ALM Rangers sim-ship guidance with the VS11 RC

I am really proud to have been involved in the team of ALM Rangers who have SIMultaneous-SHIPped best practice guidance with Visual Studio 11 RC, which became available last night**.** I am sure anyone working with Visual Studio and TFS will find the guidance of value, I have certainly learned a lot whilst helping produce the material. It has been a great experience working with a great crowd of people both inside and outside of Microsoft. ...

June 1, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

First meeting of the Leeds-Sharp user group

Last night I attended the first meeting of the new .NET user group Leeds Sharp. This is a flavour of user group we don’t have in Leeds; we have SQL, Ruby, Agile user groups, the list goes on, but not a dedicated .NET one. So hopefully this .NET usergroup will take off. Especially as Microsoft conveniently decided to launch Windows 8 Release Preview and Visual Studio 11 RC during our opening session, so there are loads of new subjects to talk about. ...

June 1, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Solution to “We couldn't get your developer Licence for Windows 8 Consumer Preview” on Win8 Server beta

Whilst preparing for the Black Marble Windows 8 event tomorrow (still places available for this free event) I hit problem with VS11Beta and Metro projects. I was sorting out a demonstration of remote debugging, I had a Samsung tablet PC running WIn8CP and intended to use a WIn8Server CP running inside a VirtualBox VM on Windows 7 PC. I installed VS11 Ultimate 11 Beta on both devices On the Win8 Tablet I loaded the VS11 remote debugger monitor ...

May 29, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

On the panel at Tech.Days: Visual Studio 11 Online Event

A while ago I recorded a video Visual Studio Team Foundation for Everyone, this forms part of Tech.Days: Visual Studio 11 Online Event, 28th June 2012, 1pm to 3pm. To lift the agenda from the MSDN site This event will cover the key new features and capabilities that Visual Studio 11 offers software development teams, and the opportunity to ask questions to the UK Developer Tools team and partners. There’ll be something for almost anyone involved in software development, from Project Managers & Scrum Masters to developers and testers. ...

May 28, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Skydrive pushes me over my broadband usage

I got back from a trip away to find an unexpected bill for broadband through the letterbox. I have paid about the same each quarter for broadband for a good while now, I don’t see much variation as I rarely use my home phone, then again who does? This bill was nearly double, why? I think it was mostly due to setting up Skydrive to mirror my family photos and video as a backup, though this can’t explain it all, but then again my son as found Roblox. In each month I went over my usage it was costing me £5 a 5Gb block. It adds up fast. ...

May 28, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

DDD South West session on Unit testing in VS11

Thanks to everyone who attended my session at DDDSW today. The session was completely demo driven so no slides to share, but the contents of the session is covered in the blog posts Unit testing in VS11Beta and getting your tests to run on the new TFSPreview build service Now that VS11 has a fake library do I still need Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint? More on using the VS11 fake library to fake out SharePoint

May 26, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Links for todays Typemock webinar

Thanks to everyone who attended my Typemock Isolator and SharePoint session. The links I mentioned were Mocking Sharepoint for Design with Typemock Isolator Mocking SP2010 64bit Assemblies with Typemock Isolator I will post a link to the recording as soon as it is made available

May 22, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Upgrading our blog server from BlogEngine 2.5 to 2.6

A week ago version 2.6 of BlogEngine.net was released. This has plenty of new features such as a new file manager and image tools, but for us the most important was site aggregation. As I posted about previously, we moved to BlogEngine from Community Server because we need multi blog hosting, but with BlogEngine 2.5 we had to write our own basic site aggregation by creating a custom theme that managed some RSS feed merging behind the scenes. Now with BlogEngine 2.6 this type of feature available out the box. ...

May 21, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

New .NET usergroup in Leeds

Please to say there is a new .NET usergroup leeds-sharp.org in Leeds, their inaugural meeting is on the 31st of May. I hope to be able to make it if I am in Yorkshire that day.

May 17, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

A bit busy with upcoming presentations

I am a bit busy with upcoming presentations, all of which are free to attend Monday 21st May - Black Marble Webinar ‘How to Kick start your ALM Process ‘ Tuesday 22nd May – Typemock Webinar ‘Using Typemock Isolator to speed up the development of SharePoint Web Parts’ Saturday 26th May – DDD South West (Bristol) ‘Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 Beta’ Wednesday 30th May – Black Marble (Holiday Inn Leeds) ‘A day with Windows 8’ – I’m talking on development in the afternoon Wednesday 13th June - Black Marble (BM Offices) ‘How to Plan your Application Lifecycle Implementation with TFS11’ Wednesday 20th June – NEBytes (Newcastle) ‘Overview of Visual Studio/TFS 11’ - Event To be confirmed Friday 22 June – Black Marble Architect Track at the Microsoft Cloud Day (London) – My subject to be confirmed I think that is all for now; wow a looks worse when they are all written down in one place. I better get writing…. ...

May 15, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell