It's 7:25 AM. Andy and I are hoping to make a whistle-stop trip to the Cathedral before making it to the conference early enough to get good seats for the keynote. I thought I'd take a picture of the conference pack, especially since I've heard grumblings about the PDC bag. The TechEd pack looks pretty much identical …

A new version of the Application Architecture Guide ( v2.0 ) has been released to beta. Part I, Fundamentals of Application Architecture Part II, Design Part III, Layers Part IV, Quality Attributes Part V, Archetypes - Design and Patterns Get it Here. b.

Ola! Andy and I are now in sunny Espana. Only it's not sunny. Oh well... However, true to form we started our trip, having registered at the conference centre, by eating hot dogs in a german fast food joint in a Spanish shopping centre! If you're passing, Kurz & Gut does pretty good food. I'm also extremely …

Developer Express and Microsoft now are shipping a limited free copy version of CodeRush and Refactor! Pro. The free edition is available for C# developers using Visual Studio 2008. A list of features : Find any File or Symbol... Tab to Next Reference Expand/Shrink Selection Intelligent Declaration Based on Usage …

I am just back from the PDC and all the great news ( post to follow ) and I am just off to TechED IT all though Rik seems to have forgotten me :( if you are at TechED IT pop over to the BizTalk booth and say hello. b.

The P&P team have released the Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance Guidance book. The guide is designed to help groups meet customers expectations of delivery. How to Plan for Acceptance Testing What Kinds of Acceptance Tests to Run How to Create and Run Acceptance Tests Defining What “Done” Means ( this is the …

So back home now after a reasonable journey back from LA all things considered; so I have had a bit of time to reflect, was the PDC good? Well I think I enjoyed my previous PDC in 2005 more, your first time always sticks in your memory. I think that this might be due to the fact that at the 2005 PDC LINQ was announced …

While I was at the PDC I missed the announcement that the release candidate for Database Edition was made, I was not following blogs too much. You can find all the download links for the RTM at Gert Drapers Blog, you can also see his PDC session where he made the announcement. Why did I miss the session you might ask? …

Andy and I are travelling to Barcelona this weekend for TechEd EMEA IT. I’m really looking forward to some of the sessions on Hyper-V, SharePoint and Forefront.If you’re going to be there, feel free to drop us a line and say hi.

The keynote today was all about MSR, interesting as ever. I particularly liked the demos of Second Light (Surface computing that reaches beyond the surface of the physical pc) and Boku (a system to help children program). The latter is close to our hearts at Black Marble due to the work we have done on FPL, another …