Original subtitles

[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

i.t 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 are 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 skus 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 going 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 the capability of

configuring the update channels or where

each one of these visual studio products

should get its 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 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 2017.2

again

let me show you what i'm talking about

going back to my example i already

showed you that my visual studio 2022

instance can get updates from one of

three microsoft hosted channels

now it just so happens that my visual

studio 29 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 drop down

it's possible to configure what update

options are available within your

organization

for example you can add additional

network locations to service 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 want to change that channel name

too

well 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 i'll

import into the registry

now i'll bring the update settings

dialog 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 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 a 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

it 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

want to call your attention to is with

the bootstrappers

the bootstrapper is the file that's

named something like vsenterprise.exe

and it's a thing that you double click

on to install visual studio

it basically has just enough information

to kick start 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 webpage

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 but 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 going to

install the latest release that exists

on the 17.0 ltsc channel

and it's going to 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 moo

we've been putting all of our

administrator updates up on the

microsoft catalog 2.

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 youtube

thank you very much for listening 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 subscription 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 admini