Today we deployed our sprint 40 update to the Team Foundation Service. You can read more about it on the release notes.
We continued to make progress adding valuable components to the build images. We have two significant issues with our build images at the moment and both will be solved in the same way. First, we don’t have the ability to build Windows 8 store apps. That’s because our build VMs are based on the older Azure VM roles and they don’t support Windows 2012 (you have to use Windows 8 or Windows 2012 to build a Win 8 store app). Secondly, we are about out of space on our VM images so we are being super careful about what additional components we add – and working to prune stuff that isn’t necessary. Both will be solved by moving to the newer Azure IaaS VMs. The PaaS small VM roles we use have 35GB of disk space. IaaS VMs have 128GB. And, of course, we can run Windows 2012 on IaaS VMs. The work to port from PaaS VM roles to IaaS VMs is under way now and I hope I’ll be able to share more with you early next year.
The other big thing you’ll notice in this release is a significant facelift on some of our web based version control UI. There are many changes and I’ll let the release notes speak for themselves. I just want to include one screenshot that demonstrates the change. This is a changeset from history. We’ve gotten rid of tabs, added inline diffs, etc. What you’ll see show up today is just the beginning. We have quite a lot of version control work underway and you’ll see more improvements over the next several sprints.
Lastly, I wanted to observe that we are headed into the holidays. On our 3 week schedule, we’d have our next deployment on Dec 31st. As you can imagine, we’re not really psyched about deploying on new year’s eve. Plus with all the vacations this month, there’s not going to be a ton of change. We will still do a sprint 41 deployment – but we’re planning to delay it a week – so we’ll do it on Jan 7th rather than Dec 31st. We will continue with our normal schedule after that – so sprint 42 should deploy on Jan 21st (only a 2 week delta from the delayed deployment).
Brian