Visual Studio Online Updates – January 22

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Last week Team Foundation Services, by now renamed and added additional features called “Visual Studio Online”, had its first update for 2014.

Updated features:

  • Querying Tags
    You can add tags to your workitems, but what is the use if you cannot query on these tags to find your workitems. That has been solved for this update. With the January 22 Update you are now able to create queries with for instance the “Contains” or “Does Not Contain” operator to find the work items you were looking for.
  • Removing Weekends from Burndown
    Somewhere in the world are developers who are not working in weekends. I’m not one of them as I tend just to work in weekends, but that is maybe because I don’t see work as work. For all others it is now a new feature to be able to ‘uncheck’ resources in weekends on your team and allow your team to have a couple of days off in the weekend (or every other day if you like) to get a somewhat more realistic Burndown overview.
  • Configurable Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) Dates
    Previously the start date of your project was the day you created the project. Not always true so now you are allowed to change the start date of your project. So now you can create your project beforehand and set the start date to the actual date, again a more realistic view on your project.

“Is that all?” you may wonder? Yes that is all, but you must keep in mind that the updates are now on a monthly release cycle, or so called Sprints. Given that December has been an overall Holiday Season month I actually expected that they would skip the monthly cycle for this time but they didn’t so it is a real achievement they were even able to ship this last week.

Showtime: Frozen by Disney

Frozen


The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.


Just another great movie from the Disney animation studios. A familiar storyline, fight between good and evil, royalty, princesses and a good amount of humor.

The animation again is excellent, the storyline is touching and an enjoyable movie to go for young and old.

The story is about Anna and Elsa, two sisters who lost their parents and will now rule the kingdom. Elsa however has icy powers and as a kid almost killed her sister Anna in their play. Given that Elsa decides to move away from the castle to prevent her from doing harm to the community and most of all to keep her sister safe. In a search for her sister Anna meets Kristoff and his reindeer Sven and they try to get Anna to move back into the castle to be the new queen of their kingdom.

I always have been a huge fan of Disney and this again is a great piece of work they created to entertain us. It really does not matter if you have kids or don’t, you can go and watch the movie with or without kids, don’t be shy and just enjoy the story, the images and funny characters. Ten out of Ten (but hé, be aware,  I am biased as a Disney fan!)

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