I have just heard my proposed session for the SQLBits conference has been accepted. I will be talking on Unit Testing in SQL Server my proposal was: Test driven development is one of the current hot topics in software development, but how far can these principles be applied in the world of SQL? In this session I will look at the principles of TDD and other testing options using both freeware tools and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Datadude ...

See I was right, in my post yesterday I said the key role missing in most WPF projects was the ‘designer who can cut code’ or ‘coder with a design eye’, the session Silverlight, WPF, Expression design projects - where do we get started today was on just this subject Paul Dawson and Robby Ingebretsen discussed the need for ‘producers’ who take on this bridging role, with tips on where to find them. ...

So we reach the end of the first day of Mix07 London, what are my thoughts? Well the conference, as conference go, is well organized and I can have no complaint over the quality of the sessions or presenters. Has it changed how I think about Silverlight? Well I have realised that 1.0 is a very different product to 1.1. Have no doubt this conference is about SilverLight 1.1, and that the 1.1 Alpha release is missing a lot of functionality at present. As a shipping product 1.1 look a long way off, at least a year (which is forever it seems in the world of Web 2.0). ...

Today and tomorrow I am at the Mix07 conference in London which is being held at the Congress Centre, a building that I knew as the Trade Union Congress building. So given this location I expected a Harold Wilson ‘beer and sandwiches’ style lunch, but no it was small food (very nice tapas style dishes) and as we all know - if it is small and food it is trendy. You know you are at a design orientated event when the even the food is trendy! ...

I am speaking at the .NET User group in Bristol next week and have been putting some final touches to my demos. One thing I will be talking about is using CruiseControl with TFS. Whilst getting this running on my demo VPC I hit a problem. I did a default install of CruiseControl .Net 1.3, this was on top of a Visual Studio TFS Orcas VPC I had built for DDD5. When I tried to load the CCNet WebDashBoard (installed onto the default web site) I got an error: ...

I am off to loads of conferences and event in the next few week, you wait all year for one then they all come together….. Next week Mix07 - London Office Business Applications Architect Forum - London This month MSDN: Introduction to .NET Framework V3.0 - Leeds (hosted by Black Marble) Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2007 - Seattle Next month TechEd Developer 2007 - Barcelona MSDN: What’s new in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5 for the Web Developer - Leeds (hosted by Black Marble) SQLBits - Reading I aim to blog from all of them WiFi and batteries allowing ...

New version of LiveWriter beta is out, it adds video support (not sure yet if this feature works with Community Server). Watch out of you are installing it as it also updates other Live components such as messenger and tried to add some IE toolbars you might or might not want

I posted about the problems I had adding a user to a project TFS earlier this week. Well I have seen a similar problem again today, I added a new user to an AD group but they could not access the project until I restarted the Web Server process on my TFS front end server. I still suspect a cache problem is the root issue. However, I have had another thought - it could be because my TFS 2005 server knows I intend to install the 2008 Beta2 but don’t have the time as I am off to MIX07 in London next week and won’t do a major update if I am not going to be about, so it is sulking!. ...

Today I tried to add a user to an existing TFS Team project, this user had happily been working on other team projects hosted on the same same server. In theory all I had to do was add the AD user to an existing AD group that was already setup as a contributor to the team project I now wanted them to work on. However when I did this I got the error “TF14044: Access Denied: User DomainNameusername needs the CREATE_PROJECTS global permission(s)” when they tried to load the Source Code Explorer tab in VS2005. Basically they could not see any files or the directory containing them. ...

I am doing some work at present where I need to debug into webparts hosted in a MOSS 2007 server. Never an easy set of debugging to get right. To try to ease the process I wrote a WinForm test application that just calls the webpart method with test parameters so I don’t have to go through all the pages I normally would to get to the feature I need, or manually have to attach the debugger to the Sharepoint web process every time. ...