(upbeat music)
- Hi, my name is Christine Ruana,
and I'm here today to talk to you
about all the improvements we've been making
to the Visual Studio administrator experience.
Over the last several decades,
Visual Studio has provided world-class productivity tools
for developers.
We've also realized how important it is
to provide the same level of functionality and support
to IT Administrators.
Those people who have the important responsibility
for maintaining their organization's software infrastructure
and keeping it secure.
The developer tools that we provide to you must be easy
to update and easy to manage
so that your organization can be resilient
to security threats.
We want you to always have the most current
and best defenses at your disposal.
In this talk,
I'll be describing the recent improvements we've made
to help administrators deploy and manage Visual Studio.
As many of you are aware,
Visual Studio has a concept of servicing baselines
which are distinct future version levels that are supported
and that enterprises can park on.
We are now referring to servicing baselines
as Long Term Servicing Channels or LTSCs.
LTSCs provide flexibility and control
for when you accept and deploy feature
or security updates across your organization.
With Visual Studio 2022,
there are a few significant improvements I'd like
to call your attention to regarding LTSCs.
We're now declaring in advance
when these additional LTSCs will become available
and how long they'll be supported for.
Starting with Visual Studio 2022,
every six months, in the fall and in the spring,
we will release a new LTSC that supports the skills
that our enterprise and professional customers use.
Each LTSC release will be supported
and kept secure for 18 months.
Having better visibility into our upcoming release schedule
will hopefully be helpful to you
as you plan your upcoming business upgrade cycles.
Additionally, these LTSCs now completely
behave as independently installable products.
Which means that it's easier
to receive the correct notifications and updates.
The second improvement I'd like
to highlight here in this talk
is an even more fundamental change to the product.
In fact, I'm gonna demo this because it's so cool.
With Visual Studio 2022,
you can now configure where your clients
are going to get their updates from.
We call these update channels.
Furthermore, you can also configure what update channels
are available to your organization.
Let me show you what I'm talking about.
Here on this machine,
I've installed the Visual Studio 2022 product,
and I have the Visual Studio 2022 Installer opened.
The Visual Studio Installer
is actually a completely separate app
from the main Visual Studio IDE.
The installer manages all of the instances
that I have installed on the machine
including previous versions.
You can see here that I happen
to have both Visual Studio 2022
and an older version of Visual Studio 2019 installed.
The new installer that comes with Visual Studio 2022
now has a capability of configuring the update channels
or where each one of these Visual Studio products
should get it's future updates from.
When I click on the More button,
there's now an option to display the update settings dialog,
which allows me to configure the update channel.
You can see here that this instance
of the product is configured
to get updates from the Visual Studio 2022
to current channel,
which contains the latest product hosted by Microsoft.
I have the option to switch
to either the 17.0 LTSC baseline channel
or the preview channel.
If I choose the LTSC channel,
then all of my subsequent updates and notifications
will be sourced from the latest release
that is available on that LTSC channel.
Oh, one more thing,
don't forget to actually
do the update after you change a channel,
setting the update channel
and updating the product are two separate actions.
Many of our enterprise customers,
have to manage customized environments
and enforced customized policies.
For example, sometimes in these environments,
the client machines don't have access to the internet
or sometimes the development teams want
to tightly control exactly what version
of the product their team uses.
For these types of scenarios,
the IT Admins usually wind up in creating
and maintaining a network layout
of the Visual Studio product
that they then make available for their client machines
to install or update from.
Well, with the new ability
to configure where the client looks for updates,
you can easily configure it
to look for updates in a layout location
that you make available.
And, since layouts are very popular with IT administrators,
we thought it'd be helpful
to make this layout changing functionality work
for all visions of Visual Studio
that the installer controls.
In other words,
this functionality will work down level
for VS 2019 and VS 2017 too.
Again, let me show you what I'm talking about.
Going back to my example,
I already showed you that my Visual 2022 instance
can it get updates
from one of three Microsoft hosted channels?
Now it just so happens
that my Visual Studio 2019 instance
was installed on this machine a while ago
via a network layout.
You can see here that the update channel
is named Private Channel
and the package location
is here on this network server
that was used to install from a long time ago.
Now the update channel name
for this layout install says Private Channel
simply because we made the word private channel
be the default channel name.
In situations like this,
where an older product
had already been installed long before
this new 2022 installer arrived.
So the last thing I'd like to show you in this section
is the ability to somewhat customize
what shows up in this dropdown.
It's possible to configure what update options
are available within your organization.
For example, you can add additional network locations
to serve as update channels
or you can hide Microsoft channels
and prevent your clients from looking
at Microsoft servers as a source for updates.
Suppose I am an administrator
in a very locked down environment
and I wanted to make both my 2022 instance
and my 2019 instance get updates
from new layouts that I just created
based on security updates from Microsoft
that came out last patch Tuesday.
Also, I don't really like the default name Private Channel
in my 2019 instance
so I wanna change that channel name too.
While I can do all of this by configuring
a few entries in this client's registry, which I'll do now.
I have here this registry file
that'll import into the registry.
Now, I'll bring the update settings dialogue up again
and you can see that I've added my layout
in this 2022 version.
I have the current channel
and I have my new private layout channel too.
In this 2019 version,
I've renamed Private Channel
to something that's more meaningful to my organization
and I've also added another layout channel here too.
This particular configuration I demonstrated
is just an example.
We have a few other dials available
to facilitate slightly different scenarios
so refer to the Visual Studio administrator's guide
for additional details.
I hope you can see and appreciate that configuring
and managing updates is now a lot easier
with Visual Studio 2022.
Even though my demo illustrated how to change a channel
through the UI in the installer,
you can also get to this UI directly within the IDE
by going to the Help menu and checking for updates.
And, most importantly,
this functionality is accessible through the command line
so that Admins can manage this stuff programmatically.
The third improvement I'd like to make you aware of
is regarding layouts.
As I mentioned earlier,
a lot of enterprises use Layouts
to control which exact version of the product
is used within their organization.
As with most important things in life,
one of the biggest costs of using layouts
is dealing with the maintenance.
Layout maintenance is absolutely necessary
in order to keep both them
and their clients updated and secure.
With Visual Studio 2019 and below,
there are a few,
shall we say hurdles with managing layouts.
The process of updating layouts
was sometimes rather difficult to either do or to get right.
In some situations,
the new layout folder would not be recognized.
And in other situations it was tricky to determine exactly
what the layout would even be updated to.
We've recently spent a lot of time and effort
polishing up these scenarios and with Visual Studio 2022,
we've made it much easier for you
to confidently update and maintain layouts.
First of all,
you can now reliably change the network location
of a layout.
In other words,
if your client installed from a layout in one location,
and you've recently created an layout in another location,
you can easily configure your client
to update from the new layout
by using the change update channel functionality
that I just showed you.
This is a pretty simple concept
and a lot of our customers just expected it to work.
Well, it just didn't always work before,
but I'm happy to say,
the scenario works now all of the time.
Now in order to change layout update locations,
you just need to have the functionality
that comes with this new
and improved Visual Studio 2022 installer.
So, we're providing the ability for you
to distribute this new installer
in your older 2019 and 2017 layouts.
Once the new installer gets installed
on your client machines,
then the clients will be able to switch
to get updates from a new layout.
The next set of layout improvements
I wanna call your attention to is with the bootstrappers.
The bootstrapper is the file
that's named something like vs-enterprise.exe
and it's a thing that you double click on
to install Visual Studio.
It basically has just enough information
to kickstart the installation process.
The bootstrapper can also be used to update a layout.
In earlier versions of the product
if you wanted to update your layout
to a very specific version of Visual Studio,
you might have discovered this web page,
which has links to all of our available bootstrappers.
You may have clicked one of these links
next to the exact version that you wanted,
downloaded that bootstrapper
and use it to update your layout.
A simple that immensely helpful improvement we've made
to the bootstrapper is to reflect both the channel
and the product version in the files properties.
Here, I have a 2022 bootstrapper.
You can see that the file properties
in the details tab,
now tells you which version and channel it will install.
This information helps you confirm that what you execute
to update a layout is actually what you intend.
This bootstrapper here
is gonna install the latest release
that exists on the 17.0 LTSC channel
and it's gonna configure the layout to use that channel.
Another way we're making layout maintenance easier
is by providing another location for you
to acquire updates from.
As you're presumably aware, earlier in 2021,
we started shipping Visual Studio administrator updates
through the Microsoft update channel.
As part of distributing through MU,
we've been putting all
of our administrator updates up on a Microsoft catalog too.
So you can also update a layout by just downloading
one of these update packages from the catalog
and use that to update your layout.
By keeping your layouts updated with the packages
that you get here,
you can have confidence that your layout will get updated
to the exact same version of Visual Studio
that we're promoting as current and secure.
Again, for everything I've discussed here,
read the online administrator's guide
for details on how to do all of this.
Now the final thing I would like
to make you aware of is just
how many benefits Visual Studio comes with
and how easy it is for your users to access them.
The vast majority of companies,
when they purchase rights to use Visual Studio,
do it by way of subscriptions.
There are two main ways of distributing subscriptions
to your users.
The old school method involves distributing keys
which works in the sense that it allows your teams
to use just the Visual Studio product.
But there's so much more goodness that the subscription
has to offer that the old key method won't unlock.
Instead, if you took the additional step
of assigning email addresses to subscriptions,
then each person would have access
to the additional benefits that the subscription offers
such as Azure Credits, Pluralsight training
or access to all historical downloads
that Microsoft produced.
So we really encourage you
to both assign their email addresses to subscriptions
and to encourage your users
to visit myvisualstudio.com either through the website
or through the IDE to become aware
of the other resources that are available to them.
One way for an Admin to assign email addresses is to go
to the manage visualstudio.com portal
and either assign names individually
or upload a file that contains a bunch of names.
We recently enabled another convenient way for Admins
to assign email addresses to subscriptions.
You can now create an Azure active directory group,
assign that to a subscription,
and then simply add your users to this AAD group.
At any rate,
I hope you and your users are able to take advantage
of all the extra value
that your Visual Studio subscriptions entitle you to.
Thank you very much for listening to this talk
and learning about the changes we've made
to Visual Studio to improve the IT Admin experience.
You can find additional details of everything I've discussed
in the online documentation
of the Visual Studio administrator's guide.
We're in the process of planning for the next release
of Visual Studio, and would love to hear your feedback.
We have a survey available where you,
our partners can leave your contact information
along with details of your environment
and any challenges that you're having.
That way we'll have a better understanding of your situation
so that we can better design for it in the future.
We've also enabled a special IT Admin way
for you to submit bug reports or problem to us.
The initial submission is public,
but we can make it more private if you'd like.
Of course, you can always reach out
to your account manager as well.
Lastly, we put announcement on the VS blog
so read that periodically and search on the admin keyword
to find the content that you might be most interested in.
We're looking forward
to continued partnership with IT Admins
in the years to come.
Stay safe and happy admin.