I got the paperwork for the British Computer Society EGM this week. This EGA raises some interesting issues, the best overview of the issue I have found seems to be on the Computer Weekly site. So has supporters of the EGM motion argument, led by former BCS trustee Len Keighley, any merit? Yes, it does. Enough to vote out the current BCS management and trustees? Well I am not so sure. I was a student member of the BCS in the late 80s, when I was working for a small PC and LAN dealership. It was not good experience, I left the BCS with a feeling they did not care for anything bar old mainframe style IT and had no interest in anything newer than the late 70’s. ...

Recently my Humax PVT9200T has started to hang. When I started it up, within a minute or two (usually much less) the picture froze. Prior to this it had been working fine for the six months I had owned it. This seems to be a common problem for the PVT9200T of late, there is much talk of a patch on the way. For me the immediate solution seems to have been simpler; I just reset it to factory defaults and let it rescan the channels. It has now been working fine for a couple of days. Maybe this simple solution will help other owners of the PVT9200T ...

In Kevin Jones’ session at today’s DDD South West on ‘Testing ASP.NET MVC Applications’ the question was asked it it was possible to mock out .NET extension methods using any mocking frameworks. Kevin said did not think it could be done with Rhino Mocks, but thought it might be possible with Typemock. Given my experience with Typemock I could see no reason why you would not be able to fake an extension method with Typemock, though I had never had need to do it. A quick search when I got home provided this post by Dennis van der Stelt which explains how to do it. t is just as easy as you would expect. ...

Thanks to everyone who turned up for my session at DDD South West, and to the organisers for putting the event on so well. As my session was basically a 1 hour demo of the testing tools in VS2010 there are no slides for me to upload, but if you have any questions ping me an email. I would say that for a good overview of the subject have a look at the book ‘Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010: with Team Foundation Server 2010’ ...

After upgrading a TFS 2010 RC server (which was previously upgraded from Beta1 to Beta2) to RTM I hit a problem when trying to create a new team project. The error I saw was Event Description: TF30162: Task “GroupCreation1” from Group “Groups” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Exception Message: TF50609: Unable to retrieve information for action ADMINISTER_TEST_ENVIRONMENTS, it does not exist. A quick search shows this is a known problem with TFS 2010 Beta 1 to Beta 2 upgrades, strange it did not show itself on our servers until we when to RTM. Grant Holiday provides the solution for Beta 1 to Beta 2, but the command line required for RTM is slightly different to the one he had to use. The fix involves using both the parts of this post, the TF50660 is a symptom of the underling TF237091 error ...

Whist moving Team Project Collections (TPC) from our old TFS2010 Beta/RC server to new production hardware I got a TF261007, exactly as detailed in Marcel de Vries post. However, I was in the better position than he was as I still had full access to my original server, so I thought I could go back, re-attached the TPC on the old server, run the command tfsconfig lab /delete /collectionName:MyCollection /External re-detach and all would be OK. ...

After my comments on the QDD session at a past BCS meeting I have been asked to return and speak at the West Yorkshire BCS meeting on the 30th of June to give an overview about Agile methods. This will be very much a management overview for people who are unaware of Agile methods, hence I will touch on XP, Scrum, Crystal Clear and Kanban and try to compare and contrast. ...

I won’t bother to repeat what Gojko has said on David J, Anderson’s book on Kanban, other than to say I agree wholeheartedly. I too have been looking for a good introduction book on Kanban as applied to software development (so Kanban as opposed to kanban, not the capital K). This is exactly what with book does. OK I know that this information is out there on the web (http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/); but there times, especially for introducing potentially non technical people to development methodologies, where you want to point people at an easily accessible introduction they can dip into. This is that book, have a look it is worth it ...

June’s Agile Yorkshire meeting is on the experiences of the BI development team at Skipton Building Society on bringing automated testing to data warehousing using Fitnesse and dbFit. For more details check out the Agile Yorkshire site

When you drop a combo box on a Access 2010 web form and databind to a query or table with a value column and display column (e.g. the query select id, description from table1) you don’t get what you would expect. It shows just the value e.g. a set of integers in the combo. This is not the case if you are using a standard Access client form. the wizard that gets run sort it all out for you, and if it does not, you just set the ‘Bound Column’ property to sort it out. ...