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A common problem with getting software developed is the needing to get everyone aiming for the same goal. This too often gets lost in the development process; the real goal of the business is not communicated to the development team. It maybe that the goal professed by the business is not the one they even really want, but their current viewpoint obscures the true goal. In this new book from Gojko Adzic provides a excellent introduction to Impact Mapping as a tool to help address this problem....

Another good turn out this year for the Age UK Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds. Over 9000 runners this year, certainly seemed much busier than previous years. Again Black Marble had staff members running. As with last year we did a wisdom of crowds based handicap race for the impressive Black Marble trophy (we all estimate each others expected times, the winner is who beats mean estimate the most). This year there was a tie to the second between Jon and Becky, who are as we speak negotiating over trophy sharing for the next year....

Winter is rushing on, so it is time for a new season of Black Marble events in Yorkshire. 21 Nov 2012 (All day) - [Whats New in SharePoint 2013](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Whats New in SharePoint 2013) All the updates and announcements from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference around SharePoint 2013. 27 Nov 2012 (AM) - [An Introduction to Windows 8 Development](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=An Introduction to Windows 8 Development) We welcome Microsoft Evangelist Mike Taulty to present a morning on Windows 8 for developers....

Just upgraded this blog server to BlogEngine .NET 2.7 from 2.6. Nice straight forward upgrade.

I must have clicked something in error on my Win 8 PC as when I open one of our SharePoint 2010 sites and select a file, right clicked and selected Send To > Email Link instead of an Outlook email opening my PC tries to open Chrome. A bit of quick digging showed the issue was that the file association for mailto: was wrong. You can check this setting in IE > Internet Options > Programs > Internet Programs > set Programs (button)...

Today has been one of purging build system problems. On my TFS 2012 Windows 8 build box I was was getting the following error when trying to run Windows 8 App Store unit tests TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.’. On further investigation, I am not really sure anything was working too well on this box....

A while ago I posted about seeing the TF900546 error when running unit tests in a previously working TFS 2012 build. The full error being: TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.’. Well late last week this problem came back with avengeance on a number of builds run on the same build controller/agent(s)....

Ewald’s post explains how to create a WCF web service to act as an end point for TFS Alerts. I have been using the model with a TFS 2010 to check for work item changed events, using the work item’s System.AssignedTo field to retrieve the owner of the work item (via the TFS API) so I can send an email, as well as other tasks (I know I could just send the email with a standard alert)....

Whilst setting up a TFS 2012 Lab management environment for Coded UI testing we got the problem that none of the tests were running, in fact we could see no tests were even being passed to the agent in the lab On the build report I clicked on the ‘View Test Results’ which loaded the result in Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) and viewed the test run log, and we saw...

I recently had the need to use IISExpress on Windows 8 to provide a demo server to a number of Surface RT clients. I found this took me longer than I expected. It might be me but the documentation did not leap out. So as a summary this is what I had to do, let us say for example that I want to serve out http://mypc:1234 Make sure you have a project MyWebProject in Visual Studio that works for http://localhost:1234 using IISExpress Open the TCP port 1234 on the PC in the Control Panel > Admin Tools > Firewall Edit C:Users[current user]DocumentsIISExpressconfigapplicationhost....