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. ...

Please to say there is a new .NET usergroup leeds-sharp.org in Leeds, their inaugural meeting is on the 31st of May. I hope to be able to make it if I am in Yorkshire that day.

I am a bit busy with upcoming presentations, all of which are free to attend Monday 21st May - Black Marble Webinar ‘How to Kick start your ALM Process ‘ Tuesday 22nd May – Typemock Webinar ‘Using Typemock Isolator to speed up the development of SharePoint Web Parts’ Saturday 26th May – DDD South West (Bristol) ‘Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 Beta’ Wednesday 30th May – Black Marble (Holiday Inn Leeds) ‘A day with Windows 8’ – I’m talking on development in the afternoon Wednesday 13th June - Black Marble (BM Offices) ‘How to Plan your Application Lifecycle Implementation with TFS11’ Wednesday 20th June – NEBytes (Newcastle) ‘Overview of Visual Studio/TFS 11’ - Event To be confirmed Friday 22 June – Black Marble Architect Track at the Microsoft Cloud Day (London) – My subject to be confirmed I think that is all for now; wow a looks worse when they are all written down in one place. I better get writing…. ...

Are you interested in Windows 8 Development? Well if you are Black Marble are running a free event on Windows 8 on the 30th of May in Leeds. Also Jon Fowler, one of our development leads has just started a series of blog posts on converting Prims to .NET for Windows 8 metro style apps. This is all tied to his port of Prism to Metro which you can download from Codeplex Enjoy…. ...

I see after a few days of issues the DDD10 site is back up and ready for submission. I have submitted a session, why don’t you – it will be fun! 08/05 – Call for speakers opens 02/07 – Call for speakers closes 03/07 – Voting opens 24/07 – Voting closes 27/07 – Schedule opens 30/07 – Registration opens 01/09 – DDD10

I am presenting a webinar on Typemock Isolator and Sharepoint on the 22nd of May. For more details and to register see the Typemock site

Whilst using DBAN to clean down some very old PCs for disposal to new homes at good causes I hit a stupid gotcha. I booted off the DBAN CDRom but could not continue beyond the first screen as it did not detect I had pressed the return key. Turns out the PCs were so old that, though their BIOS allowed USB keyboards (and I could enter setup and edit BIOS settings with a USB keyboard) the Linux kernel on the CDRom could not detect them. Once I switched to an old PS2 keyboard it all worked fine. ...