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I am please to be able to announce that there will be an Alt.net Open Space Conference in Bradford on the 17/18th April this year. I had mentioned my intension of organising such an event at the last London conference, but it has taken a bit longer than expected to get sorted due to problems with getting the venue. The event will be hosted by Black Marble at their office in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and there will be space for 50 attendees. The format will be the same as previous UK Alt.net conferences. ...

At todays Azure event I heard a new word for my occasional buzz word posts. Marketechture - an architecture designed by marketing for use in Powerpoint

You can now register for SQLBits IV in Manchester on the 28th March, hurry if you want to attend as these free conferences do tend to full up quick

Thanks to everyone who voted for my session ‘Making the SQL developer one of the family with Visual Studio Team System’, it was successful in the selection process and so will be on the agenda at SQLBits IV on 28th March 2009 in Manchester Hope to see you there.

I have been getting the error “The required version of the .NET Framework is not installed on this computer.” (event id 4096 in Event log) when trying to install a VSTO application from both a ClickOnce deployment and a local copy. This is interesting as the .NET framework is installed (on my 64bit Windows 7 PC) and the VSTO application was developed on the self same machine (and works in Visual Studio 2008). ...

I know of two free events next week in Yorkshire next week for those interested : On Wednesday the 11th is the regular meeting of the Agile Yorkshire user group, where we will be enjoying a presentation on Test Driven Development by user group regulars Adam and Neil from Masternaut ThreeX. This will start at 7pm as normal, but some of us are planning to arrive about 6:30 to discuss some administrative issue of the user group. So if you are interested just turn up at the Victoria Hotel. ...

I raised a question on the Typemock forum concerning a problem I was having mocking Sharepoint SPFarm objects. It was all down to which way to fake items using the various techniques in Isolator. It was interesting enough, I thought, to repeat here as a blog post. I had written some tests for a method that got a list of SiteCollections that a user had rights to access. The key point being the need to access the static property SPFarm.Local to get a list of Sharepoint services to iterate across. If I ran each test by itself it worked; but if run as a batch in TestDriven.Net or MSTest the first passed and the rest failed. ...

The voting process has opened for Developer Day Scotland being held on the 2nd of May. I would like to draw you attention to my proposed session on testing for Sharepoint developers where I will show what can be done with Typemock and good use of design patterns to allow the building of complex tests that can be run of build servers that do not require Sharepoint to be installed. But even if you don’t fancy this session please still vote, and when it opens sign up to attend DDS. In my opinion DDS was the best of the DDD events I went to last year. A great venue and atmosphere. ...

I have been having a problem with a new automated CI build under Team Build that I have added to an old Visual Studio solution. The solution is fairly big, but in essence it contains a shared data type assembly, a web site front end and a back end web service. The problem was on the Team Build drop share in the _PublishedWebsitesproduced by team build I was finding a old version of the shared data type assembly. However in the release directory of the same build I found the correct newly built version of the assembly. ...

I have been struggling today with a problem that a PostBuild event on a C# project works fine on my development PC but failed on a Team Build box. The project is based on the Codeplex SharePoint Visual Studio Project Template that uses post build scripts to create a deployment WSP. It turns out the problem was an unwanted condition on the PostBuildEvent in the projects .csproj file. It was like this: ...