While I was at the ALM Summit in January, Claude from InCycle (now with Microsoft) was doing demos of their InRelease software.  The deployment software allowed for a massive amount of deployment configuration, moving a build between labs and retaining environment-specific configurations using a tokenized language.  The workflow definition for how the build should flow from environment to environment also allowed for accepting or rejecting the build.

I was impressed at the time, and obviously Microsoft was as well, since they started the process for acquiring the product a few months ago.  As of July 10th, the acquisition is official.

This means InRelease will soon become a full part of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013.  The preview download is available from the InCycle website.

Media:

• Microsoft News Release (June 3): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/jun13/06-03InReleasePR.aspx
• Brian Harry Blog (July 10): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/07/10/inrelease-acquisition-is-complete.aspx