Announcing the deprecation of a number of guidance and tools

Our mission is to provide practical guidance, experience, and gap-filling solutions to the developer community. These solutions are eventually deprecated for a number of reasons, such as:

• Gaps are filled as the products and documentation continue to mature ()
• Value of solutions becomes less than the effort to maintain them (no value)
• Passion and bandwidth of associated volunteers fades (no energy)
• We forgot all about the solution (no need)

We have deprecated the following solutions in our Library of tooling and guidance solutions (aka.ms/vsarsolutions):

• ALM Assessment Guidance (use aka.ms/devopsassessment instead).
• Device Testing Guidance
• DevOps Workbench
• Team Foundation Build Guidance
• TFS 2010 Monitoring Management Pack
• TFS Process Template Customization Guide
• Unit Test Generator Tool
• Visual Studio Architecture Tooling Guide and Extension

We’re investigating the state, value, and feasibility of deprecating the following solutions:

• Branch Visualization extension – Move to OSS and let the community take it over?
• Build Usage extension - Challenging to synchronize build usage data with product billing
• Sample Data extension - Challenging to keep it up to date with product (consider VSTS Demo Data generator instead)
• Migration of RM assets from RM server to VSTS - Dated – still relevant? OSS sample seems sufficient
• Secure SonarQube VM with Azure SQL DB - Dated – still relevant? OSS sample seems sufficient
• Technical Debt Management / SonarQube (aka.ms/vsartdsq) – still relevant? OSS sample seems sufficient

Thoughts?

See please uninstall our deprecated extensions for deprecated VSTS extensions.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2018
  We are using the Build Usage extension in TFS (I assume your product billing reasoning is related to VSTS?) and it is still very usefull to get an overview.
  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2018
    Jeroen, when we deprecate an extension we only block new installations. Existing users will be unaffected and can continue using the extension. We've received a number of feedback from users who do not trust as it's data does not match the reported Resource Limits. Unfortunately there are scenarios where we're unable to query all the data, for example, cannot query and include build minutes from deleted builds.