I posted yesterday on using Powershell to email a TFS user if they had files checked out. Well, we still run a legacy set of SourceSafe databases for old projects that are under maintenance, but not major redevelopment. (Our usual practice is to migrate projects to TFS at major release points). Anyway, these SourceSafe repositories are just as likely, if not more so, to have files left checked out as TFS. The following script email a list of all checked out files in a SourceSafe DB ...

I am far from the first to post about the Alt.Net.UK conference next year. I think this is a great idea, I have posted a few times on how I am finding the most useful conferences being the ones about best practice. New technology is great, we all like new toys, but it is the engineering practices we do day to day that have the most effect in the quality of your work, not the IDE we use. ...

With any source control system it is possible to leave files checked out. This is especially true if your IDE does the checking out behind the scenes. This is made worse still by the fact you can have a number of workspaces on the same PC in TFS. It is too easy to forget. It is therefore a good idea to check from time to time that the files you have checked out are the ones you think you have. There is nothing worse than trying to work on a project to find a key file is checked out or locked to another user or PC. ...

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). ...