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I had a strangely thought provoking weekend, I took my son to do the tour of Concorde at Manchester Airport, and whilst in the area popped into Jodrell Bank to look at the Radio Telescope and the arboretum. Two great technological achievement, well worth a visit, but I felt both seemed to be in our past. I remember Concorde, I remember Apollo (just) and I remember sitting in a room at school to watch the first Shuttle launch, but where is the equivalent today? I started to feel that this ‘thrusting to the future’ style of project no longer exists; there seem to be few children saying ‘I want to be an engineer’ or ‘an astronaut’. I fear they are too often now saying ‘I just want to be famous’. ...

Want to monitor the health of your TFS system? Then wait no longer, the ALM Rangers have just shipped a SCOM Management pack for Visual Studio 2010. The management pack provides availability and configuration monitoring, performance data collection, and default thresholds. So if you use any SKU of SCOM 2007 and TFS 2010 why not download it and have a look.

To quote their site…. Leeds Hack is a 24 hour hack day in the city of Leeds (surprise!). 100+ people in a room – Feed them, water them, take them out for walks every now and them and let them create some amazing things. Best of all… It’s free.. For more details have a look at http://leedshack.com/

The detailed agenda for the Developer Group Meeting on the 20th of October in London has been published. I am speaking in the afternoon on ‘Using Typemock Isolator to enable testing of both well designed code and nasty legacy systems’ Hope to see you there

I have reached my hotel after the days events at Software Craftsmanship 2010 at Bletchley Park and got a chance to write up my thoughts. I had planned to Tweet during the day, but just never got round to it, too busy. So how was the event? I have to say I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as last year’s event. That is not to say this was not a good event, but this years seemed to focus on hands on programming tasks. This is great but I always feel that I could have been doing this at home, or in a dojo session in the office (not that I do this oftan enough). Last year the sessions were more Randori Kata format and the group discussion this engendered I found very useful. I think conferences like this are probably at their best when they open your mind to new technique and ideas; yes coding kata can do this, but I feel that a conference needs to focus on the meta level of ‘why do this kata’ and how to ‘best run a kata’ and leave the actual kata sessions to usergroups meetings. ...

We have had an internal timesheeting system written in Access services running without any problems for the past through months. At the end of last week, when people tried to submit their timesheets they started getting a -4002 error saying the macro (that saves the weekly sheet) could not be started. Checking the server event logs, Sharepoint logs and Access services log tables showed nothing. So as all good IT staff do we tried the traditional IISRESET command (on both our Sharepoint web servers) and it all leapt back into life. The only change on our server in the past week has been been the ASP.NET security fix, and associated reboot, but I cannot see why this should effect Access Services, it looked as if it had basically Access services just failed to restart fully after the server reboot. ...

The results of the DDD Dublin vote is in, and I am sorry to say I did not make it through the selection process. I must come up with at least some more interesting titles and abstracts (of course I can leave the sessions as dull as ever as you have voted for them by then, just like politicians and general elections really). The schedule looks really good, but after a bit of thought I have decided not to attend the event; I am speaking or attending events both the week before and the week after DDD Dublin so I am going to take the chance to reduce my carbon footprint and have a weekend at home. ...

DDD9 will be on the 29th Jan 2011 at TVP, for more details and to submit sessions see http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/ddd9/

21 Sep – [From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010 - 21 Sept) (Black Marble Bradford) 29 Sep – Microsoft ALM day (Microsoft Reading) [Cancelled] 5 Oct – Microsoft ALM day (ICCI London) [Cancelled] 7 Oct - Software Craftsmanship Conference (not speaking but attending and it is workshop based so I doubt I will be silent all day!) 9 Oct - DDD Dublin – The vote is still open so not sure I am presenting here yet or just attending [Did not get though the vote so decided not to attend] 13 Oct - [Mix in the North](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Mix in the North) (Holiday Inn, Tong) 14 Oct – Integrating Java Developers into TFS with Team explorer Everywhere (Black Marble Bradford) 20 Oct - [The Developers Group Meeting](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=The Developers Group Meeting “The Developers Group Meeting”) Using Typemock Isolator (EMC Office London) 28 Oct - [VBug Autumn Conference – The Step Up to ALM](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=VBug Autumn Conference – The Step Up to ALM) (Loughborough) Postponed to the spring 16 Nov - [From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010 - 16 Nov) (Black Marble Bradford) 17 Nov - Provisionally booked for a session on using Typemock Isolator (NEBtyes Newcastle) 8 Dec 2010 - [Architecture Forum in the North 2010](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Architecture Forum in the North 2010) (Holiday Inn, Tong) and that is just this year ...

21 Sep – [From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010 - 21 Sept) (Black Marble Bradford) 29 Sep – Microsoft ALM day (Microsoft Reading) [Cancelled] 5 Oct – Microsoft ALM day (ICCI London) [Cancelled] 7 Oct - Software Craftsmanship Conference (not speaking but attending and it is workshop based so I doubt I will be silent all day!) 9 Oct - DDD Dublin – The vote is still open so not sure I am presenting here yet or just attending [Did not get though the vote so decided not to attend] 13 Oct - [Mix in the North](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Mix in the North) (Holiday Inn, Tong) 14 Oct – Integrating Java Developers into TFS with Team explorer Everywhere (Black Marble Bradford) 20 Oct - [The Developers Group Meeting](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=The Developers Group Meeting “The Developers Group Meeting”) Using Typemock Isolator (EMC Office London) 28 Oct - [VBug Autumn Conference – The Step Up to ALM](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=VBug Autumn Conference – The Step Up to ALM) (Loughborough) Postponed to the spring 16 Nov - [From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010 - 16 Nov) (Black Marble Bradford) 17 Nov - Provisionally booked for a session on using Typemock Isolator (NEBtyes Newcastle) 8 Dec 2010 - [Architecture Forum in the North 2010](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Architecture Forum in the North 2010) (Holiday Inn, Tong) and that is just this year ...