Posts

I posted about NBC Olympic coverage - today I discovered I cannot stream BBC provided media content from the Olympics on my Windows PDA using Opera via the Vodafone 3G service. Seems the BBC does not think I am in the UK. I know Yorkshire assumes it should be independent, but I don’t think it has happened yet. I suppose this is all to be expected, technology that allows reasonable media delivery over a mobile network at a vaguely sane price is new; especially when roaming between countries/networks. I doubt we will see this problem disappear soon unless the media rights are more commonly picked up by the telco providers such as Vodfone as opposed to the broadcast media companies like NBC and the BBC. ...

After the announcement at Mix of the NBC Silverlight Olympic streaming service I was looking forward to have a look at what had been created. Turns out you have to be in the USA to watch it, I assume due to media rights issues, a bit of a shame. I hope something can be worked out with a small fraction of the 2200 hours of content so we can all see what Silverlight can do for such a major event. ...

My blog is now being mirrored at http://msmvps.com/blogs/rfennell/Default.aspx as well as being available in it’s real location http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell To quote MSMVPS it is The Ultimate Destination for Blogs by Current and Former Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals.

I have at last got round to moving the location of the WSS sites used by our TFS server from the WSS instance running on our TFS Application Tier (AT) to our main 64bit MOSS 2007 server farm. A job I have been putting off for ages. I decided that there was nothing on the TFS WSS sites of importance, other than documents (which I could easily copy) so decided to create new WSS sites as opposed to trying a backup and restore model. ...

Over the past few days I have been travelling around the country by car, something I have not done for a while, preferring the train. It was a good chance to try out a couple of gadgets. One I have had a for a while, my HTC Touch Cruise phone, but the other was new a Pure Highway DAB car radio. So what did I learn? The phone I have recently set my phone to use push email (so constantly sync’ing with Exchange during office hours). This seems to have had a serious adverse effect on battery life. I had not noticed this before as I usually connect my phone to my PC via USB when in the office thus keeping it charged and up to date. Whilst away, without really thinking about it, I had expect my usual (pre push email) 3 day battery life, but the constant sync and using the phone as a camera knocked this down to about 8 hours! The simple solution seems to be to set the sync to every hour, thus reducing the data calls. ...

I have been building a webpart that needs client side validation. I kept getting the error: “Unable to find control id txtNotes referenced by the ‘ControlToValidate’ property” Now most of the posts say just use the command to get the ‘real’ ID at runtime this.rfvNotes.ControlToValidate = this.txtNotes.ClientID; But this did not work, in the end the form I found worked was: protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { base.OnInit(e); this.txtNotes.ID = “txtNotes”; this.rfvNotes.ControlToValidate = this.txtNotes.ID; this.rfvNotes.Enabled = true; this.rfvNotes.Text = “* Required”; } ...

Update 29 Mar 2010 - See this post for some updated usage notes I have been looking at Fitnesse.NET for a while; if you have not come across this testing tool I cannot recommend Gojko Adzic book highly enough; an excellent real world introduction to Fitnesse.NET. For me, the problem with Fitnesse is that it’s WIKI architecture does not lend itself to working within our Team Foundation Server based development model. However, as I am not really looking for a tool to allow Business Analysts to edit a central repository of tests the WIKI was not that important; so I have been looking at a way to store the Fitnesse tests inside a Visual Studio solution, so they are managed like a unit test. ...

I see that the registration (and hence session voting) has opened for the free community conference SQLBits III, I can’t make it as it is the same day as Alt.Net. However, I really do recommend this event if you ever work with data (some of you do that don’t you?)

The July edition of the Team System power tools have just been released. To pick out just one of a great set of tools - have a look at the Alert Editor, a really easy way to wire up external events handler to do things when TFS events occur.

Thanks to everyone one who attended my session at the Leeds SQL User group on Visual Studio Database Edition and to UPCO for hosting the event. The slide stack is available on the Black Marble web site