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The problem We have had an insteresting problem, we have a Virtual Server 2007 R2 (Beta), this is accessed both internally on our company network and externally via a ISA 2006 on the Internet. This has been working fine with our XP PCs, but we saw problems when we tried to use Vista. When on our LAN, the Vista PC was fine, you could connect to the Virtual Server console web page and VMRC to any VPC. We had set our domain *.blackmarble.co.uk as the local intranet in IE security so we were not prompted for for repeated logins. ...

We have been having fun installing SQL2005 Developer Edition on Vista PCs with Reporting Services, you need the SP2 for Vista, but installation of this kept stalling with authentication problems. Turns out this is the process to follow: Do a default Install SQL 2005 Dev. Edition Run the Reporting Service Configuration Tools, make sure that the Reporting Services Process is started. Make sure the new SQL service has also be started (via control panel) Run the SP2 package, we were having problems on the login verification page, it said we could not authenticate the Reporting Services login until we had done steps 2 and 3.

The voting for the sessions at DDD5 is now open. Have a good read of the options and vote for what you would like to see sessions on. Of course I would not be suggesting you should vote for mine, but……………

Ayende Rahien and Roy Osherove have been having an interesting ping-pong about the merits and problems of TFS. Well worth a read….

Maybe it is just my background in network analysis, but I do feel any developer working with remote servers needs a protocol analyzer; in just the same way as you need the SQL profiler when working with a Microsoft SQL server, especially with auto generated code. Without tools like these how can you work out what is actually being sent on the wire? And if the data on the wire is wrong what hope is there for higher levels in the application| ...

I posted in the past about all the problems I had with my overheating Dell 5150, and with the problems trying to Vista Betas working on it. Well an update on both…. After putting new thermal grease on the CPU heatskin it never overheated again With the release version of Vista every bit of hardware (bar the modem which I quickly found a driver for) was detected and worked first time and I have seen no problems with the PC since. So I have a healthy, three year old laptop running Vista with the Aero interface (and the 5150 does have a nice high res. screen) perfectly adequately. ...

I had posted on problems with the nVidia Raid on our SunFire servers. Well I think I now have the root cause of the problems: not the Sun hardware, the nVidia RAID, or Windows 64 bit drivers. All the problems we had were when we used mirrored pairs of Western Digital 500Gb SATA drives that we had bought in a single batch of four drives. Identical drives bought on another day were fine, as were 500Gb drives from Maxtor and Hitachi. ...

I went to the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club last night, the meeting included an Extreme Hour. An interesting experience; the idea is that in an hour you go through a number of 10 minute XP iterations, doing ‘development’ by drawing the solution on a white board. Yesterday we had three separate groups of six; each with two customer, two developers (pair programming i.e. with one pen) and two QA/testers, and all had to design moon cheese harvesting solutions. ...

Today I rebuilt a PC with new drives and all seemed OK, but after 15 minutes or so it kept stopping (no nice shutdown), irrespective of what the PC was doing. I even swapped back the old disks all to no avail, hence I was stumped for a while. The problem turned out to be it was a somewhat full case and a wire was stopping the system fan turning, so the CPU was going into thermal shutdown and leaving no event log messages. Also the motherboard was not complaining as the am was still drawing current. ...

The photo I have added to my blog’s header is me at the Ripon Triathlon