This years DDD North is to be held at Bradford University on 13th October, keep an eye open for the call for speakers

I tried to install the Windows 8 CP on my Lenovo W520 with no success as I posted about in the past.I was only able to install Windows 8 CP only if I disabled the Nvidia graphics card and just used the integrated Intel controller. This was of no real use as I need dual monitors. With the release of Windows 8 RP I though I would try again. The first attempt failed with the same problem, it hung detecting devices. I check the BIOS and noticed I was set to discrete only (the Nvidia setting). I knew the RP should work on the W520 as other at the office have got it working. So I changed the BIOS to Nvidia Optimus (the auto swap system between Intel and Nivdia) and tried again – and it worked. So this is the first post from Windows 8. ...

I am really proud to have been involved in the team of ALM Rangers who have SIMultaneous-SHIPped best practice guidance with Visual Studio 11 RC, which became available last night**.** I am sure anyone working with Visual Studio and TFS will find the guidance of value, I have certainly learned a lot whilst helping produce the material. It has been a great experience working with a great crowd of people both inside and outside of Microsoft. ...

Last night I attended the first meeting of the new .NET user group Leeds Sharp. This is a flavour of user group we don’t have in Leeds; we have SQL, Ruby, Agile user groups, the list goes on, but not a dedicated .NET one. So hopefully this .NET usergroup will take off. Especially as Microsoft conveniently decided to launch Windows 8 Release Preview and Visual Studio 11 RC during our opening session, so there are loads of new subjects to talk about. ...

Whilst preparing for the Black Marble Windows 8 event tomorrow (still places available for this free event) I hit problem with VS11Beta and Metro projects. I was sorting out a demonstration of remote debugging, I had a Samsung tablet PC running WIn8CP and intended to use a WIn8Server CP running inside a VirtualBox VM on Windows 7 PC. I installed VS11 Ultimate 11 Beta on both devices On the Win8 Tablet I loaded the VS11 remote debugger monitor ...

A while ago I recorded a video Visual Studio Team Foundation for Everyone, this forms part of Tech.Days: Visual Studio 11 Online Event, 28th June 2012, 1pm to 3pm. To lift the agenda from the MSDN site This event will cover the key new features and capabilities that Visual Studio 11 offers software development teams, and the opportunity to ask questions to the UK Developer Tools team and partners. There’ll be something for almost anyone involved in software development, from Project Managers & Scrum Masters to developers and testers. ...

I got back from a trip away to find an unexpected bill for broadband through the letterbox. I have paid about the same each quarter for broadband for a good while now, I don’t see much variation as I rarely use my home phone, then again who does? This bill was nearly double, why? I think it was mostly due to setting up Skydrive to mirror my family photos and video as a backup, though this can’t explain it all, but then again my son as found Roblox. In each month I went over my usage it was costing me £5 a 5Gb block. It adds up fast. ...

Thanks to everyone who attended my session at DDDSW today. The session was completely demo driven so no slides to share, but the contents of the session is covered in the blog posts Unit testing in VS11Beta and getting your tests to run on the new TFSPreview build service Now that VS11 has a fake library do I still need Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint? More on using the VS11 fake library to fake out SharePoint

Thanks to everyone who attended my Typemock Isolator and SharePoint session. The links I mentioned were Mocking Sharepoint for Design with Typemock Isolator Mocking SP2010 64bit Assemblies with Typemock Isolator I will post a link to the recording as soon as it is made available

A week ago version 2.6 of BlogEngine.net was released. This has plenty of new features such as a new file manager and image tools, but for us the most important was site aggregation. As I posted about previously, we moved to BlogEngine from Community Server because we need multi blog hosting, but with BlogEngine 2.5 we had to write our own basic site aggregation by creating a custom theme that managed some RSS feed merging behind the scenes. Now with BlogEngine 2.6 this type of feature available out the box. ...