Free UK Visual Studio/ALM Events in 2016

Throughout the second half of this year, Microsoft are hosting three free events on the popular topics of Application Lifestyle Management & DevOps with Visual Studio. These are full day events, and yes to answer the most important question snacks and lunch is free! It’s not entirely clear if the event is going to include Visual Studio Team Services, however there is the promise of showing off new features. So presumably another update for Visual Studio 2015 is coming soon, or new features are going to be added to VSTS.

The Story of Synchronized Settings - The Visual Studio Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

The Story of Synchronized Settings - The Visual Studio Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs.

This blog from the Visual Studio team provides an insight into how and why synchronized settings came about.

Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Preview Released

Barely a month has gone by since the announcement at Tech Ed North America 2013 yet Visual Studio 2013 Preview is available to download. TFS 2013 Preview is also available, however as I use the Team Foundation Services hosted by Microsoft, I’m just going to focus on VS 2013. .NET 4.5.1 preview is also available, which is installed when you install the VS 2013 preview. .NET 4.5.1 is also included in all installations of the Windows 8.1 preview. These products are classified as “go-live” by Microsoft, so they will support them in production.

SQL Server 2014 CTP1 Released

This week has been the week of the release: We’ve had the Visual Studio 2013 Preview and now the SQL Server 2014 CTP1. And that’s just the ones I’m focusing on! There’s the Windows 8.1 Preview as well as Windows Server 2012 R2. What with all the keynotes from Build and both TechEd’s this month, it is clear that Microsoft have certainly accelerated the release cycle and embraced a cloud-first development model. For me this is most noticeable in Team Foundation Services, the Azure based Source Control solution. Features were turned on regularly before they were released in the three updates we’ve had since the release of TFS 2012 back in August. This is a big change from the Microsoft’s previous strategy of developing for its products hosted on the premises first and then being pushed to them to the cloud afterwards.

At a later date I’ll dig more into features of SQL 2014, as this week my focus has been on Visual Studio 2013, which is out sometime this year, as well as doing my job in real life. The duties of blogging…

Visual Studio 2013 Announced

Well, that was unexpected: the team behind The Microsoft product family of Visual Studio have announced that a new version will be released this year! Seeing as we tend to upgrade our version of TFS in December, there goes my hopes of a quiet Christmas. This post is going to explore the change in the cadence of releases from the ALM Team at Microsoft and discuss some of the features that have piqued my interest, and my frustrations at the lack of info surrounding the most significant changes at the tail end of the LifeCycle. I’m also going to do a short demo of one of the features that was switched on when the announcement was made for TFS 2013.