Since the upgrade of my Media Center PC to Windows 7 I have had a few problems with fast forward on recorded TV and DVDs (which I had not seen on Vista). It was as if the fast forward button on my remote got jammed on and I could not go back to standard playback easily, it took a few seconds for the message to get through, then you ended up back where you started. ...
A webcast recording of SQLBits IV session ‘Making the SQL developer one of the family with Visual Studio Team System’ is now available on the SQLBits site. This discusses the features of the VS2008 Database GDR Edition. Unfortunately I will not be proposing a session for this years SQLBits community event on the 21st of November 2009 at Celtic Manor in Newport, as I will be travelling back from the Microsoft PDC in LA ...
Thanks to those people who attended my sessions at Epicenter yesterday in Dublin. For hose who asked you can find [copies of the presentation at the Black Marble web site](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=Publications&subsection=Conference Papers).
I was at an interesting meeting at my local BCS branch tonight ‘Opening The Black Box: An Introduction to Quality Driven Development’ by Tim Hunter. I had heard of TDD and DDD etal. but QDD was new to me. What we got was a hour framed by the basic premise that ‘Waterfall is good - Agile is bad’ (or progressive methods as the speaker called anything that was not waterfall). As another attendee pointed out in the Q&A, this tone in the presentation tended to cloud the more balanced points, managing to get the backs up of a good few attendees by the speaker’s seeming lack of understanding of god agile practices. He seemed to see agile as developers messing around, no documentation, testing or general engineering discipline. He argued that without waterfall, and specifically quality gates, we could not write quality systems. This is not the Agile I know. ...
I have just attended an excellent free webinar session on ASP.NET testing with Ivonna and Typemock by Gil Zilberfeld of Typemock and Artem Smirnov creator of Ivonna a Typemock add-on for unit testing ASP.NET The session is being repeated today at 2pm GMT and I understand a recording will appear on the Typemock site in due course. So if you get a chance this afternoon have look, it is well worth your time if you work in the ASP.NET space. Personally I have also found Ivonna useful for Sharepoint testing too, watch the session it might give you some ideas. ...
Doron at Typemock has posted a nice description of how they use Kanban for managing support. A good introduction for those unfamiliar with lean
Thanks to everyone who attended my two Nxtgen session on Sharepoint and Typemock in Birmingham and Manchester. You can find copies of the slide on the Black Marble site. There was a good deal of chat in how Typemock could be used for more general ASP.NET testing; if this is of interest to you I would strongly recommended Typemock’s next webinar on the 25th of August on Unit testing ASP.NET with Isolator and Ivonna ...
Cool, I just noticed that on Windows 7 Media Center with a Hauppauge Nova 500 T Tuner card the red button works; so at last I can get Digital Teletext and interactive channels on the BBC without having to know their actual channel numbers (and as I remember they were actually ignored by previous versions of Media Center without a registry hack anyway). This makes using MCE just like a standard Digital TV – should help general acceptance. This has certainly improved since the older versions. ...
A reminder that next week I will be speaking on ‘Developer testing of SharePoint projects using Typemock’ at two Nxtgen user groups: Birmingham on the 18th Aug 2009 Manchester on the 19th Aug 2009 Hope to see you there.
I am speaking at Epicenter 2009, the Irish Software Show at the end of the month. The conference runs from the Wednesday the 26th to Friday the 28th. My sessions on TFS 2010 are both on the Thursday the 27th as part of the ‘Microsoft zone’ Application Lifecycle Management - Moving beyond source control Making Testers Part of the Development Team This is an interesting conference as it aims to address a wide variety of technologies i.e. not just Microsoft or Open Source. I find this type of conference a great way to catch up on technology I am not usually that exposed to; just the same ethos as Agile Yorkshire where Java and .Net developers can constructively compare their worlds. ...