At the PDC expo drinks last night I was asked to show age ID to get a drink! Just me it seems, nobody else from the company. I thought I was doing well to be carded on my 30th birthday whilst in the US, but 10 years on it getting silly – You must ask how do I keep my youthfully countenance? Wish I knew, but they say it …

Though not really mentioned in the keynote there are a lot of sessions on VSTS 2010 at the PDC; it is going to be a major really major release. Chatting in between the sessions with other delegates there seems to loads of interest in the new testing features, but we know this is pain point from Alt.net meetings. It …

So it seems we are going to have themed days at the 2008 PDC and day one is all about the Azure services platform. Though judging by the expo stands the key announcements for tomorrow - Oslo and Dublin are out there too. As conferences go it seems a bit confused to me, I guess Microsoft are aiming for three big bangs …

I won’t repeat Robert’s blog entry on the Black Marble founders reunion, but just to add the missing photo

Every now and again the founders of Black Marble meet up to discuss the future directions of the computing industry to help plan the road ahead for Black Marble. This year we chose Newport Beach south of Los Angeles. Although I can’t imagine why people would like to live near here. Andy has suggested that our next …

A bunch the pride at the black marble are here ready and waiting for the PDC, we are all registered ( with the less than amazing shopping bag issued, better things to come ;) ), Robert , James and Richard look in awe at the future of thinking outside of the box here’s looking to tomorrow. b.

I don’t visit the Mix community site often – historically, the content has been of little interest and infrequently updated. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a relaunched Mix Online with a new Microformats project – Oomph. In short, it’s cool – a microformats extension for IE plus other goodies to help implement …

I got this error when installing TFS 2008. In the error log I could see the problem was when the TfsGssInit.exe was run, it said Detailed Message: TF213000: A required user account could not be added during installation or repair of Team Foundation Server. The installation or repair failed with the following exception …

Whilst doing a new TFS 2008 dual tier install I was getting a failure with a TF220050 error when I entered the data tier DB instance name. The setup wizard just said ‘failed to connect to data tier’, but you can find the actual error number in the install logs to be found under C:Documents and Settings[setup user]Local …

So that took about 6 hours by my estimation. Popular or what!