The latest selection of Black Marble Xmas cards have a distinctly sci fi theme … We are particularly fond of the snowman below inspired by our devs regular game playing! Have a very Halo Xmas.

At the start of December Black Marble was very proud to co-host Architecture in the North with Microsoft. I would like to thank everybody who came and to the great Microsoft speakers who came to educate us all. Session Decks Sustainability from Data Centre to the Cloud - Matt Deacon Architecture Guidance - Simon …

as a part of my collected sets of links here is a set of useful tools and links for Visual Studio Languages IronPython 2.0 can be downloaded from here Tools Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET (CAT.NET) v1 CTP - 32 bit - here -CAT.NET is a snap-in to the Visual Studio IDE that helps you identify security flaws within a …

Yes that's right Microsoft Press are celebrating 25 years and giving away free books, this months is Joseph Davies’s book on IPV6 Get it Here the offer runs out in a few days so get downloading if you want it. b.

If you have TypeMock Isolator based MSTests in a solution you will want them to be run as part of any CI build process. To get this to work with Team Build you have to make sure Isolator is started in the build box at the right time (something that is done automagically behind the scenes by Visual Studio during …

One of the cool feature of the last October 08 release of TFS Power Tools has been that the members of a Team Project are shown inside Team Explorer. One of the ideas of this is that you can use Live Messenger from inside Team Explorer to see team members status, but I and many other were seeing the error shown below …

I posted a while ago about trying to wire in the results from StyleCop into a Team Build, the problem I had was that I could not get the StyleCop violations into the build summary. Well I still can’t, after much checking and asking around I was reliably informed that the build summary is not editable and there are no …

If your team build project uses the Publish Target option (to create a ClickOnce deploy) you may see the error BuildWallboard.csproj" (Publish target) (3:5) -> (_DeploymentGenerateBootstrapper target) -> MSB3155: Item 'Microsoft.Net.Framework.3.5.SP1' could not be located in BuildWallboard'. MSB3155: Item …

I would say at this time unless you need 64Bit specific assemblies built you are best staying on a 32bit operating system. This will happily build MSIL .NET assemblies which I guess for most of us is the bulk of our work. OK you loose a bit of performance if you have 64bit hardware (or virtual hardware in our case), …

I have been rebuilding our TFS build systems on Hyper-V based virtualised hardware. The long term plan being to hold a configured build server as as Hyper-V template to we could prevision extra ones quickly, or rebuild all of them if we need to upgrade some library or tool; in effect to give us revision control over …