Sprint 44 is done and has now been deployed to the service. You can read the release notes on the Team Foundation Service Portal to learn more about what’s in it. Maybe the biggest news is that the customizable swim lanes for kanban are live on the service now. Over all though, it was a sprint of just moving the ball forward on many fronts – improve test case execution, version control annotate/blame, scheduled builds for Git, etc. No real big news – just everything a bit better. It’ll probably continue to be that way for a few sprints as we pull together our next set of “big” improvements.
You may also want to checkout my upcoming posts on VS 2012.2 (Update 2) and VS Git Extension updates. Both enable new scenarios with the service.
I also want to make you aware that we’ll be taking the Team Foundation Service down for about 15 minutes Saturday March 23rd in the afternoon (US East coast time) – see the release notes for more precise timing. I talked a few months ago about some “big infrastructural changes” we had made that were the root of many of our Update 1 problems. That work is finally done and will allow us to repartition some of our key services data (account, identity, etc) and allow the service to scale a lot further than it can today. That work will be enabled in production on March 23rd. Because it’s a pretty big reorganization of our account database, we’ll need to take the service down while we do it. It’s only 15 minutes because most of the work can be done online and only some wrap up stuff has to be done synchronously while the service is down. We chose Saturday afternoon because that’s generally a low usage time.
We haven’t done an intentional offline servicing event in a year or more. We are generally able to make all of our upgrades with the system fully online. I don’t anticipate another event like this in the coming months but I don’t promise it will never happen again. I won’t be surprised if it’s something we need to do once or twice a year as the service goes through significant architectural evolution. I apologize for the inconvenience ahead of time. We’re trying to give you plenty of warning.
As always, please let us know if you have any feedback,
Brian