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In case you missed it, you can now make submissions for presentation slots at DDD5. Even if you don’t want to present, keep an eye on the site for a chance to vote on what you would like to see and to register as an attendee.

I just realised that TeamPlain also makes external access easier for remote users outside your firewall. The problem with external access to TFS from VS Team Studio is that you have to open up the TFS server and the associated WSS 2.0 server ports in your firewall. Not a major issue but opening ports is something you want to minimise, or at least your firewall manager will want to minimise. ...

As I am sure you have seen Microsoft have purchased devBiz and made their TeamPlain product free to all TFS customers. I have just installed the new free release of TeamPlain on our TFS system and I must say what a pleasant experience it was; run the MSI answering a few questions, go into the newly created TeamPlain admin web page, enter the URL of the TFS server and that’s it. Really easy and it just works. Compared to the the fun I have had with other bits of TFS this is joy. ...

I had to move our CRM install this week to new hardware, and I had expected it to be a nasty job. However it turned out to be straight forward, though it is really hard to find any useful Microsoft Dynamics CRM documentation beyond the basic manuals. Why do the Dynamics team make it so hard to find things out? Anyway these are the steps to follow: To move the database (got this process from a Microsoft Knowledgebase document on setting up SQL clustering for CRM) ...

If you change the domaintfsservice and/or the domaintfsreports as you would expect your TFS server to stop, and it does. To get it back working you have to reset the passwords in: The various TFS AppPools on the frontend server need the new tfsservice password The datasource in ([frontendserver]/reports) on the reporting services need the new tfsreports password. After that all should be OK

When I heard the NxtGenUG were putting on a day conference Fest 07 on the 23rd May, I had assumed it might be in the midlands, as that is where their user groups are based. However it is at Microsoft TVP in Reading - yet another trek south, does nothing other than an occasional MSDN/TechNet road shows come further north than the M4 corridor? other than our Black Marble events of course! This said the line up of speakers looks great and well worth the trip. ...

Our SunFire x2100 application servers, running Windows 2003 R2, are configured with Nvidia RAID system (built into the motherboard) to mirror the pair of SATA drives in each servers. Two of these servers keeps losing the mirrors, but a third, and a SunFire x2200, do not. When this happens Windows hanging - not good in a server. We have had a support call open with Sun and swapped bits of hardware, but it keeps happening. During the support calls we discovered that the Nvidia RAID is not true hardware, but a ‘software trick’. So not a great step up from letting Windows do the mirroring itself. ...

I did my presentation on Scrum last night for the Extreme programming club in Leeds, seemed to go down well. A lively discussion was had on Scrum and a whole bunch of agile issues. If anyone has questions post them on the club forum. The next meeting on 12th of April an Extreme Hour, an audience participation event on doing an XP project in a an hour - sounds interesting.

I decided to completely rebuild my media center PC as I was making no progress on the problems I had discussed in my previous post. I dropped in a new hard disk as drive C: (leaving in my old one to allow me to copy data off) and installed Vista Ultimate, no problems there. It did not find drivers for my ASUS motherboard SoundMax card or for my Hauppauge Nova T 500. ...

I will be speaking about Scrum at the second Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club meeting next Thursday 8th March at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. So if you are interested in a quick introduction to Scrum, or just want to meet other developers in the Yorkshire region interested in Agile methods come along.