Last night I went to a lecture by Dr Alexander Martynov and Colonel Alexander Volkov organised by [Space Connections](http://pace Connections “http://www.spaceconnections.net/") on the Russian space efforts in both the Soviet and current era. The thing that struck me was the often spoken of different between the US/NASA technology based solution and the the Russian ‘simple first’ philosophy e.g. the cosmonaut should be able to fix it themselves with the tools to hand, a philosophy the Mir space station repeatedly showed ...

Since I upgraded my VS2008 Beta2 to the RTM, the intellisense has not been working. I have seen a few posts about this, some suggesting you need to reset the configuration by running devenv.exe /safemode (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278(VS.80).aspx) but this did not work for me. So I had a poke about in Tools|Option and found that on the Text Editor|All Languages that the three checkboxes for Statement Completion where showing neither empty or checked but a fully coloured box - which usually means an unknown settings. So a set these all to checked (a tick) and my Intellisense started working. ...

For those of you who attended my DDD6 session on Scrum you will remember that I had to cut my demo of eScrum short due to taking too many questions as I went along. So I have recorded what I intended to show as a screencast, enjoy.

Today I had to do some work on an old VB6 system, a development environment I do not have on my Vista laptop. So I copied a Virtual PC image I had with most of the tools I needed and ran it on one of our Virtual Servers. As this VPC needed to run at the same time as the VPC I copied it from, I ran NewSid to change the SID and the PC names. ...

Got back from DDD6 late last night after our 5am start. After what seemed a short nights sleep I got up to do the Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds this morning with 6000 other runners, posting a 47 minute time, which I suppose is OK given the complete lack training of late due to conferences of late and I was hampered by tripping over some wire left in the road near the start and cutting my knee open! ...

Just seen a post on Brian Harry’s blog that the license has been changed for TFS. You no longer need a CAL for all users who connect to the TFS server, a special case of users has been created, those who can create work items, but do little else. You now have an unlimited number of theses as standard. Why is this good? it means you can have anyone in a company connect to the TFS server to log bugs or change requests. Previously to do this means you bought a lot of CALs, or very naughtily ignored he license, so this is good sensible move. ...

While I was presenting yesterday at the second of Black Marble’s events on Windows 2008 to a group of IT professionals, I suggested that they look at ‘Writing Secure Code’ by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc to get a good view of security in depth and risk analysis. On second thoughts, this book might be a bit too developer focused. I think Michael Howard’s new book with Steve Lipner “The Security Development Lifecycle” might be a bit more appropriate read (though it does not seem to be available on Amazon UK yet, should be there soon). ...

I have been working on my DDD6 demo, I intend to show eScrum at end of my session on Scrum. I thought I would use the VPC I had from DDD5, this was based on the TFS Orcas Beta1 and had all the tools I wanted configured. To get some more realistic data in the reports I wanted to leave TFS server running for a week and on a daily basis update the work items as if the project was progressing. ...

Our home grown work tracking system has been through many versions over the years. The current incarnation was using a pre-release version of the Microsoft AJAX extensions. Now this caused a problem when we moved the ASP.NET application to a newly rebuilt IIS server with the 1.0 release version of AJAX. We were getting errors that the correct System.Web.Extensions DLL could not be found, as you would expect. I rebuilt the application using Visual Studio 2005 with the AJAX 1.0 Release installed, and published this build. I tried to load the application and the browser went into a tight loop, not what I expected. I checked the server event log and found the issue was that in the published web.config file there was a reference to a Crystal Reports DLL (which we have not used for years). Once I removed this reference from the web.confg the site worked perfectly. ...

… you end up presenting at TechEd. Yesterday was fun (of a sort) I ended up doing the demo section of the ESB Guidance session at TechEd. This session was scheduled to be done by Robert Hogg (Black Marble) and Ewan Fairweather (Microsoft) but Ewan had to fly home early unexpectedly on Friday morning, so leaving somewhat of a gap. So you say, ’that is not too bad you just step in and do the prepared and scripted demo’. Well in a perfect world you would, but about 6 hours before our session was on the formal release of ESB 1.0 was posted to the MSDN site. As our demo was based on a CTP build, and as we knew the final release was somewhat different, we thought it only right to at least show the new documentation and file structures. So a hectic few hours were had by all. ...