We had a company outing at the weekend to Bletchley Park for their Annual Enigma Reunion event. A great chance to see the place where Enigma was cracked and some of the equipment they used to do it, such as the working rebuild of a Turing Bombe Whilst down there we also took the chance to have a good look around the National Museum of Computing, which shares the site; you know are are getting old when a third of a museum is devoted to equipment you have worked on! ...

This Wednesday is the night for the regular Agile Yorkshire meeting, It was meant to be on Pex but the speaker has had to cancel (but you can see a video he did on the subject at DDD online). So in Ben’s place we are doing some Grok Talks, short ad hoc open mike talks. It should make for lively discussions, and is that not the key purpose of any user group? So, free beer usual place, Wednesday night, hope to see you there ...

Whilst working on our TFS2010 Beta 1 test server today I got the following error when I tried to create a new team project TF250020: The following SharePoint Web application is not valid: http://vs2010.mydomain.com. Verify that you have the correct URL. I thought this strange, as I was doing nothing I had not done before, creating a MSF Agile team project with default settings. What I did notice was that in the new project wizard I had the server URL as http://vs2010 but the error message said http://vs2010.mydomain.com. So I checked the alternate access mappings in the WSS central admin, only vs2010 was listed, so I added vs2010.mydomain.com as the Internet alias and it all leapt into life when I tried the wizard again. ...

Homegroup certainly make home networking easier, especially when the PC is part of a domain as well, it just works. No more fiddling with rights between home accounts and domain users.

Since the upgrade of my Media Center PC to Windows 7 I have had a few problems with fast forward on recorded TV and DVDs (which I had not seen on Vista). It was as if the fast forward button on my remote got jammed on and I could not go back to standard playback easily, it took a few seconds for the message to get through, then you ended up back where you started. ...

A webcast recording of SQLBits IV session ‘Making the SQL developer one of the family with Visual Studio Team System’ is now available on the SQLBits site. This discusses the features of the VS2008 Database GDR Edition. Unfortunately I will not be proposing a session for this years SQLBits community event on the 21st of November 2009 at Celtic Manor in Newport, as I will be travelling back from the Microsoft PDC in LA ...

Thanks to those people who attended my sessions at Epicenter yesterday in Dublin. For hose who asked you can find [copies of the presentation at the Black Marble web site](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=Publications&subsection=Conference Papers).

I was at an interesting meeting at my local BCS branch tonight ‘Opening The Black Box: An Introduction to Quality Driven Development’ by Tim Hunter. I had heard of TDD and DDD etal. but QDD was new to me. What we got was a hour framed by the basic premise that ‘Waterfall is good - Agile is bad’ (or progressive methods as the speaker called anything that was not waterfall). As another attendee pointed out in the Q&A, this tone in the presentation tended to cloud the more balanced points, managing to get the backs up of a good few attendees by the speaker’s seeming lack of understanding of god agile practices. He seemed to see agile as developers messing around, no documentation, testing or general engineering discipline. He argued that without waterfall, and specifically quality gates, we could not write quality systems. This is not the Agile I know. ...

I have just attended an excellent free webinar session on ASP.NET testing with Ivonna and Typemock by Gil Zilberfeld of Typemock and Artem Smirnov creator of Ivonna a Typemock add-on for unit testing ASP.NET The session is being repeated today at 2pm GMT and I understand a recording will appear on the Typemock site in due course. So if you get a chance this afternoon have look, it is well worth your time if you work in the ASP.NET space. Personally I have also found Ivonna useful for Sharepoint testing too, watch the session it might give you some ideas. ...

Doron at Typemock has posted a nice description of how they use Kanban for managing support. A good introduction for those unfamiliar with lean