Posts

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. ...

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.

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…. ...

Are you interested in Windows 8 Development? Well if you are Black Marble are running a free event on Windows 8 on the 30th of May in Leeds. Also Jon Fowler, one of our development leads has just started a series of blog posts on converting Prims to .NET for Windows 8 metro style apps. This is all tied to his port of Prism to Metro which you can download from Codeplex Enjoy…. ...

I see after a few days of issues the DDD10 site is back up and ready for submission. I have submitted a session, why don’t you – it will be fun! 08/05 – Call for speakers opens 02/07 – Call for speakers closes 03/07 – Voting opens 24/07 – Voting closes 27/07 – Schedule opens 30/07 – Registration opens 01/09 – DDD10

I am presenting a webinar on Typemock Isolator and Sharepoint on the 22nd of May. For more details and to register see the Typemock site

Whilst using DBAN to clean down some very old PCs for disposal to new homes at good causes I hit a stupid gotcha. I booted off the DBAN CDRom but could not continue beyond the first screen as it did not detect I had pressed the return key. Turns out the PCs were so old that, though their BIOS allowed USB keyboards (and I could enter setup and edit BIOS settings with a USB keyboard) the Linux kernel on the CDRom could not detect them. Once I switched to an old PS2 keyboard it all worked fine. ...

I use a number of site collections on the Azure hosted Team Foundations Service (http://tfspreview.com); I have just solved a problem that I could not login to one of them via Visual Studio (2010, Dev11 or also TEE 11, I tried then all), but I could login to my other collections. Also I could access the collection if I logged in via a browser, just not with VS; all very good for work item management, but not much help for source code check-ins. ...

We had an interesting issue of late building a Surface2 application solution within a TFS 2010 build system. The solution built fine in VS2010 on both my development PC and also using VS2010 on my TFS build box (both Windows 7 64bit PC), so I know I had all the right SDKs in place. However if I built it via TFS 2010 Team Build I got the error App.xaml (136): Unknown build error, ‘Index (zero based) must be greater than or equal to zero and less than the size of the argument list…” ...

I recently posted on how you could use the new fakes tools in VS11 to fake out SharePoint for testing purposes. I received comments on how I could make my Shim logic easier to read so though I would revisit the post. This led me down a bit of a complex trail, and to Pete Provost for pointing the way out! When I did the previous post I had used SP2007, this was because I was comparing using Microsoft Fakes with a similar sample I had written ages ago for Typemock Isolator. There was no real plan to this choice, it was just what had to hand at the time. This time I decided to use SP2010, this was the process used that actually worked (more on my mistakes later) … ...