New community build extensions documentation for the RoboCopy activity

I have just published some documentation on theTFS2010 community build extensions RoboCopy activity

December 15, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Updated SharePoint TFS Team Build Activity documentation

I have just published updated documentation on the SharePoint build activity for the Community TFS build extensions.

December 14, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

The battle of the Lenovo W520 and projectors

My Lenovo W520 is the best laptop I have owned, but I have had one major issue with it, external projectors. The problem is it does not like to duplicate the laptop screen output to a projector, it works fine if extending the desktop, not duplicating. Every time I have tried to use it with a projector I either end up only showing on the projector and looking over my shoulder, or fiddling for ages until it suddenly works, usually at a low resolution, I don’t know what I did to get to this point so I don’t dare fiddle any more so use it anyway....

December 12, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Error 0x80070490 when trying to make any purchase on WP7 MarketPlace

Recently I have had a problem with my LG E900 Windows Phone 7 running Mango. Whenever I try to make a purchase on marketplace I was getting the error “There has been a problem completing your request. Try again later” and seeing the error code 0x80070490. A search on the web, asking around everyone I thought might have an answer and placing a question on Microsoft Answers got me no where....

December 10, 2011 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

When you forget to save a word document

We have all done it, opened Word typed all morning, not bothering to save the file as we go along and then for some mad reason exited Word say you did not want to save. So you loose the mornings work. Now we know that Word does an auto save, but if you are stupid enough to say yes on exit without saving how do you get the auto backup file?...

December 9, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

My experiences moving to BlogEngine.NET

Background I have recently moved this blog server from using Community Server 2007 (CS2007) to BlogEngine.NET. We started blogging in 2004 using .Text, moving through the free early versions of Community Server then purchased Community Server Small Business edition in 2007. This cost a few hundred pounds. We recently decided that we had to bring this service up to date, if for no other reason, to patch the underling ASP.NET system up to date....

December 8, 2011 · 7 min · Richard Fennell

Black Marble’s blog server has changed platform to blogengine.net

Hopefully you should not notice, but we have moved this Blog Server from using Community Server 2007 to BlogEngine.NET. We have been busy bring over all the content so any search should still return the same page, but it might take a few days. I will be posting on my experiences as soon as I have my notes sorted. THE MAIN CHANGE YOU MIGHT SEE IS THAT THE BM-BLOGGERS AGGREGRATE FEED HAS MOVED TO http://blogs....

December 7, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

We need to teach children computer science

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning had a section on children not being taught computer science. so says a variety of employers who cannot find the staff they need. It seems entry to Computer Sciences degrees has been dropping over the years and the current ICT course at school are to blame. I was at school in the first generation to get access to computers. I did Computer Sciences O level (1982 I think, it is a while ago) and we learnt about flowcharts, CPU, memory and programmed in BASIC on a teletype and sent 5 hole punch paper tape off to a local Polytechnic for processing and a week or so later got back a printout saying error on line 10 (and my staff today complain about their slow PCs!...

November 28, 2011 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Windows Phone 7 not synchronising Outlook

I had a problem with my LG E900 WP7 phone over the weekend, Outlook stopped synchronising with our office Exchange server. It started when I got back from a trip Ireland. My phone switched back from roaming and started to use 3G for data again, as opposed to WIFI. Also over the weekend we had a connectivity problem from the office to the Internet so for a while I could not connect to any of our services from any device....

November 28, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Working with Hyper-V, VLAN tags and TFS 2010 Lab Management

I did a post at the start of the year about Lab management and VLAN tags, how they are not supported, but you can work around the problems. Over the past few months we have split our old Hyper-V cluster into one for production and one for test/lab development. This gave our IT team a chance to look at the VLAN problem again. So a quick reminder of the issue – the deployment tools in Lab management that create environments provide no means to set a VLAN tag for any networks connections they create....

November 23, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell