually appealing.  One of the big things we focused on with these updates was improving the getting started experience.  ...

Visual Studio 2013 RTM Available

October 17, 2013 Oct 17, 2013 10/17/13
Brian Harry
In the wee hours of the morning this morning, we made the final versions of Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server 2013 and .NET 4.51 available.  You can download the trials and related products and MSDN subscribers can download the licensed product from the subscriber portal.  You can learn more about what’s new in VS 2013...

How do you measure quality of a service?

October 14, 2013 Oct 14, 2013 10/14/13
Brian Harry
Since we started down the path of building an online service a couple of years ago, I have learned a lot.  One of the things I’ve learned a lot about is measuring the health of a service.  I don’t pretend to have the only solution to the problem so I’m happy to have anyone with a differing opinion chime in. For the purpose of this ...

Running a high scale TFS server

October 8, 2013 Oct 8, 2013 10/8/13
Brian Harry
Grant Holliday, recently wrote a post on managing TFS servers.  Grant has a colorful history.  I first met him when he joined the Team Foundation Server MVP program.  He was so knowledgeable and helpful that I eventually offered him a position on my team to help us manage internal adoption of TFS (over 45,000 people today). ...

VS 2012.4 and TFS 2012.4 RC 4 is available

October 8, 2013 Oct 8, 2013 10/8/13
Brian Harry
Yesterday we released the final release candidate for Update 4 for VS 2012 and TFS 2012. We’re on track to release the final versions in a month or so.  I encourage you to try them out and let us know if there are any last minute issues we need to fix.  One thing to keep in mind – If you install TFS 2012.4 RC4, ...

Hosting GPLv3 Projects on CodePlex

October 3, 2013 Oct 3, 2013 10/3/13
Brian Harry
I’ve been a bit quiet here recently about what’s been going on with CodePlex.  I don’t blog every time we do a release otherwise I’d be blogging about the site every week, but we made a change today that I thought was worth mentioning – the GPLv3 license has been added to the list of open source licenses available when creating a ...