InRelease Released - The InRelease acquisition has completed and you can now get the "InRelease for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Preview"

Brian Harry’s blog - InRelease Acquisition is complete

At TechEd, in early June, I announced our agreement to acquire InRelease – a release management product built specifically for Team Foundation Server by InCycle Software.  Since then, we’ve received tons of requests for more information, demos, etc.  Unfortunately, we’ve only been able to point people at InCycle because the acquisition was not final.  I’m happy to say that about a week ago we closed the acquisition and InRelease is now a part of Microsoft.

That doesn’t mean we can start selling it right away.  There are a number of things that have to happen in order to enable that – getting it on our price lists, shipping a version that is properly branded, serviceable, etc.  All of that will take a few months but there are some good options for you in the interim.  Let me share some of them.

• We are providing a preview of our future Release Management product today.  It’s basically the existing InRelease product with some minimal changes to meet some of our compliance requirements.  You can download it here.  You can also read the InRelease Preview User Guide and ask questions on the forum.
• InCycle Consulting will continue as an independent company and, until we ship the first fully Microsoft product, will continue to provide trials and sell the InRelease product.

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Hopefully these two paths will solve everyone’s needs while finish up the changes we need to make.

I also want to say a few words about licensing so you, at least, have a little context on what to expect.  We are not ready to announce pricing but I can share a bit about the structure of the licensing.

• The InRelease release management authoring components will be included in Visual Studio Test Professional, Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate.
• Everything needed to participate in a release process (as opposed to configuring it) will be included in the Team Foundation Server CAL.
• The InRelease server components will be integrated into Team Foundation Server 2013.
• The InRelease deployers (which are required for each node you deploy on) will continue to be licensed separately.

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InRelease for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Preview

Brief Description

InRelease for Visual Studio 2013 Preview is the essential suite of release and deployment tools available to automate deployment of applications across the desktop, the server, and the cloud.

Overview

Microsoft InRelease for Visual Studio 2013 Preview helps development and operations teams integrate with Team Foundation Server 2013 Preview to configure and automate complex deployments of their automated builds to target environments more easily. Development teams can also model their release processes and track approvals, sign-offs, and visualize their release status.

Release management with InRelease for Visual Studio 2013 Preview requires Ultimate 2013 Preview, Premium 2013 Preview, or Test Professional 2013 Preview. The deployment agents will continue to be licensed separately per target server.

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InRelease Preview User Guide

InRelease is a continuous deployment solution for .NET teams that makes release cycles repeatable, visible and more efficient by automating deployments through every environment from Team Foundation Server (TFS) until production. With pre-defined release paths, InRelease triggers deployments upon approval, assembles all the components of your application, moves them to the target servers and installs all of them in one transaction. Once the installation is successful, InRelease can execute automated tests or data generation scripts specified for your application. The same steps are repeated until the application is approved and goes to the next environment.

Based on a business-approval workflow and a flexible and centralized configuration, InRelease is an orchestration platform that improves coordination and communication between development, operations and quality assurance to decrease issues inherent to it such as: inefficiency, errors, frustration, high costs and delays.

Not for everyone or every dev, but still a great additional to the Microsoft ALM DevOps story...