Microsoft today announced the completion of its acquisition of the InRelease Business Unit from InCycle Software, an ALM service and .NET release-management solution provider. Microsoft acquired InRelease, a release-management solution for .NET and Windows Server applications, in an effort to expand its application life-cycle offering to include more DevOps functionality.
According to Microsoft, the InRelease acquisition will provide development teams with richer release-management capabilities and will streamline the process of managing project workflows in Team Foundation Server. Microsoft said that teams will be able to use InRelease to automate the release process for application deployment.
“The release-management capabilities provided by InRelease offer a critical component of the DevOps workflow,” said S. Somasegar, corporate VP of the Developer Division at Microsoft, in a blog post this morning. “[It will enable] developers to deliver faster and more frequently into production.”
Microsoft also today announced that InRelease will be integrated into Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013. In a separate blog post this morning, Brian Harry, technical fellow for Team Foundation Server, said that Microsoft has also released a free, downloadable preview of InRelease for Visual Studio 2013 Preview.
“We are providing a preview of our future Release Management product today,” he said. “It’s basically the existing InRelease product with some minimal changes to meet some of our compliance requirements.”
While this preview is available as a separate download, Somasegar said that Microsoft “intends for the InRelease components to be packaged together with Visual Studio Test Professional, Visual Studio Premium, and Visual Studio Ultimate when Visual Studio 2013 ships later this year.”
Harry said developers can download a free preview, read the InRelease Preview User Guide, or ask questions on the InRelease forum.
Microsoft first announced its agreement to acquire the InRelease Business Unit from InCycle Software last month at TechEd 2013. Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Microsoft said that it “will acquire the business unit of InCycle Software that provides its InRelease automated-deployment solution. InCycle Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, will remain a separate entity focused on ALM consulting.”
