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Do you use the Visual Studio web site? If you do or you don’t Microsoft are interested to find the reasons why via a quick survey.

The BCS has had its EGM today and the results are out. Basically the vote is about 75% in support of the status quo, which I am not surprised by. What I am really pleased to see is that the Trustees withdrew the special resolution the change the number of people to required to call an EGM from 50 people to 2% of the membership. I really do hope that this whole EGM process has been a warning to the Trustee and board that they must be more open, and help promote and continue the dialog that EGM has created. ...

I have just found out I have been re-awarded as a Visual Studio ALM MVP for the third year (though it was called Team System the first two times). It is a privilege to get to work with such a great group of people as a have met via the MVP programme.

[Also see http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/archive/2010/08/13/how-to-edit-a-tfs-2010-build-template-when-it-contains-custom-activities.aspx ] A couple of months ago I wrote and published a custom activity for Team Build 2010 to allow Typemock tests to be run within the build process. Whilst setting up a new build need to use this activity so I though I would see if there was an easier way to use it in a build without all the branch and fuss required for development. This is what I had to do ...

Thanks to everyone who attended my session last night at the West Yorkshire BCS on Agile and Lean development process. The projector failing after only a few minutes meant I had to adopt a good agile approach to the session. It was nice that so many people came up afterwards to say they enjoyed the lack of PowerPoint. This got me thinking, as I enjoyed not having it as well. All I really missed was a couple of slides one that showed a Kanban board and another that diagrammatically showed the Scrum process, I got round the lack of both of these by pointing wildly at the blank projector screen and asking people to imagine. So if I run that session again I think I will just have that pair of slides and lose the rest. I just need to find a nice means to let me see the text slides, which I used as my speaking notes. I have never been a fan of postcard style notes when presenting, too much to drop, and when I tried using my phone in the past it was awkward, but maybe time to try again now my phone has a larger screen. ...

Just a reminder I am speaking at the West Yorkshire BCS meeting this Wednesday on the subject ‘Agile is so old hat all the cool kids are doing lean now’. The meeting starts a 5:45 for refreshments, and 6:30 for my session. The venue is the Old Broadcasting House, 148 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9EN (www.ntileeds.co.uk) Hope to see you there

My fellow UK ALM MVP, Martin Hinshelwood, is running a Professional Scrum Developer course in London at the end of next month. I understand there are still some places left, and some good discounts available. So if you was looking at wanting to implement a Scrum process on TFS it could be well worth a look If you want to know more about the whole PSD programme have a look at the Microsoft site ...

Whist upgrading a TFS2010 Beta2 server to RTM I saw the following error when I ran the verify step of the upgrade. TF246062: Two or more databases are in conflict because they are each designated as the owners of the following schema: Framework. The schema is for the host with the following name and ID: CollectionName, 8aace481-2471-49c8-da74-77ee3da4ce29. The databases with this conflict are: Data Source=SQLInstance1;Initial Catalog=Tfs_CollectionName;Integrated Security=True, Data Source=SQLInstance1;Initial Catalog=Tfs_Production_CollectionName;Integrated Security=True. You must specify one and only one database owner for the schema in the searchable SQL Server instances for this deployment of Team Foundation Server. ...

Gil at Typemock has been posting about some ideas we discussed over breakfast at the Typemock Partner conference a while ago, I have been a bit slow at commenting, so I though I better add to the conversation. Though Typemock is an excellent mocking framework, for me basic mocking is not its biggest win. All the ‘classic auto mocking’ of interfaces to speed TDD style working is great, but I can do that with any of the .NET mocking frameworks. All they do is mean I don’t have to write my own test stubs and mocks, so saving me time, which is good but not the keep win I was looking for. ...

What a great event the Norwegian Developers conference is. It is a nice size so there is a good selection of tracks, but no so big you feel lost, also the speakers and attendees were all mixing freely which I think always makes for a good atmosphere. This was all enhanced by the excellent organisation of the event, what can I say the wifi worked faultlessly, the food was good and the overflow screens (so from one place you could view the video and audio of any current sessions) was a brilliant idea, so much I know some people took to using this in preference to going to the actual session. You can see the overflow screens at the top of the photo below. ...