Posts

A reminder that next week I will be speaking on ‘Developer testing of SharePoint projects using Typemock’ at two Nxtgen user groups: Birmingham on the 18th Aug 2009 Manchester on the 19th Aug 2009 Hope to see you there.

I am speaking at Epicenter 2009, the Irish Software Show at the end of the month. The conference runs from the Wednesday the 26th to Friday the 28th. My sessions on TFS 2010 are both on the Thursday the 27th as part of the ‘Microsoft zone’ Application Lifecycle Management - Moving beyond source control Making Testers Part of the Development Team This is an interesting conference as it aims to address a wide variety of technologies i.e. not just Microsoft or Open Source. I find this type of conference a great way to catch up on technology I am not usually that exposed to; just the same ethos as Agile Yorkshire where Java and .Net developers can constructively compare their worlds. ...

Over the past couple of days I have upgraded my Vista based Media Center to Windows 7. After my previous experiences upgrading from XP here, here and here I decided to do a new install onto a new 1Tb disk as opposed to an in place upgrade. This all went OK, there was nothing major to note, Windows 7 shipped with a driver for everything in my 3 year old AMD/ASUS based PC bar the sound card built into my motherboard, but that was easily downloaded. It is worth commenting that my Hauppauge Nova 500 T digital TV turner was found OK, but I had to get it to scan for channels three times before it got a signal. Why it worked the third time I don’t know as I did not change anything. ...

Thanks to everyone who attended my VBUG session yesterday on ‘Enabling agile development with Visual Studio Team System 2010’. I have just posted the slides on Black Marble’s web site

It is good to see that at last Expression Web and Blend have got source control integrated into their IDEs. This is a vital feature if developers and designers are to work together effectively on the same code. It is a shame that the integration is just for TFS, it would be nice to support other source repositories to get an even wider reach, but TFS is enough for me now. ...

I love the new paste preview selection in Word 2010 This really is cutting down the number of paste, undo, paste special, damn undo again that failed so paste into paint or notepad, reselect and copy try again sequences I am going through.

Since I installed Outlook 2010 technical preview I have not been able to search emails using the ‘search mail’ boxes in Outlook (which links into Windows desktop search). I had not realised how much I used the feature until it did not work. When I tried a search I was shown a dialog saying there was 40000+ items waiting to be indexed, and this number was not changing. It seemed that the indexing of Outlook contents had stopped. ...

You can connect a Visual Studio 2008 IDE instance to a TFS 2010 server, as detailed in Martin Hinshelwood’s blog, but I cannot stress enough you have to have VS2008 SP1 installed. If you don’t, you get an error dialog when you enter the URL for the TFS server saying the URL contains invalid characters. This seems a simple rule, but as I found today it is easy to not realise your PC is not patched. You look in the about dialog for Visual Studio and it says SP1 installed, but the Team Foundation Client has not been. This was because the following installation order was followed: ...

With all this coverage of the moon landings I am surprised that the other major news item of 40 years ago today has not been covered – the Fennell family moved house. I ask you just what are the priorities of the news media?

I downloaded and installed the Office 2010 technical preview today. All seemed to go OK (after I realised I could only do an in place upgrade from 32bit Office 2007 –> 32bit Office 2010), once the upgrade was done I could load Word and using our VSTO based document templates all seemed to work fine. However when I tried Outlook I got a problem. On the first loading it took a while, telling me it was doing something to 40K+ items, presumably checking the local OST file, but then seemed to load OK. However after about 30 seconds it crashed, and continued to do this every time I rebooted Outlook even when I was tried safe mode, add-ins switched off and/or offline working. It all had no effect. Checking the event log I saw I had the error: ...