The voting for DDD6 is now open - as I always say vote early vote often. I hope my submission of a proposal for a session on Scrum is of interest. I know I have had feedback on my previous sessions that people want to know more on this area. Also saw today on Colin Angus Mackey’s blog that DDD7 DDD Scotland will be in May 2008 at Glasgow Caledonian University. Well another 3+ hour drive but in a different direction! It will be interesting to see if the change of location alters attendance ...

Last night went to an excellent free meeting at the Yorkshire Extreme programming Club given by Clarke Ching entitled : Programmers may be from Mars, Customers may be from Venus … but why does everyone think that Project Managers are from Uranus? From the title I was unsure of the content, other than it would be about project management. It turned out to be a workshop on using formal conflict resolution techniques to dig into problems in projects to find solutions and to expose underlying patterns - very interesting. This is set of techniques I had come across (I did got to Bradford University which has a well know Peace Studies department that studies just this area) but had not considered their use in project management. ...

I have just got back from SQLBits after giving my session on Unit testing in SQL. As I said at the start of my session, at developer events I often feel a bit of an outsider when I say I am talking on testing as opposed to development; today it was doubly so when surround by so many DBAs. I have to say some of the sessions I attended seemed to be from a completely different world to my day to day work. Hey but that is what makes IT interesting is it not? ...

Whilst sorting our eScrum installation I kept getting a variety of Javascript errors when selecting a project using the dialog on the top right of the main web form. I also was unable to create new product via the web site. It turned out to be two problems: Templates Some the projects I had registered to be used via the Escrum web site were not using the eScrum template, they were using the Conchango Scrum one. ...

As I posted before I have been updating our TFS server to 2008 Beta2, today it was the WSS from 2.0 to 3.0. Well I followed the process on Sudhir Hasbe’s blog and it just worked, so now we have WSS3.0 running the the TFS application tier. The final step will be to move the SharePoint sites to our main MOSS 2007 farm, but that is for another day. As part of today’s upgrade I was working on process templates. We use Escrum but I had noticed our Escrum web site was not showing all the projects using that template. I had completely forgotten that you had to manually add Team Projects to the Escrum web site. This is done using a URL like: ...

Today I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade our ’live’ TFS installation to 2008 Beta2, now there is support from Microsoft. The only reason I have delayed this long has been we have been involved in the delivery of a big project and I did not want to take the TFS server down for any reason. Our TFS installation is dual server, the data tier (DT) running on our central SQL2005 64bit server and the application tier (AT) on a virtual server as a VPC. I have kept the AT virtual as it is easy to backup. ...

Due to popular demand, well one person, I have uploaded my GUITester system I presented about at DDD3 to CodePlex. It can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/guitester. If you are interested in moving the project forward let me know.

If you are having to support a TFS install there have been some excellent posts on disaster recovery on Sudhir Hasbe’s blog, he is a PM on the TFS team. Well worth a read.

I will be speaking at NxtGen usergroup Birmingham branch on the 17th December about, you guessed it TFS. Look forward to seeing you there.

As I sit on the train traveling north to our Black Marble hosted MSDN event I must write to say how much I enjoyed presenting at last night’s .NET Developers Network usergroup meeting; thanks to Guy Smith Ferrier and the whole group for getting it organized. I think I managed to cover all the questions raised about TFS during the meeting. I have been through my slides to add notes to clarify any points raised. The updated set of the slide stack can be downloaded from http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=Publications&subsection=Conference%20Papers. ...