After a hiatus in 2008, the Black Marble Brigade return this year caught up in the machinations of the mysterious Professor iNfamy! Part I (left) on our website and on every desk with a Black Marble Xmas Card! Find out in Part II (right) where iNfamy’s time travelling scheme has taken them … that mansion looks familiar …

Microsoft’s WF/WCF host server codename “Dublin” now has a new cool name and a promise of a great future. Windows Server App Fabric as it is now known since it has been merged with the product formally known as “Velocity” is to be the foundation for internal hosted scalable application farms, with the ability to …

Black Marble hosted the Second Architecture Forum in the North, and was delighted to welcome back Matt Deacon, Simon Thurman and Simon Davies from Microsoft. this time they were joined by Mark Richardson and Giles Davies from the Developer Tools team. The theme of this year’s Forum was the Professional Developer’s …

DATE: 17 December. Location - Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrews Place, London NW1 4LE Welcome to the Microsoft/Black Marble exploration of developer tools and application lifecycle management, now taking place in London for your convenience. Visual Studio 2010 is being designed inside and out to give …

The interest in Visual Studio 2010 is growing, I am presenting at two events this week and have another day of less formal meetings on the subject. The event on Thursday is the [Architecture Forum in the North](Architecture Forum in the North) we are hosting with Microsoft, there are still a few spaces available is if …

I realised I never did another post after my first at the PDC, now what does that tell you? One thing it tells me is that blogs are not they primary news form for events now, it has moved onto [Twitter](RefName – Enter a unique Identifier for the field in TFS. The identifier must have at least one period in the name; …

So the PDC2009 day 1 keynote is over and what was the story? Well it is more of a vision thing, but then again this is a PDC not a TechEd so what do you expect. For me the two major themes were Dallas – a centralised data service that allows unified access to both public and private via subscriptions. Thus allowing …

Well the title says it all, a sentence I thought I would never utter but its true, Access is great, specifically Access Services in SharePoint. We have been deep and dirty with Access Services in SharePoint for sometime, before it was announced getting some demo’s built of our planned release products based on …

I’d love to say that I enjoyed the Legoland Experience in Berlin, located beneath the Sony Centre in Potzdamer Platz. I’d love to, but I can’t – I’ve been to a conference you know; none of this sightseeing malarky for me. Having said that, whilst visiting the Mauerfall celebrations I stumbled upon the entrance, and I …

Lets get this straight right of the bat: Grenander is not a restaurant. Sure, it’s open in the evening and it does light meals (think: soup and a roll). However, it’s really a cafe (‘cafehaus and icecream’, says my receipt). Coffee and cake is a deep-seated German tradition. You really must indulge, but beware that …