Naming things is hard

One thing you learn early as a developer is that naming things is hard. Apparently doubly so for some billion dollar companies, well Microsoft at least. A few weeks ago they announced the latest version of TFS (Team Foundation Server) but it wasn’t TFS any more. Now it’s called Azure DevOps Server 2019 to match the cloud version.

Now the cloud version of TFS, sorry Azure DevOps, has gone through a few of it’s own naming controversies. When it first launched it was call Visual Studio Online (VSO). This name was widely panned by the development community as it was confusing - the named made you think it was an online version of Visual Studio which it definitely was not. Then it eventually got change to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), a mouthful but more true to it’s function. VSTS lasted for a few years until the most recent rename to Azure DevOps a few months ago.

I’m stuck somewhere in the middle on the new name. I think my beef is that it has nothing to do with Azure. The core idea of Azure DevOps Server 2019 is that it’s hosted on-premise which is the exact opposite of what Azure is.

Either way I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen in the RC of Azure DevOps Server 2019. I’m excited for the final release so that I can upgrade the version we are using at work. The web team should be close to having their code in a state where we can use the pipeline feature. This will really simplify their deployment process and get them pretty close to a full CI and CD workflow!