Brian Harry's Blog

A Wiki for Team Services and TFS

February 8, 2017 Feb 8, 2017 02/8/17

Brian Harry

One of the big areas of investment for us recently is "social" experiences.  I'm using a fairly broad definition of that term, including a focus on "me" and my stuff and capabilities that improve collaboration across my team, project, organization.  You've already seen lots of pieces that support this general direction...

More on GVFS

February 7, 2017 Feb 7, 2017 02/7/17

Brian Harry

After watching a couple of days of GVFS conversation, I want to add a few things. What problems are we solving? GVFS (and the related Git optimizations) really solves 4 distinct problems: There are other partial solutions to some of these problems - like LFS, sparse checkouts, etc.  We've tackled all of these problems in...

TFS 2017 Process Template Editor is available

February 3, 2017 Feb 3, 2017 02/3/17

Brian Harry

I know a bunch of people have  been asking for it, now you can get it.  The TFS 2017 Process Template Editor (which, btw, is an extension to VS 2017) is now available.  You can install it from the free process template editor extension in the Visual Studio marketplace. Let us know if you have any issues. Brian  ...

Scaling Git (and some back story)

February 3, 2017 Feb 3, 2017 02/3/17

Brian Harry

A couple of years ago, Microsoft made the decision to begin a multi-year investment in revitalizing our engineering system across the company.  We are a big company with tons of teams - each with their own products, priorities, processes and tools.  There are some "common" tools but also a lot of diversity - with VERY MANY internally ...

VS Team Services Update – Jan 25

January 26, 2017 Jan 26, 2017 01/26/17

Brian Harry

We have begun the process of deploying our sprint 112 work into production.  You will see the improvements show up in your account over the next week.  You can read the release notes for all the details in this deployment. A few things worth highlighting... This provides your first peek at our new Enterprise Agile "Delivery Plans" feature...

TFS 2017 Update 1 RC available

January 23, 2017 Jan 23, 2017 01/23/17

Brian Harry

Today we released the Team Foundation Server 2017 Update 1 Release Candidate. This release can be used for a fresh install or to upgrade any supported previous version.  Here's a chart showing the recommended upgrade paths from various TFS versions (you can substitute TFS 2017.1 in the rightmost column).  The upgrade from any of ...

Open sourcing the VS Test platform

January 20, 2017 Jan 20, 2017 01/20/17

Brian Harry

Yesterday we released our unit test execution infrastructure as an open source project.  You'll also find an open source project with the documentation. VSTest is a very extensible unit test execution framework.  The base engine, discovers tests and runs them.  It can parallelize across cores, provides process isolation and can integrate ...

VS Team Services Update – Jan 6

January 6, 2017 Jan 6, 2017 01/6/17

Brian Harry

Next week we will be rolling out our sprint 110 and 111 updated (we didn't do a 110 deployment due to the holidays).  You can check out the release notes for details.  Please bear with us - these changes are going to roll out a bit slower than usual.  As I write this, we are waiting for a major snow storm to hit North Carolina and we are ...

Happy holidays 2016

December 20, 2016 Dec 20, 2016 12/20/16

Brian Harry

Today is my last day in the office for the year.  I just want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who reads my blog and engages on TFS and VS Team Services.  It's great working with all of you. Overall, it's been a good year.  We shipped TFS 2015 Update 2 and 3 and TFS 2017.  We continued our tradition of substantial Team ...

VS Team Services Update – Nov 28

November 29, 2016 Nov 29, 2016 11/29/16

Brian Harry

This week we are deploying our sprint 109 payload.  You can read the release notes for details. There's a few things I'm particularly excited about. Build task versioning - We had a live site incident a few months ago because we rolled out an update to a build task on our hosted pools and it broke pretty much everyone's builds.  That caused ...