If you look on the Black Marble web site you will find listing of the free events we are running up to the end of the year and into the new year. This year our events include 12 Oct 2011 [Re-Build – IT ](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Re-Build - IT)[Re-Build – Dev](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Re-Build - Dev) Black Marble will bring you the key announcements and developments from Microsoft Build about Windows 8 17 Nov 2011 [Delivering High Impact WebSites with SharePoint](http://www....

I have in the past posted about developing SharePoint web parts without having to use a SharePoint server by using Typemock Isolator. This technique relies on using Cassini or IIS Express as the web server to host the aspx page that in turn contains the webpart. This is all well and good for SharePoint 2007, but we get a problem with SharePoint 2010 which seems to be due to 32/64bit issues....

I am doing a free webinar on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 3:00 PM BST with the title “Using Typemock Isolator to speed the development of SharePoint Web Parts”. For more details have a look at http://www.typemock.com/webinars the details should be up soon

The agenda is up for DDDNorth, seems .JS related subjects are the fashionable topics for this conference. As I suspected my session on build customisation did not make the cut, just not cool enough! As with all DDD events the event is free, but the place tend to go quickly. I think this DDD has 300 spaces so I suggest you register quickly to avoid disappointment

I am currently writing some training material for a client on mocking showing how life is so much easier if software is designed with testing in mind. As part of this material I showing that though we aim for nice design patterns which allow testing we have to deal with legacy systems that were not designed this way. However, there are tools that allow us to write unit tests for poorly designed (with testing in mind) legacy systems, specifically Typemock Isolator....

Session voting has opened at DDD North, vote for what you would like to see at the conference in October

One of the very useful features of the TFS 2010 Power Tools is that it provides a backup wizard, great for teams using TFS who don’t have much SQL/IT Pro experience. Whist setting this up on a server I hit an interesting gotta with sending alerts. This TFS server in question was configured to enable SMTP alerting (via the TFS Administration Console) and this was working During the backup configuration wizard you have the option to be send email if the backup job fails....

I create a number of task work items in TFS 2010 using a list in Excel. This all appeared to work OK, and I could run a work item query in Team Explorer and see all my new work items. However then I tried to open the work item query in Project I got a TF80070 error. It loaded the work items up a point in the list then failed and showed error dialog....

Any session submissions for DDDNorth have to be in by Friday the 26th. Go on you must have something you want to talk about……..

The latest set of TFS 2010 power tools are out, well worth updating if you are using the March release, and if not using any version a definite install. There are major update across the board, summary details can be found on Brian Harry’s blog. With the main release note and download on Visual Studio Gallery