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Background I have recently moved this blog server from using Community Server 2007 (CS2007) to BlogEngine.NET. We started blogging in 2004 using .Text, moving through the free early versions of Community Server then purchased Community Server Small Business edition in 2007. This cost a few hundred pounds. We recently decided that we had to bring this service up to date, if for no other reason, to patch the underling ASP.NET system up to date. We checked how much it would cost to bring Community Server to the current version and were shocked by the cost, many thousands of dollars. Telligent, the developers, have moved to only servicing enterprise customers, they have no small business offering. So we needed to find a new platform. ...

Hopefully you should not notice, but we have moved this Blog Server from using Community Server 2007 to BlogEngine.NET. We have been busy bring over all the content so any search should still return the same page, but it might take a few days. I will be posting on my experiences as soon as I have my notes sorted. THE MAIN CHANGE YOU MIGHT SEE IS THAT THE BM-BLOGGERS AGGREGRATE FEED HAS MOVED TO http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/syndication.axd ...

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning had a section on children not being taught computer science. so says a variety of employers who cannot find the staff they need. It seems entry to Computer Sciences degrees has been dropping over the years and the current ICT course at school are to blame. I was at school in the first generation to get access to computers. I did Computer Sciences O level (1982 I think, it is a while ago) and we learnt about flowcharts, CPU, memory and programmed in BASIC on a teletype and sent 5 hole punch paper tape off to a local Polytechnic for processing and a week or so later got back a printout saying error on line 10 (and my staff today complain about their slow PCs!). During the course we did at least move onto a Tandy TRS80 so it did get a bit more immediate. ...

I had a problem with my LG E900 WP7 phone over the weekend, Outlook stopped synchronising with our office Exchange server. It started when I got back from a trip Ireland. My phone switched back from roaming and started to use 3G for data again, as opposed to WIFI. Also over the weekend we had a connectivity problem from the office to the Internet so for a while I could not connect to any of our services from any device. However, even after both these things were sorted my Outlook still failed to sync, it said it was in sync but showed no new email since Friday when it was disconnected from my Irish ISP based MIFI in Ireland. No errors were shown. I waited until I got back to the office and tried a sync via our internal WIFI, all to no effect. ...

I did a post at the start of the year about Lab management and VLAN tags, how they are not supported, but you can work around the problems. Over the past few months we have split our old Hyper-V cluster into one for production and one for test/lab development. This gave our IT team a chance to look at the VLAN problem again. So a quick reminder of the issue – the deployment tools in Lab management that create environments provide no means to set a VLAN tag for any networks connections they create. Once an environment is created you can manually set a VLAN tag, but it is all a bit of a pain and certainly unsupported. ...

Typemock have recently released a new version of Isolator, 6.2. As well as the usual fixes and enhancements you would expect, this is the first version to support TFS 2010 team build out the box. Prior to this release Typemock supported MSBuild based TFS builds (2005/2008) but not the Windows Workflow based version in TFS 2010. The issue was that in TFS 2010 builds it was possible for build steps to run in parallel, maybe on different build agent PCs, so you could not guarantee that Typemock Isolator was intercepting the correct threads. You could call the MSBuild tasks to enable the mocking interception, as in 2005/2008) it was just that they did not work in practice on 2010. ...

We got a good turn out of Black Marble staff at this years Age UK Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds. We were amongst over 8000 runners who turned out for a cool and foggy Yorkshire Sunday morning run. We had a handicap race amongst ourselves, using a wisdom of crowds poll to estimate everyone target time. This was won by Steve Spencer our Development Director. He beat his target by 20 minutes. I am not sure whether this says more about his fitness or our staff’s opinion of him! ...

In my post experiences upgrading my Media Center to receive Freeview HD I said I thought the reason my Windows 7 Media Center was hanging at the “TV signal configuration” step was down to using mixed tuner cards. Well my second PCTV nanoStick T2.arrived yesterday so I was able to try the same process with a pair of identical USB T2 tuners. Guess what? I got the same problem! However, being USB devices it mean I could test the tuners on my laptop, a Lenovo W520 (Core i7, 16Gb, Windows 7). So I plugged them both in, they found drivers from the web automatically, I ran Media Center, select setup the TV signal and……. it worked! A few worrying pauses here and there, but it got there in about an hour. ...

When you are trying to run a command line tool via the InvokeProcess activity in a TFS 2010 Team build you might see the somewhat confusing ‘Access denied’ error. There appears to be no more detail in the log. I have found that this is usually down to a type on the filename property of the activity. It should be set to something like “c:my toolstool.exe” but is actually set to ...

Whilst I have been on holiday Black Marble have announced some new events and this time they are not just in the UK, we have a couple in our new Dublin office location. The programme up to new year is: 17 Nov 2011 (Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford) Am - [Delivering High Impact WebSites with SharePoint](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Delivering High Impact WebSites with SharePoint) SharePoint 2010 creates a dynamic and striking internet experience for your users. Pm - [A Guide to Successfully Adopting the Cloud for IT Managers](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=A Guide to Successfully Adopting the Cloud for IT Managers) This session will be exploring the business value of cloud computing with Microsoft Windows Azure. 30 Nov 2011 (Black Marble office Cleckheaton) Am- [TFS for the small team – hosted in the cloud](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=TFS for the small team – hosted in the cloud) I’m doing this one and I will be talking about the hosted version of TFS, its UI, the new features it exposed from TFS vNext. 6 Dec 2011 (Dublin) Am - [The Right Tools for your Application Lifecycle](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=The Right Tools for your Application Lifecycle) This session will discuss how this Application Lifecycle Management process can be managed, and what are the right tools to do that – Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Pm - [An Afternoon of Windows 8](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=An Afternoon of Windows 8) Following the fanfare, what is there in Windows 8 for developers and the IT professional? 8 Dec 2011 (Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford) All day - [Architecture Forum in the North 4](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Architecture Forum in the North 4) The top Microsoft Architecture Forum in the UK returns for its fourth year. 26 Jan 2012 (Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford) Am - [Black Marbles Annual Technical Update for Microsoft Technologies – 2012](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Black Marbles Annual Technical Update for Microsoft Technologies - 2012) Return of our roadmap for all things Microsoft! Pm - [Implementing the Secure Development Lifecycle in your ALM Process](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Implementing the Secure Development Lifecycle in your ALM Process) A look at how implementing Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) into your development process can improve quality, reliability and long-term maintainability. Hope to see you at some of these events, I won’t be at all of them due to client commitments, shame I enjoy doing these. ...