Uncategorised

Today I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade our ’live’ TFS installation to 2008 Beta2, now there is support from Microsoft. The only reason I have delayed this long has been we have been involved in the delivery of a big project and I did not want to take the TFS server down for any reason. Our TFS installation is dual server, the data tier (DT) running on our central SQL2005 64bit server and the application tier (AT) on a virtual server as a VPC. I have kept the AT virtual as it is easy to backup. ...

Due to popular demand, well one person, I have uploaded my GUITester system I presented about at DDD3 to CodePlex. It can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/guitester. If you are interested in moving the project forward let me know.

If you are having to support a TFS install there have been some excellent posts on disaster recovery on Sudhir Hasbe’s blog, he is a PM on the TFS team. Well worth a read.

I will be speaking at NxtGen usergroup Birmingham branch on the 17th December about, you guessed it TFS. Look forward to seeing you there.

As I sit on the train traveling north to our Black Marble hosted MSDN event I must write to say how much I enjoyed presenting at last night’s .NET Developers Network usergroup meeting; thanks to Guy Smith Ferrier and the whole group for getting it organized. I think I managed to cover all the questions raised about TFS during the meeting. I have been through my slides to add notes to clarify any points raised. The updated set of the slide stack can be downloaded from http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=Publications&subsection=Conference%20Papers. ...

I have had a week of Web 2.0 mashup sites at the MIx07 London event so was interested in a thing on the TV last night whilst watching England’s appalling performance against South Africa in the rugby. eBay ran adverts with a virtually real time feed (20 second delay they claimed) from a live auction. Now I have never seen this before, maybe I just don’t watch ITV enough, so this is the first Internet/broadcast TV mashup I have seen. I wonder how much the sale prices of the lucky items featured in the adverts are affected? ...

I have just heard my proposed session for the SQLBits conference has been accepted. I will be talking on Unit Testing in SQL Server my proposal was: Test driven development is one of the current hot topics in software development, but how far can these principles be applied in the world of SQL? In this session I will look at the principles of TDD and other testing options using both freeware tools and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Datadude ...

See I was right, in my post yesterday I said the key role missing in most WPF projects was the ‘designer who can cut code’ or ‘coder with a design eye’, the session Silverlight, WPF, Expression design projects - where do we get started today was on just this subject Paul Dawson and Robby Ingebretsen discussed the need for ‘producers’ who take on this bridging role, with tips on where to find them. ...

So we reach the end of the first day of Mix07 London, what are my thoughts? Well the conference, as conference go, is well organized and I can have no complaint over the quality of the sessions or presenters. Has it changed how I think about Silverlight? Well I have realised that 1.0 is a very different product to 1.1. Have no doubt this conference is about SilverLight 1.1, and that the 1.1 Alpha release is missing a lot of functionality at present. As a shipping product 1.1 look a long way off, at least a year (which is forever it seems in the world of Web 2.0). ...

Today and tomorrow I am at the Mix07 conference in London which is being held at the Congress Centre, a building that I knew as the Trade Union Congress building. So given this location I expected a Harold Wilson ‘beer and sandwiches’ style lunch, but no it was small food (very nice tapas style dishes) and as we all know - if it is small and food it is trendy. You know you are at a design orientated event when the even the food is trendy! ...