Posts

DD-SW in Taunton seems to go well, a big thank you to Guy and the rest of the Bristol .NET user group for all their work getting this event up and running. Also it was nice to see new faces, it is certainly a good idea to get the DDD family events out to places beyond Reading, spreading the good works of the community across the country. Thank you to those who attended my session on Scrum, I hope you all found it useful. You can find a virtually identical set the slides on the Black Marble web site and the actual stack I used will be up on the DD-SW site soon. ...

It is Developer Day South West this weekend where I will be speaking on Scrum. I may also do a lunch time grok talk on SharePoint and Typemock Isolator as I did at Developer Day Scotland. I think there are still spaces at this event, so if you can make your way down to Taunton on Saturday I think it will be well worth the trip.

Since moving to Windows 7 I have encrypted all my USB pen drives and external USB disk drives with Bitlocker to go. This has been working great for me, I have noticed no performance problems and it give nice piece of mind. The only irritation is when you plug the encrypted drive into an XP or Vista PC you can’t read it, but this is meant to be being addressed. However, I have seen one issue, this is that there seems to be a timeout if the bitlockered to go device is not accessed for a while (well over an hour is my guess, I have not timed it) it relocks itself and the password has to be re-entered. I can’t find any setting anywhere to control this timeout. I suppose the workaround is to set the bitlockered device to always automatically unlock on my PC, but I do like the security of having to enter the key manually. ...

When you setup a dual or multi server TFS installation you need to specify the location of the OLAP Analysis service instance that will be used for the reporting warehouse. As with much of the TFS installation and configuration process there is a test button to confirm your setting will work, these are always worth pressing. If there is a problem you could get a TF255048 error, as the text says this hints the server cannot be found or you have no rights to access it, which may well be the case. ...

TFS 2010 provides far more options for the configuration of your server than the previous versions. You now can easily make use of any existing server resources you have such as SharePoint farms or Enterprise SQL installations. Today I was looking at one of these ‘less standard’ setups using some of our test lab equipment (hence the somewhat strange mix of 32bit and 64bit hardware) and hit a problem with the TFS beta 1 release configuration tool. ...

I have been playing around with some workflow code for a demo I am doing. This has meant creating and deleting a workflow project as I refine the demo. Whilst going through the process of a delete and recreate of the workflow (using the same name for the project/workflow but creating a new project from the VS file menu) I hit the problem that when the new version of the workflow was run I got a “failed to start” error. ...

Today the Visual Studio 2010 Team Suite Beta 1 and Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Beta 1 became available to download for MSDN subscribers and will be available to the general public on Wednesday.

Wow, the Alt.Net conference in London in August certainly filled up fast. On Friday I went into a meeting before registration opened, and by the time I came out the first wave was full. I now see that the second wave of registration is also full. Unfortunately I can’t make this one, but I am sure it will be a success. I really like the format that is being tried, a bit for everyone. ...

I have been blogging for a while now on using Tyepmock & Ivonna for various forms of testing, well you can bow buy both packages as a bundle and here is the blog/press viral marketing release….. Unit Testing ASP.NET? ASP.NET unit testing has never been this easy. Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle - and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers. ...

I was unable to attend the last Agile Yorkshire meeting, shame it sounds like it was a good one. The slides are up and give a really nice overview of the theory behind exploratory testing, worth a look at http://www.agileyorkshire.org/2009-event-announcements/may13th-exploratorytesting/ExploratoryTesting.ppt