InCycle Software's Application Modernization and DevOps Blog

Visual Studio / TFS / Release Management Update 3 is available!

Written by Daniel Mann | Aug 26, 2014 1:59:54 PM

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but in case you didn't know it already, Update 3 is available for Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, and Release Management.

You can read all of the patch notes for Visual Studio on VisualStudio.com

The big change for Release Management is support for Desired State Configuration releases to Azure and on-premise environments, and deployments using Chef to on-premise environments. It's really cool stuff; I'll post more about how all of that works soon.

A smaller change is the ability to generate a "change summary" since the last release of your software. This, of course, assumes that you've been tying work items to your changesets, and associating changesets with builds. That's only available if you're doing Desired State Configuration releases; it's not available for agent-driven, workflow-based deployments.

And one last thing I've noticed during day-to-day use that will make a lot of folks very happy: Idempotency has been improved in a lot of the built-in tools. For example, the "Create Application Pool" tool used to fail if the app pool already existed. In Update 3, it no longer fails, it just reconfigures the app pool if it already exists, as you'd expect.