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I have been asked a couple of times whist at the Alt.net and ReMix conferences about the local user groups around Leeds. Well these are the regular free community events I know about: Black Marble community events - my company runs free community events at a hotel between Leeds and Bradford roughly monthly from autumn to spring. We invite a variety of leading .NET community speakers. The Yorkshire Extreme Programming and Agile Methods Club (XPClub) - meets the 2nd Wednesday of the month in the centre of Leeds. This is a group of .NET and Java developers interested in agile development bast practice. ...

I have just found out that the session I was doing at Vbug in Coventry next week has been cancelled due to low numbers. Sorry if you were planning to come, but don’t worry I will be doing a similar sessions (the the bonus of post PDC Rosario updates) at the VBug conference in November.

It is all well and good Microsoft saying that a developers and designer can share the same project WPF/Silverlight files in Visual Studio and Expression Blend, but whilst Blend does not have the ability to use a source control repository (TFS, SVN or anything else for that matter) and actually strips out any source control binding it finds in a project file, this is for me unworkable experience. How has this product got to V2 without this feature? ...

Just seen the keynote for Remix in Brighton, I must say that Bill Buxton’s part was one of the best keynotes I have seen (watch out for the streamed webcast). For me the most important thing for a keynote is to set the tone, the meme, for the conference and his session certainly did. OK it is good to see the demos of products but you can’t beat a good bit of thought provoking public speaking. First time I have seen this done well by Microsoft since the last PDC a couple of years ago. Interestingly, setting the tone was something always done very well at the Sun JavaOne conferences I attended in the late 90s. ...

Do you feel alone, nobody nearby who you can talk to about TFS? Well try the new virtual user group meeting in Second Life. Only issue is the meeting will be 2am UK time by my reckoning.

Back home now after a excellent two days at Alt.Net in London. As with the spring conference this was a thought provoking event. I really like the whole open space format, though there were four ‘main sessions’ the event started the night before in the planning session and the bar and carried on without a pause, including the train trip home. The main sessions can be excellent; but it is usually the chat walking to get a coffee or over lunch was where you get a nugget of information that completes a picture for you. It is great to find out you are not alone in the problems you have and refreshing to hear people speak so openly over the challenges and successes they have had. ...

I hit a problem today when trying to sign a powershell script as detailed on Scott Hanselman’s blog with a Thawte code signing certificate. The basic issue was that the certificate could be seen in the Personal section of the Certificates MMC snap-in. Also it was listed if I issued the Powershell command Get-ChildItem cert:CurrentUserMy but if I added the flag to only show usable codesigning (Class III) certificates it was not listed. ...

The next XPClub meeting is a double bill: Code Quality and Scala + Lift. and is being held at the usual venue the Victoria Hotel Leeds. This is a free event open to all. As usual drinks and snacks thanks to the club sponsors are free, also there will be a draw for one free personal license for any of the products by JetBrains - the new club sponsor.

Today I got round to upgrading our TFS 2008 (dual server setup) with Team Server 2008 SP1. I tried it first on my demo VPC I use for presentations (reminder I am at VBug Coventry at the end of the talking about TFS, a free event open to all). Anyway, this update went fine and did not take too long, 5 or 10 minutes. On the main system all seemed to go OK, but it did take around 45 minutes. I assumed the time it takes is dependant on volume of data in the DB, some sort of schema update I guess. ...

I have had a nightmare getting this going. Adding the ModalPopupExtender to a form is easy, you drop it on and tell it the two required controls parameters PopupControlID=“MyModalPanel” TargetControlID=“ButtonToLoadIt” And it just works fine, but is triggered by a client side click of the Target Control. If you want to do some server side code behind first you are meant to set the TargetControlID to a fake control that is visible on form e.g. “FakeButtonToLoadIt” IT IS VITAL THIS CONTROL IS VISIBLE AND HENCE RENDERED, but the control can be effectively hidden via CSS styling with something like Style=“display: none” In the code behind after your own processing you are just meant to call this.MPE.Show(); where MPE is the ID of your extender Well this did not work for me. If I clicked my fake control (when it was not hidden obviously) it all worked by the server side call just displayed my panel where it was in the underlying HTML flow - the extension never kicked in. ...