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I am speaking at the Scottish SQL user group on Wednesday about VS2008 for DB Professionals. Hope to see you there.

There has been a good deal of discussion on Blogs and Forums as to if there is a need for a developer edition of Sharepoint (WSS3.0) so you can develop against it under Vista. Historically your options were: Run W2K3 on your client PC - licensing issues and maybe drivers if using a laptop Do all development in a VPC (or VMware) - is be a bit slow. Now some people argue the separation between client and server this causes is good - and it is a strong argument. However I want to get the best performance out of my development PC, so a WSS3.0 on Vista would be really useful to me. I know it won’t address all my development issues (I will still need a VPC from time to time) but it will do 90% of my day to day work and run at least 50% faster than a VPC. ...

I forgot to say in the last post the thing I noticed most about Spain - the quality of the roads and the courtesy of the drivers. Both excellent. As a cyclist in the UK I am used to pot-holes and being cut up all the time. None of this is Spain, drivers seem happy to wait for cycles and overtake safely giving loads of room. All this on super smooth roads. ...

I have had a week off on holiday at a triathlon club training camp (some holiday some might say, 26 hours of training sessions in 6 days). We were staying at Idle Breaks just outside Malaga. A location which I cannot recommend highly enough, great location, facilities, food and owners. However, I have to say you do get some strange looks as you get ready for a swim in the Mediterranean. ...

Yesterday we had the first drop of the VS2008 SP1 Beta, well there is also one for TFS2008. As with the main VS2008 service pack there are loads of fixes and some new features. Support for Windows Server 2008. Support for SQL Server Codename Katmai CTP6. The Add to Source Control dialogs have been improved to be easier to use and more scalable. Drag & Drop from Windows Explorer to add to Source Control. Support for Version control operations on files not in bound solutions. Right-click access to set Working Folder/Cloak of folders from within Source Control Explorer. Check in date/time column in Source Control Explorer. Editable path field for the Source Control Explorer. Email work items and queries to someone. A new API to download files to a stream. Links to Team System Web Access pages from notifications. Improvements to the number of projects per server. Performance and scale improvements. Improvements to the VSS converter to make it much more robust. Support for creating Team Projects from the command line. Given my experiences with the VS2008 Beta I think I will be waiting for the real release before I put this near our main systems. As with any system critical beta only play with them in a sandbox! ...

14 May UPDATE - Due t illness the speaker cannot make it , so this session is being rescheduled to next month. Check the XP Club site for what is on in its place Remember tomorrow is monthly meeting of the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. The session is by Chris Mills a developer relations manager for development for the Opera Browser.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session in Glasgow yesterday, I hope you found it useful. The slides will appear on the DDS site at some point but you can find them now on the Black Marble site. There is also a web cast of a virtual identical presentation on the Extreme Programming Club site. The noticeable difference at this event from DDD in Reading was what was going on at lunch time. The grok talks seemed far better attended than at TVP, also there was interesting Alt.Net Open Spaces style session where we had a general chat on tools and libraries which I attended. ...

Since updating to TFS 2008 we have lost our Sprint Burndown chart in eScrum, not a major problem as we use the cumulative flow in its place. However, I have eventually got round to fixing it. It turns out the problem is down to the the way the dates for the start and end of the Sprint are converted to measure names for the main MDX query. There were both regional date format issues (mm/dd/yy as opposed to dd/mm/yy) and the fact that the MDX query was very particular over leading zeros for the end date of the range e.g. 14/4/2008 did not work but 14/04/2008 did (but this was not the case for the start date!) ...

If you are using the TFS API within a WebApp with impersonation there is a good chance you will see the error below when you run the web site on IIS System.Security.SecurityException: Requested registry access is not allowed. at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowSecurityException(ExceptionResource resource) at Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey.OpenSubKey(String name, Boolean writable) at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.RegisteredServers.OpenCurrentUser(Boolean writable, Boolean shouldCreate) at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.RegisteredServers.GetUriForServer(String serverName) at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.RegisteredServers.GetServerKeyForServer(String serverName, String subKey, Boolean writable, Boolean shouldCreate) If you google for this forums tells you to add read access for the impersonated user to ...

I have just adding some Performance Counters to instrument some code and had a few issues that are worth knowing about. I created two categories of counters using the following code: //Create a category with a single counter PerformanceCounterCategory.Create( “categoryName”, “categoryDescription”, PerformanceCounterCategoryType.SingleInstance, “counterName”, “counterDescription”); //Create a category with more than one counter System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationDataCollection counterCollection System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationDataCollection(); counterCollection.Add(new System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationData( “Name1, “Description1”, PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems64)); counterCollection.Add(new System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationData( “Name2, “Description2”, PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems64)); // Create the category and pass the collection to it. System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory.Create( “multicategoryName”, “multicategoryDescription”, PerformanceCounterCategoryType.SingleInstance, counterCollection); ...