Visual Studio Online Experiences Growing Pains -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio Online Experiences Growing Pains

The developer service has had a number of outages since its introduction last November.

By Keith Ward
02/11/2014

Microsoft's rollout of Visual Studio Online has been rocky, with a number of service outages, but steps are being taken to smooth the road ahead.

That's the message of a blog post by Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry. He said that that latest deployment of the service, which allows developers to build apps in the cloud or some hybrid version, happened on Sunday, and went better than some other recent rollouts. "As you may know, since [around] Oct, we've had a run of "bad" deployments that caused unacceptable down time," he wrote.

The latest deployment was "sprint 60", Harry said. Sprint 59, by contrast, went poorly, and Microsoft had people working all weekend to fix the issues. That's not good for morale, Harry implied, and other solutions are in the works.

He said that Visual Studio Online has outgrown the deployment processes currently in place, and that Microsoft has "...done a lot of technical work in the past few months to "get back on top" of deployments."

With the new measures being taken, Harry said things will get better, but it may take several months. He added that he wants "3 or 4" smooth deployments in a row before he's willing to announce the problem solved. He defined "solved" as so transparent that no one even notices it's happened.

Visual Studio Online was introduced Nov. 13, 2013, the same day Visual Studio 2013 and the .NET Framework 4.5.1 were officially launched. Microsoft has positioned it as a "Cloud OS" that allows developers the flexibility to build apps solely in the cloud, or some combination of local and cloud integration.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

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