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Thanks to everyone who attended yesterdays Black Marble event ‘Enabling agile development with cool tools’, both Gary Short’s and my sessions seemed well received. I was asked if my slides would be available anywhere, well the answer is no. The reason for this is that my session was mostly demo driven, so the slides just set the scene. After a bit of thought, a quick blog post seems a better option; so this post covers the same basic points as the session. If you are interested in any of the products I would urge you to download them and give them a go. Many are free and all have at least a free fully functional evaluation edition. ...

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterdays Black Marble event ‘Enabling agile development with cool tools’, both Gary Short’s and my sessions seemed well received. I was asked if my slides would be available anywhere, well the answer is no. The reason for this is that my session was mostly demo driven, so the slides just set the scene. After a bit of thought, a quick blog post seems a better option; so this post covers the same basic points as the session. If you are interested in any of the products I would urge you to download them and give them a go. Many are free and all have at least a free fully functional evaluation edition. ...

After much delay I have at last got our internal Lab Management running on ‘real’ hardware as opposed to it’s initial home on a demo rig PC. We have just been too busy to find the time to reconfigure and redeploy our own kit! You know how it is ‘a plumber’s house is full of drippy taps’. That said I of course still want more hardware, as soon as you start to build up test environments you eat Hyper-V server resources very quickly; memory seems to be my most pressing current limitation on how much I can run at the same time. ...

I have spent today preparing my presentation and demos for the Black Marble event next week [Enabling Agile Development with Cool Tools](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Enabling Agile Development with Cool Tools). I will be presenting with Gary Short of DevExpress. He is going to be talking about refactoring under the intriguing title ‘How to Eat an Elephant’. My session will be on the tools to aid the project management side of the ALM process. Specifically the tools available for TFS 2010 both those ‘out the box’ and from third party vendors. I only have a hour slot, so I have had to be selective as there are may ‘cool tools’ to choose from. So after some thought I have chosen ...

Whist trying to make use of a custom build activity I got the error TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition Tfsdemo1Candy: Cannot create unknown type ‘{clr-namespace:TfsBuildExtensions.Activities.CodeQuality;assembly=TfsBuildExtensions.Activities.StyleCop}StyleCop’ This occurred when the TFS 2010 build controller tried to parse the build process .XAML at the start of the build process. A check of all the logs gave no other information other than this error message, nothing else appeared to have occurred. ...

I asked the question a while ago if I should buy a Kindle? I still think that new books are too expensive, but as there are loads of out of copyright books available for the platform so I did not hesitate to download the Windows Phone 7 Kindle app today. You never know when you need something to read and what could be better to dip into than a bit of Sherlock Holmes? ...

Seems yet again my sessions for a DDD event did not excite the voting public; the selected sessions for DDD9 are out and I am not on the list. Again it does look a nice varied selection of sessions. I have tried to see if I can see a trend in what is being selected, but it seems a fair mix between language feature introductions, web technologies, tools and architecture/process/patterns – so something for everyone. ...

The voting has opened for DDD9, As with all the DDD style events the agenda is set by you, the attendees, so get in there any say what you are interested in, it is not as if there is not a great choice this time. I have a session up on writing custom build activities for TFS 2010 which I hope some of you will find interesting, but I do fear it is a rather specialist area! ...

Did you miss the Typemock session on mocking legacy system this week? If you you can watch a recording at the Typemock site. If you are interested a more SharePoint specific session check out my session next week.

Thanks to everyone who turned out from Rik’s and my session last night at NEBytes. I have not bothered uploading my slides as it was really a demo driven session, but there is a video of a similar session I did at NDC2010 However, if you want to learn more about using Typemock Isolator with legacy system why not attended Roy Osherove’s ‘Be a Legacy Code Unit Test Ninja with Typemock Isolator’ web session next week? ...