Microsoft officially launched Visual Studio Online (Formerly Team Foundation Services) last week. The announcement came with news of many added features and benefits. Here is an overview of the announcement:
Pricing
The good news is that if you have MSDN, you are most likely going to still not be charged for day-to-day usage. The bad news is that if you have product owner or product manager roles our your team and want them to use VSO for backlog interaction, etc. They will now need to pay a membership fee. The MSDN license that allows that access free, is the Ultimate level, which is the most expensive MSDN package there is. This is going to cost at least $45 monthly for these employees (of course depending upon their role in your organization). You can find the breakdown of pricing levels
here. The other financial consideration is that you will be charged for build time on any build and deploy jobs. This is basically going to cost a couple of pennies per minute every time you do a CI style build. I did some investigation and found out that this does include publish time. In our world, that is roughly 65% of the time the build job is running. So, you will pay the going rate while your build is being uploaded and deployed to the Azure instances for which you are already paying.
Link VSO with Azure
Link your VSO account to your Azure account and have a single portal for managing them both. Very handy. Details
here.
Monaco
Monaco is a new development service specifically designed for building and maintaining Windows Azure Websites. With Monaco, developers have a lightweight free companion to the Visual Studio desktop IDE that is accessible from any device on any platform. Monaco is a rich, browser based, code focused development environment optimized for the Windows Azure platform, making it easy to start building and maintaining applications for the cloud. Here are some cool videos on
Channel9
Application Insights
With this “360 degree view” of your application, Application Insights can quickly detect availability and performance problems, alert you, pinpoint their root cause and connect you to rich diagnostic experiences in Visual Studio for diagnosis and repair. It also supports continuous, data-driven improvement of an application. For example it highlights which features are most and least used, where users get “stuck” in an application, where and why exceptions are occurring, which client platforms are being used with which OS versions, and where performance optimizations will make the biggest impact on compute costs. You can sign up for the free preview
here. Following are some sample screen shots:
 |
| Dashboard |
 |
| Visual Studio Integration |
 |
| Environment Metrics |
