We are excited to share the new, Microsoft Azure Portal Preview – reimagined, redesigned, and remade for you. Join us for this journey into the future of Ops in a DevOps world, integrating Microsoft Visual Studio Online and Azure into a single, seamless experience that allows you to get real work done, fast. We look at how to connect your source code to Azure for continuous deployment, managing builds, tests and work items, as well as managing your Azure apps built using Azure Web Sites or VMs, using Storage or SQL, etc., and monitoring the health of your deployed application with rich insights, all inside the new Azure Portal Preview. Join us to hear about the future of this new platform.

Operating a cloud-based application, from small business apps to social apps at web scale, is one of the most challenging transitions that customers and cloud service vendors have to implement when moving from on-premises to the cloud. Troubleshooting, capacity planning, health analysis, alerting are just some of the traditional practices that requires a different approach in this new environment, and new organizational techniques like DevOps are becoming more and more important in the overall solution success. In this session, we describe how to instrument a new or existing Azure solution (PaaS or IaaS), and create a telemetry system that will help operations to keep things up and running. We talk about application logging based on ETW and SLAB, Windows Azure Diagnostics, Azure SQL DB diagnostic DMVs and how to collect and correlate information coming from a number of different diagnostic sources to be able to interpret and monitor your overall solution health.

The Azure Pack enables the Microsoft Cloud OS vision by providing a consistent datacenter platform and DevOps experience regardless of target cloud environments. This session focuses on the improvements that aligns with the next release of Windows Server and System Center.

In this session, learn how the new Azure Automation service enables you to automate the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of services in your Microsoft Azure environment using a highly scalable and reliable workflow execution engine. The service can be used to orchestrate the time-consuming and frequently repeated tasks you’d otherwise accomplish manually across Azure and third-party systems to decrease operational expense for your cloud operations. Azure Automation gives you the ability to import or build Windows PowerShell modules to enable integration across Azure and third-party systems; author flexible Windows PowerShell Runbooks to accelerate time to value; and deliver resources faster through automation of manual tasks.

Do you want to look at your entire application as a unit, create a template for your app and deploy it automatically for your dev/test environment? Do you want to make sure dependencies across your resources are managed automatically? How about grouping resources the way you like by tagging them? If you answered yes to any of this, then let us introduce you to a modern cloud management solution for Microsoft Azure.

This session focuses on the Plan, Develop, Release and Operate phases in the DevOps movement. As you move towards Microsoft's Cloud OS, IT pros and developers need to understand the dynamic integration that is possible within the Microsoft DevOps movement. The session focuses on the IT professional's role within the Microsoft DevOps movement, with technical demonstrations of the on-premises integration requirements and processes between System Center and Visual Studio. Resulting in Agile infrastructure deployment and monitoring, and in Agile application development.

Are you paying attention to DevOps? Adoption of DevOps practices can greatly improve your company’s deployment efficiency. PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) helps teams take the management of their Windows-based infrastructure into the DevOps space by capturing their infrastructure as "code". The declarative PowerShell model enables autonomous, idempotent, and transparent configuration and deployment of Windows infrastructure and components. Capturing infrastructure as "code" is not only a means to manage what they have, at scale and speed, it is also a way to decouple the complexity of their existing environment in order to facilitate a migration to the cloud. Come see how DSC works and how you can use it to make configuration of internal applications, databases, and other infrastructure elements more efficient.

Azure Pack (WAP) for Windows Server enables the Microsoft Cloud OS vision by providing a consistent datacenter platform and DevOps scenarios regardless of target cloud environments. This session focuses on the key tools needed for Panel/Billing integration.

Application Insights is a new service in limited preview that helps DevOps teams ensure their ASP.NET, Windows Phone, and Store applications are highly available, performing as customers expect and provide visibility into customer usage patterns to understand if your applications are succeeding. Application Insights is a part of the application lifecycle and provides insights and alerts through email to reduce time to detect issues, metrics, and events to reduce time to solve problems and dashboards to easily understand overall trends and changes across application versions. Come and learn about this new service and see how easy it is to get started directly from Visual Studio or on a server. Once you solve an application problem with Application Insights, you’ll be hooked!

Most of us understand the benefits of using open source software (OSS) and libraries. Heck, even Microsoft embraces it, so why can’t you adopt it as well in your enterprise? Open source can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. We probably all remember incidents like the “heart bleed” vulnerability in a popular open source implementation of SSL. So, if open source becomes more and more prevalent, how can we cope with the challenges that lay at hand? We will be challenged with all sorts of questions in the enterprise: What are the license implications when I take a dependency on a library with a viral type of license? What version of open source libraries are we using and are they the choice of the generic public or did we select one we now need to maintain ourselves? Are there known vulnerabilities in the libraries we use, and if so, are we affected by that? In this session, we take a practical approach to using open source libraries in product development for the enterprise. We touch briefly on the license types and the ones to look out for. We show you how an artefact repository system can help you to answer a lot of the tough questions. Learn how to integrate a system that is very popular, called Nexus, in your continuous deployment strategy and ensure a frictionless experience for your developers. We show integration with NuGet and how to manage open source dependencies using proxy facilities so you can ensure only a curated set of libraries are used, and meet compliance requirements for your business.

This session demos using Desired State Configuration (DSC) with Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 to tackle real-world deployment challenges. We start by presenting an overview of the key concepts, architecture, and configuration of the various components. We discuss the out-of-the box deployment actions available to compose automations for common deployment scenarios and how to use extensibility to cover the not-so-common scenarios. In more detail, we discuss adding custom DSC resources, how to trigger release as part of a build and how to leverage logs to diagnose failed releases. These are presented through specific scenarios encountered in the field.

So you know a bit about the Application Insights service but you want to know more. In this session we cover real-world scenarios to help you build available, performant and successful ASP.NET, Windows Store, and Phone applications. This includes tracking custom metrics with the Application Insights SDK for your client or server side code to power A/B tests, Real user monitoring, creating multi-step webtests to test the performance of your site through a load test or to power availability of your end to end transaction, collecting/searching over your log data to solve problems quickly or setting up the perfect visualizations and dashboard so your entire team can get a sense for what your "live site" state is. Regardless of where your app is in the Application Lifecycle it isn't too late to start benefitting from the Application Insight service and take your application to a new level of Availability, performance and success with your customers.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 and Visual Studio Online bring a valuable set of new features and capabilities to agile teams. They provide a simple-to-use experience on top of a powerful, customizable platform. In this session we go deep into the agile planning tools and learn how to customize them to work the way your team does. We also touch on best practices that Microsoft has learned and applied from “dogfooding” these tools for their own use.

With Release Management you can achieve true continuous delivery on any platform. This session demos how to use Release Management for continuous delivery in Cross-Platform environments including Windows and Linux. We cover how to leverage Desired State Configuration (DSC) and Chef integration to create a release pipeline for both Windows and Linux. 

Support for Git was added into Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013. In this session, learn more about why you might want to use Git for your next project, what makes DVCS a powerful model for software development and when you might want to choose Git over TFVC for version control. Learn about the fundamentals of a repository and how to successfully collaborate using Git in your Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online account.

This session is born of the hard lessons learned from years of working with diverse companies using metrics to improve their software development processes. Come learn from our successes and be warned by our failures. This session covers what makes an effective metric, the pitfalls in designing metrics, and the basic principles for using metrics appropriately. We cover many general principles, but dive deeply in the metrics needed for lean and agile software practices, using Kanban and Scrum as our representative methodologies. You’ll leave with a number of good metrics and how to collect them, and more importantly, with a deepened understanding of why measuring the right things is critical, and how to measure those things. For instance, there’s one highly effective metric that can turn a frantically busy and harried team into a team that will deliver more value without feeling overworked! We even lay to rest some enticing, but ultimately harmful, measures like efficiency. In fact, we show you how reducing efficiency can dramatically improve productivity! (Sound impossible? It’s not, and once you’ve seen how, you’ll never look at efficiency the same way again.) Don’t miss this session.

Team Foundation Server has customizable workflows, enterprise level reporting, and incredible scalability. Visual Studio Online has elastic load testing, Application Insights and deep integration with Microsoft Azure. The perception is that enterprises have to choose one or the other, but it’s not true. You can leverage both together for even more power. In this session we walk through the key scenarios for both Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, provide criteria for when to pick one INSTEAD of another, and finally demonstrate how Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online can work together to solve difficult enterprise problems.

Code and debugger maps help you understand and navigate through code when troubleshooting and designing new functionality. Come and learn how code maps help you: understand the flow of code when debugging or examining execution traces recorded in production, e.g. using Application Insights. Get insights into the structure of code, in particular the relationships and dependencies between different code elements, whether that code is in a Visual Studio solution or an arbitrary set of binaries. Then, see how you can use the resultant maps to navigate the code as well as share understanding with colleagues.

Do you find it painful to set up infrastructure to run performance and load tests? Do you think load testing is an expensive affair? Do you have a need for testing your service with a large burst load just before your big launch? Do you want to get a 360-degree view of the performance and availability of your application when tested under load conditions? In this session, see how you can use the cloud-based load testing service provided by Visual Studio Online in conjunction with the monitoring and analytics.

In this lab, learn about the agile planning and portfolio management tools and processes provided by Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 and how they can help you quickly plan, manage, and track work across your entire team. We explore the product backlog, sprint backlog, and task boards which can be used to track the flow of work during the course of an iteration. We also take a look at how the tools have been enhanced in this release to scale for larger teams and organizations.

The primary goal of unit testing is to take the smallest piece of testable software in the application, isolate it from the remainder of the code, and determine whether it behaves exactly as you expect. Each unit is tested separately before integrating them into modules to test the interfaces between modules. It provides you the ability to test small amounts of code without needing to run the entire application from the start. Unit testing provides several benefits, including faster testing, the likelihood of catching errors sooner, simplified code integration and documentation of the units. This lab shows you how to incorporate unit testing into your Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 projects.

In this pre-conference seminar we will help you understand the role that the DevOps movement is playing in helping organizations to meet today’s demands and innovate in new and faster ways. We will evaluate how people, processes, and technologies fit into this transformation and will spend a significant portion of the day showcasing both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies working together to help you attain these benefits. Kurt Bittner, Principle Analyst with Forrester Research, joins this session to share his observations and insights about this transformation. This pre-conference seminar covers four major aspects of the DevOps process: Plan – We will look at People, Process, and Product and each individual role during the DevOps transformation. We will define development, operations and other group's roles included in the application lifecycle and how to get to ship a product or feature by breaking down barriers between teams and through better collaboration. Develop – We will see how infrastructure as code is one crucial foundation of DevOps which allows you to more effectively manage the changes to your applications and environments. We will show you how to make shipping a feature something you check off every time you finish your work. Release – Deploying the software quicker with a higher quality enables you to show a better return to the Business. We will discuss what you need to do to support continuous deployment. Learn how to use the latest build features, as well as look at various deployment tools and its release management capabilities. Operate– We will learn how to employ mechanisms to discover running infrastructure, reduce the mean time to detect (MTTD) problems, as well as mean time to repair (MTTR) problems with the applications - passing valuable information back into the planning and development lifecycle phases. We will explore Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Global Service Monitor, as well as the preview of Application Insights.