Over the weekend I took my son to the excellent ‘Bang goes the Theory’ Live road show which is part of the Festival of Science in Bradford. If a similar event is near you I recommend you go along, fun for all the family even if science is not really your thing. The whole event makes the subject very accessible to all. …

If you use the database unit testing feature of VS2010 there is a good chance you will want to run these tests on more than one PC and probably the build server. The issue is that these different PC will need different deployment paths and SQL connection strings. Luckily there is a feature to address this, as detailed …

If you look on the Black Marble web site you will find listing of the free events we are running up to the end of the year and into the new year. This year our events include 12 Oct 2011 [Re-Build – IT ](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Re-Build - IT)[Re-Build – …

I have in the past posted about developing SharePoint web parts without having to use a SharePoint server by using Typemock Isolator. This technique relies on using Cassini or IIS Express as the web server to host the aspx page that in turn contains the webpart. This is all well and good for SharePoint 2007, but we get …

I am doing a free webinar on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 3:00 PM BST with the title "Using Typemock Isolator to speed the development of SharePoint Web Parts". For more details have a look at http://www.typemock.com/webinars the details should be up soon

The agenda is up for DDDNorth, seems .JS related subjects are the fashionable topics for this conference. As I suspected my session on build customisation did not make the cut, just not cool enough! As with all DDD events the event is free, but the place tend to go quickly. I think this DDD has 300 spaces so I suggest …

I am currently writing some training material for a client on mocking showing how life is so much easier if software is designed with testing in mind. As part of this material I showing that though we aim for nice design patterns which allow testing we have to deal with legacy systems that were not designed this way. …

Session voting has opened at DDD North, vote for what you would like to see at the conference in October

One of the very useful features of the TFS 2010 Power Tools is that it provides a backup wizard, great for teams using TFS who don’t have much SQL/IT Pro experience. Whist setting this up on a server I hit an interesting gotta with sending alerts. This TFS server in question was configured to enable SMTP alerting (via …

I create a number of task work items in TFS 2010 using a list in Excel. This all appeared to work OK, and I could run a work item query in Team Explorer and see all my new work items. However then I tried to open the work item query in Project I got a TF80070 error. It loaded the work items up a point in the list then …