Thursday, January 19, 2017

Caught myself loving on an MS service

Now this isn't an opinion/emotion I am very familiar with, not being unkind to Microsoft, but I find (or have found) a lot of their services 'acceptable' but given a choice I would often go elsewhere. Not so today.

Today, I was speaking to a colleague who is a .Net programmer but who chooses to use a mixture of the Atlassian stack and Github for; source control, issues, discussion, code reviews etc. After hearing how the various parts of this stack are integrated (or not) and the hoops that are jumped through the get the thing to just work (and the resulting fagility of the system) I asked if he'd looked at VSTS.

Now I realise VSTS doesn't cover all of the aspects of the process that he is using, but talking to him about what it could do and how it could integrate with, for example Github if you really wanted to continue to use that for source control, without compromising the rest of the product integration, I found myself being very supportive of the platform.

And I think what really struck me was that Microsoft have done such a great job in making VSTS so flexible and capable. Use your own source control, use your own build agents, use your agents inside your own network and deploy to Azure or deploy to in-house servers, it's all possible and embraced by VSTS.

You even have the ability to build your own custom build and release steps if you feel so inclined! And the ones that are available are all on Github to be inspected and reviewed.

Well done Microsoft, you've given me a first and I am pleased to speak on behalf of VSTS in future. Keep up the good work.