Brian Harry's Blog

Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming

TFS 2017 Update 2 RC1 is now available

Yesterday, we released the first release candidate for TFS 2017 Update 2 (TFS 2017.2).  This is a "go-live" release and is ready to be used in production environments.  We've already installed it on 2 of our ~50 production TFS servers and it's looking solid. If you look at the release notes, you'll see that Update 2 ...

Team Services Update – June 1, 2017

Sheesh, it's another huge update this sprint.  I expected a bit of a lull after all the work we put out along with the Build conference but things don't seem  to be slowing down much (or at least they've picked back up with a vengeance).  Check out the release notes for details. There's so many exciting things in this sprint and I'll ...

Evolving TFS/Team Services build automation capabilities

***UPDATE 7/7/2018*** https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releasenotes/tfs2018-update2 You can now upgrade to TFS 2018 Update 2 and continue to connect your XAML controllers and run XAML builds. When we removed support for XAML build in TFS 2018 RTW and Update 1, some of you could not upgrade due to having legacy XAML builds, ...

The largest Git repo on the planet

It's been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called "Git Virtual File System".  As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder and the working directory.  Rather than...

Team Services Update – May 11, 2017

As you may know, this week is the //Build conference.  Along side that event, we are announcing a ton of VS Team Services enhancements, including rolling out our sprint 117 upgrade.  Some of the changes are available immediately (because they were previously deployed and only required a feature flag to be flipped) and others will roll out ...

Two bulls meet

You may have noticed I wasn't very responsive during much of April.  That's because I took an extended "Farmcation" for about 3 weeks.  I just returned to work on Monday and should be a bit more responsive now. I won't bore you with all the details but I wanted to share one thing. Cows are cool animals in many ways.  Sometimes they ...

TFS 2015.4 released

Yesterday, we released TFS 2015 Update 4.  This will likely be the last release in the TFS 2015 line.  TFS 2017 shipped almost 6 months ago and we are already hard at work on TFS 2017 Update 2.  This TFS 2015 Update 4 release just contains fixes for commonly reported customer issues - about 30 in total.  Read the release notes for more ...

Team Explorer for TFS 2017

When we shipped TFS 2017 and Visual Studio 2017, we didn't provide a "Team Explorer" like solution.  Historically our Team Explorer installer has been available for customers that want a rich client to access version control and some work item tracking features in TFS or VS Team Services.  We didn't release it because we needed to create a ...

Shutting down CodePlex

Almost 11 years after we created CodePlex, it’s time to say goodbye.  We launched CodePlex in 2006 because we, like others in the industry, saw a need for a great place to share software.  Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of amazing options come and go but at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open ...