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When your try to remove the McAfee ProtectionPilot 1.5.0 agent using the command frminst /remove=agent you get an error “can’t stop service mcafeeframework” if you are using VirusScan 8.5. This is because VirusScan 8.5 has a new option under Access Protection that stops the McAfee services being stopped. So if you want to remove the agent you first have to go into the VirusScan Console and on the access protection properties page uncheck the Proect McAfee Services, then disable Access Protection for good measure. Then run the remove command andall should be OK ...

There seems to be a good deal of Microsoft stuff over the past few editions of Scientific American (SCIAM), and before you ask yes I do live in the UK, but I find Nature a bit too academic for me and New Scientist has too many job adverts. SCIAM is just ‘popular’ science enough to read over breakfast. The March edition has two such articles, but not on mainstream Microsoft products: One is on the Microsoft Theory Group of Microsoft Research and is called Graph Theory and Teatime. This looks at the team of top flight mathematicians choosing to work at Microsoft Research, as opposed to a more traditional career in academia, in much the same way as AT&T Bell labs operated in the past. The other on Digital Life, the current research and possibilities of using computers as external memory. It is written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell again of Microsoft Research who are working on the www.mylifebits.com research project. Raises some interesting issues of security and archiving. Both of these are every interesting and I think still available free on the web via the links above. I think they show a move by Microsoft to make their more academic and blue sky research known to the general public (or at least the ones who read pop science magazines!) ...

In case you missed it, you can now make submissions for presentation slots at DDD5. Even if you don’t want to present, keep an eye on the site for a chance to vote on what you would like to see and to register as an attendee.

I just realised that TeamPlain also makes external access easier for remote users outside your firewall. The problem with external access to TFS from VS Team Studio is that you have to open up the TFS server and the associated WSS 2.0 server ports in your firewall. Not a major issue but opening ports is something you want to minimise, or at least your firewall manager will want to minimise. ...

As I am sure you have seen Microsoft have purchased devBiz and made their TeamPlain product free to all TFS customers. I have just installed the new free release of TeamPlain on our TFS system and I must say what a pleasant experience it was; run the MSI answering a few questions, go into the newly created TeamPlain admin web page, enter the URL of the TFS server and that’s it. Really easy and it just works. Compared to the the fun I have had with other bits of TFS this is joy. ...

I had to move our CRM install this week to new hardware, and I had expected it to be a nasty job. However it turned out to be straight forward, though it is really hard to find any useful Microsoft Dynamics CRM documentation beyond the basic manuals. Why do the Dynamics team make it so hard to find things out? Anyway these are the steps to follow: To move the database (got this process from a Microsoft Knowledgebase document on setting up SQL clustering for CRM) ...

If you change the domaintfsservice and/or the domaintfsreports as you would expect your TFS server to stop, and it does. To get it back working you have to reset the passwords in: The various TFS AppPools on the frontend server need the new tfsservice password The datasource in ([frontendserver]/reports) on the reporting services need the new tfsreports password. After that all should be OK

When I heard the NxtGenUG were putting on a day conference Fest 07 on the 23rd May, I had assumed it might be in the midlands, as that is where their user groups are based. However it is at Microsoft TVP in Reading - yet another trek south, does nothing other than an occasional MSDN/TechNet road shows come further north than the M4 corridor? other than our Black Marble events of course! This said the line up of speakers looks great and well worth the trip. ...

Our SunFire x2100 application servers, running Windows 2003 R2, are configured with Nvidia RAID system (built into the motherboard) to mirror the pair of SATA drives in each servers. Two of these servers keeps losing the mirrors, but a third, and a SunFire x2200, do not. When this happens Windows hanging - not good in a server. We have had a support call open with Sun and swapped bits of hardware, but it keeps happening. During the support calls we discovered that the Nvidia RAID is not true hardware, but a ‘software trick’. So not a great step up from letting Windows do the mirroring itself. ...

I did my presentation on Scrum last night for the Extreme programming club in Leeds, seemed to go down well. A lively discussion was had on Scrum and a whole bunch of agile issues. If anyone has questions post them on the club forum. The next meeting on 12th of April an Extreme Hour, an audience participation event on doing an XP project in a an hour - sounds interesting.