We are hosting Microsoft's Azure Technical Briefing

Interested in finding out more about Microsoft’s Cloud computing strategy and the technology behind Azure? Yes - well you are in luck there are more UK Microsoft road show events in February. They are in Cambridge, Edinburgh and the one we are hosting in Bradford on the 13th. For more details and links to registration see http://blogs.msdn.com/ukisvdev/archive/2009/01/14/new-dates-for-azure-technical-briefing-announced.aspx

January 28, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Writing a webpart to work inside and outside Sharepoint when talking to WCF

I have posted in the past on porting our ASP.NET bug tracking systems into Sharepoint and also linking it to TFS. The idea being that the initial customer support contact is tracked in the call tracking system e.g. is it switched on, is there paper in it….., and then escalated to TFS when development effort is required. To do this escalation my webpart calls a WCF service to access the TFS API - why you ask? The TFS API is 32bit only and you cannot call it directly inside a Sharepoint 64bit server farm. ...

January 28, 2009 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

New name for the XP Club and next months event

The details of the February meeting of the Agile Yorkshire User Group (new name, and new web site is on the way, watch out for posts) The session is on developers experiences of TDD, another view from the coal face. See you there, 2nd Wednesday of the month as usual….

January 27, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Call for speakers for DDD South West

DDD community events are getting another venue this year, Queen’s College in Taunton on the 23rd of May. It has been decided that some of the speaker will be regulars from other DDD events; including myself speaking on Scrum. However all the other slots will be filled in the usual submission and voting manner, with the added rule the speaker should be new to the conference circuit (speaking to user groups is allowed and encouraged). So is this you? do you fancy speaking? if it is then submit a session. ...

January 27, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Voting opens for SQLBits IV

You can vote for sessions at SQLBit IV as of today at http://www.sqlbits.com/information/PublicSessions.aspx, you do need to join the site first. Note joining the site is not the same as registering to attend the event which has not opened yet.

January 26, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Problem hosting WCF using Cassini on Windows 7

I have been working on an internal legacy application at our place that is being slowly moved from ASMX to WCF services. At present the services are a mixture of the two and there is a new WCF based client making connections to both types as needed. This work has been going on for a while on Vista development boxes without any problems. However when I opened the solution on a Windows 7 box (Beta 7000 build) I found I could not access the WCF services hosted locally using Visual Studio 2008’s WebDev.Webserver.exe (Cassini) server. ...

January 24, 2009 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Installing an MSI on Windows 7 fails after 16th January 2009

I am using Windows 7 Beta on my main PC, whilst trying to install an application today I hit a problem, the installer failed on start-up. Firstly I thought it was a corrupt MSI so I tried another application, but it did the same. When I checked the Windows Application event log I found the following Faulting application name: msiexec.exe, version: 5.0.7000.0, time stamp: 0x49432105 Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7000.0, time stamp: 0x49434898 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x00000000000ebbaa Faulting process id: 0x7dc Faulting application start time: 0x01c97a77da8e8b3e Faulting application path: C:WindowsSystem32msiexec.exe Faulting module path: C:WindowsSYSTEM32ntdll.dll ...

January 19, 2009 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Another call for speakers

Just seen that there has been a calls for speakers for DDD Belfast, another chance to meet up with like minded developers.

January 15, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

XP Club January 2009 Meeting

The XP Club did not manage to book the usual venue, the Victoria Hotel Pub in Leeds, for this months meeting as it was already booked. So for one month only, on the 14th of January, will be next door to Victoria Hotel Pub at the O’Neils from 7pm. Also, it has been decided there will be no technical presentation this month, we will meet to discuss the issues and politics around the club, including club’s constitution, bank accounts, rough strategy for the future and so on. You are all welcome to come along and help to shape the future of the club, help with some duties or just come to meet-up with fellow geeks. ...

January 13, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

First thoughts on Windows 7 Beta

I had the PDC CTP on my Netbook and that was OK so I had not expected any major issues. That said it has not been without problems, but all the issues I have logged as part of the beta program have been related to hardware detection (missing base stations and ignored physical Wifi switch state) on my Acer laptop. However, these issue can be worked around i.e. don’t use sleep or hibernate. so have not stopped be using the beta on my primary PC. ...

January 12, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell