Windows 7 Boot from VHD

I have been having a play with the boot from VHD functions in Windows 7, it seems like a really useful feature when you need the raw power of your PC, but would like the ease of management of Virtual PCs (i.e. can copy them around and archive them), There are many posts on the steps that are required to add a boot from VHD partition to an existing standard install (remember the VHD must be for a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 operating system), I followed notes on knom’s developer corner....

September 17, 2009 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

New free tools to help manager or TFS based projects from Telerik

Telerik have just release a new work item manager and dashboard application for TFS, first impressions are very good. Why not download your copy and have a look?

September 9, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Your support can keep our industry's history alive

We had a company outing at the weekend to Bletchley Park for their Annual Enigma Reunion event. A great chance to see the place where Enigma was cracked and some of the equipment they used to do it, such as the working rebuild of a Turing Bombe Whilst down there we also took the chance to have a good look around the National Museum of Computing, which shares the site; you know are are getting old when a third of a museum is devoted to equipment you have worked on!...

September 7, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

September’s Agile Yorkshire meeting

This Wednesday is the night for the regular Agile Yorkshire meeting, It was meant to be on Pex but the speaker has had to cancel (but you can see a video he did on the subject at DDD online). So in Ben’s place we are doing some Grok Talks, short ad hoc open mike talks. It should make for lively discussions, and is that not the key purpose of any user group?...

September 7, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TF250020 error creating new Team Projects

Whilst working on our TFS2010 Beta 1 test server today I got the following error when I tried to create a new team project TF250020: The following SharePoint Web application is not valid: http://vs2010.mydomain.com. Verify that you have the correct URL. I thought this strange, as I was doing nothing I had not done before, creating a MSF Agile team project with default settings. What I did notice was that in the new project wizard I had the server URL as http://vs2010 but the error message said http://vs2010....

September 2, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

And another nice feature for Windows 7

Homegroup certainly make home networking easier, especially when the PC is part of a domain as well, it just works. No more fiddling with rights between home accounts and domain users.

August 31, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Update on Media Center on Windows 7

Since the upgrade of my Media Center PC to Windows 7 I have had a few problems with fast forward on recorded TV and DVDs (which I had not seen on Vista). It was as if the fast forward button on my remote got jammed on and I could not go back to standard playback easily, it took a few seconds for the message to get through, then you ended up back where you started....

August 31, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Recording of my SQLBits Session on Visual Studio 2008

A webcast recording of SQLBits IV session ‘Making the SQL developer one of the family with Visual Studio Team System’ is now available on the SQLBits site. This discusses the features of the VS2008 Database GDR Edition. Unfortunately I will not be proposing a session for this years SQLBits community event on the 21st of November 2009 at Celtic Manor in Newport, as I will be travelling back from the Microsoft PDC in LA

August 31, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Epicenter follow up

Thanks to those people who attended my sessions at Epicenter yesterday in Dublin. For hose who asked you can find [copies of the presentation at the Black Marble web site](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=Publications&subsection=Conference Papers).

August 28, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Welcome to the past of software development

I was at an interesting meeting at my local BCS branch tonight ‘Opening The Black Box: An Introduction to Quality Driven Development’ by Tim Hunter. I had heard of TDD and DDD etal. but QDD was new to me. What we got was a hour framed by the basic premise that ‘Waterfall is good - Agile is bad’ (or progressive methods as the speaker called anything that was not waterfall). As another attendee pointed out in the Q&A, this tone in the presentation tended to cloud the more balanced points, managing to get the backs up of a good few attendees by the speaker’s seeming lack of understanding of god agile practices....

August 25, 2009 · 3 min · Richard Fennell