11 Jul 2015

Configuring Card Colors in Visual Studio Online

Visual Studio Online
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the ability to customize the background colors of your kanban cards in Visual Studio Online (VSO). Not only does this give you the ability to simply add some color to an otherwise not-so-colorful board, it also allows you to make the board easier to understand at a glance. For example, you can color the background of the cards representing bugs red or you can highlight cards that are blocked in, say, yellow. We will walk through each of these scenarios below. In the board shown above, although you can’t immediately tell, the card labeled “1”…
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18 May 2015

VSO Status Inspector Extension for Visual Studio

Utilities, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
If you are a long-time user of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online (VSO) then there is a decent chance that you’ve had to endure one or more “hiccups” over the past year or so. Today, if VSO seems to be running a little slow – or not at all – you probably go out to the VSO Support page to check the current status of VSO. There, you will see something like this at the top of the page: Clicking on the Visual Studio Service Blog link will take you to a page with more details (if there are issues being…
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08 Apr 2015

Building with Microsoft Tools–For FREE!

Azure, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online
With two of Microsoft’s primary competitors (Apple and Google) offering their development tools free of charge (Xcode and Android Studio, respectively) have you ever wished you could develop on Microsoft’s platforms for FREE? Well… if you didn’t already know that Microsoft offers a good number of development tools and services for free, then read on Visual StudioAlthough it hasn’t been around long (it was announced at last year’s Connect(); event) Microsoft now provides, for no charge, Visual Studio Community 2013. This edition is essentially the same product as Visual Studio 2013 Professional – with a few restrictions placed on usage.Visual…
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06 Apr 2015

VS 2013 Premium vs. VS 2015 Professional

Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
As announced recently, Microsoft is merging the Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate editions into a single, new edition – Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise. This is a free upgrade for active Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN subscribers – until your subscription renews. At the point of renewal, there will be a slight increase in price (actual price will vary based on whether or not you are buying a single subscription or if your company has a volume licensing agreement, etc.) to maintain the Enterprise subscription.I recently wrote up a comparison between Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN and Visual Studio…
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04 Apr 2015

VS 2013 Premium vs. VS 2015 Enterprise

Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
As I recently covered, Microsoft has announced that the Visual Studio Premium with MSDN and Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN editions will be combined into a single, new edition for Visual Studio 2015 – Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise with MSDN.If you have an active Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN subscription, you will be upgraded, for FREE, to the Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise w/MSDN edition when the final product becomes available later this year. Once your subscription runs out, however, you will have to start paying for the new Enterprise edition (because the Premium edition will no longer exist).Although the price…
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31 Mar 2015

Meet the Visual Studio 2015 Family

Visual Studio 2015
Today, Microsoft announced the editions of Visual Studio 2015 that will be available when Visual Studio 2015 is made available later this summer. You might recall that they announced Visual Studio Community Edition last November (read more about its features here). They have now gone a step further and revamped the remaining Visual Studio editions for the 2015 release.The short version of this announcement is that Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate are being combined into a singled, new edition – Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN. With this change, the three primary Visual Studio editions are:Visual Studio Community 2015Visual…
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15 Feb 2015

Visual Studio Online Search–Get in Now!

Visual Studio Online
Most anyone that has been using a version control system for any amount of time has come to that point in their development career where they’ve asked the question – “I know I’ve seen that code before but where?” You don’t want to go through the hassle of having to recreate something you (or someone else) has already spent a great deal of time and effort building, testing and tweaking until it fits your needs perfectly. You just want to find it and reuse it!If your version control system happens to be Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online then…
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17 Jan 2015

How/Is Visual Studio Online Protected?

Visual Studio Online
If you have been pushing your company, or even yourself, toward using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online (VSO) cloud offering, you’ve no doubt been on the other end of questions such as: How does Microsoft project my data? How do I know it’s not going to end up in the wrong hands? What happens if a database fails? and on, and on, and…These are fair questions. If you are going to trust another entity with the very essence of the software solutions your company has put so much time, effort, money and, potentially, intellectual property into then you want to ensure…
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17 Jan 2015

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5

Visual Studio 2015
In case you’re staying up to date with the latest releases of Visual Studio 2015 (still in CTP mode), the CTP 5 release is now available for download:Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 CTP (exe, iso) Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 CTP (x86, x64, arm) Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 SDK CTP (exe) Multibyte MFC Library for Visual Studio 2015 CTP (exe)This release contains some new features around debugging, diagnostics, the XAML language service and ASP.NET 5.XAML Language Service – this service now sits on top of the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) providing you with a fast and reliable XAML editing…
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29 Dec 2014

Visual Studio 2015 Tag Admin Extension

Add-ins & Extensions, TFS 2013, Visual Studio Online
If you are currently using Visual Studio 2015 Preview, and you make use of the Tag feature within Team Foundation Server (TFS) and/or Visual Studio Online (VSO), then you will want to give the Tag Admin for Visual Studio 2015 extension a go!This new extension is brought to you by the same folks that created the Team Rooms Extension for Visual Studio 2013 and supports both TFS (2013 Update 3 and greater) and VSO.The features enabled by this extension include:View Active TagsOnce you’ve installed the extension, click on the Tag Admin link on the Home hub of the Team Explorer…
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