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For ages now I have have been prompted when I loaded Live Writer that there was an upgrade available, and every time I tried it get it, at the end of the install it failed and rolled back. As I did not have time to dig into it I just used the older version. Well today, due to upgrades in our LAN, I need to upgraded Live Messenger and as this is of part of the same Live Essentials 2011 package it not unsurprising I hit the same problem. A bit of experimentation showed the issues was that the upgrade was not able to remove the old version. If i tried to remove it via Control Panel it failed with a 0x80004004 error. In the error log I saw ...

Adding a Visual Basic 6 project to your TFS 2010 build process is not are hard as I had expected it to be. I had assumed I would have to write a custom build workflow template, but it turned out I was able to use the default template with just a few parameters changed from their defaults. This is the process I followed. I created a basic ‘Hello world’ VB6 application. I had previously made sure that my copy of VB6 (SP6) could connect to my TFS 2010 server using the Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider so was able to check this project into source control. ...

I tried to open a TFS 2010 build template within the Visual Studio shell (the bit that gets installed when you put Team Explorer onto a PC) and saw the error “The document contains errors that must be fixed before the designer can be loaded”. ” At the bottom of the screen it showed that all the underling assemblies could not be found. The solution is simple, install a ‘real version’ of Visual Studio, I put on Premium. It seems that the shell does not provide all the assemblies that are needed. Once I did this I could edit the XAML with no problems ...

This is a follow up to the post Fun with WCF, SharePoint and Kerberos – well it looks like fun with hindsight When I wrote the last post I thought I had our WCF Kerberos issues sorted, I was wrong. I had not checked what happened when I tried to access the webpart from outside our TMG firewall. When I did this I was back with the error that I had no security token. To sort this we had to make some more changes. ...

I have had my LG WP7 phone about a week now. The best thing about it, it just works. Ok I have had a few learning issues over the Metro UI, but usually the answer is so obvious I have just overlooked it. Stupid things like I was looking for the button that was equivalent to the long press on the end key on my HTC Windows 6.5 phone to lock the phone; I had not consider the off button! A classic UTS (user too stupid) error, or maybe a user dragging old habits over to a very different way of working? ...

The title of the November Agile Yorkshire meeting (on Tuesday the 9th) is “A case study exploring how agile methodologies were used to help change the way sports are traded at William Hill forever.”. As usual this is a free event and is hosted at the Old Broadcasting house in Leeds starting at 6:30pm and I am sure people will go to the pub afterwards. I have to go to Edinburgh that day to present at a Microsoft ALM event (still space available if you are in the Edinburgh area) and I doubt I will be back in time. A shame as this subject looks like a very interesting one. ...

[Updated 10 Nov 2010: Also see [More] Fun with WCF, SharePoint and Kerberos] I have been battling some WCF authentication problems for a while now; I have been migrating our internal support desk call tracking system so that it runs as webpart hosted inside Sharepoint 2010 and uses WCF to access the backend services all using AD authentication. This means both our staff and customers can use a single sign on for all SharePoint and support desk operations. This replaced our older architecture using forms authentication and an complex mix of WCF and ASMX webservices that have grown up over time; this call tracking system started as an Access DB with a VB6 front end well over 10 years ago! ...

I sat in the office yesterday with a beer in my hand watching the PDC2010 keynote. I have to say I preferred this to the option of a flight, jet lag and a less than comfortable seat in a usually overly cooled conference hall. With the Silverlight streaming the experience was excellent, especially as we connected an Acer 1420P to our projector/audio via a single HDMI cable and it just worked. So what do you lose by not flying out? Well the obvious is the ‘free’ Windows Phone 7 the attendees got; too many people IMHO get hooked up on the swag at conferences, you go for knowledge not toys. They also forget they (or their company) paid for item anyway in their conference fee. More seriously you miss out on the chats between the sessions, and as the conference is on campus the easier access to the Microsoft staff. Also the act of travelling to a conference isolates you from the day to day interruptions of the office, the online experience does not and you will have to stay up late to view sessions live due to timezones. The whole travelling experience still cannot be replaced by the online experience, not matter how good the streaming. ...

With any new product there can be some confusion over the exact range and scope of features, this is just as true for VS2010 Lab Management as any other. In fact given the number of moving parts (infrastructure you need in place to get it running) it can be more confusing than average. In this post I will cover the questions I have seen most often. What does ‘Network Isolation’ really mean? ...

At the Software Craftsmanship 2010 conference I met Gael Fraiteur of Sharpcrafters, he had given a talk on Aspect Oriented Programming AOP.Since the conference I have had a chance to look at his Postsharp AOP product for .NET. I decided to do a quick spike project for a tender I have been working on, the requirement is to add a security model to an existing .NET assembly. Usually this would have entailed adding some security logic at the start of each public method to implement the security model. Using AOP I hoped I would be able to get the same effect by adding an attribute to the classes/methods, hopefully making the changes easier to read and quicker to develop. ...