Following the wonderfully successful Black Marble Brigade Xmas Card in 2007, we are back with a great set of designs this year too. Graphics Girl has produced a wonderful ‘traditional’ card (above) that will have landed on your desk this year … as well as a selection of others that didn’t quite make the cut … we had …

At Black Marble we try to always go one step further, one of the popular things we do is to get international varieties of coke and other pop/soda from Korean to American. This December, the Guest Cokes filling your fridge include the very exotic Irish variety of regular coke … and also a French Diet Coke! Enjoy.

At the last MVP Summit Steve Ballmer said “I’m going to ask you one week switch your default [search engine], one week. At the end of the week…I’ll want feedback, how was your week, what happened, what did you like, what didn’t you like … Can I make that deal with you? (Cheers and applause.) That’s the deal.” Well the …

Updated 3 Dec 2008 – I got an email from Artem Smirnov the author of Ivonna pointing out a couple of things, so I have updated this post Updated 3 May 2009 – I altered the code samples as the previous ones did not seem to work with Typemock Isolator 5.3.0 . I have previously written a post on using Isolator with …

Black Marble hosted the first Architecture Forum in the North today and despite the treacherous weather conditions, there was a great and enthusiastic turnout. The day opened with Matt Deacon, Chief Architectural Advisor from Microsoft espousing on Sustainable IT, followed up by Simon Thurman, a Microsoft Architecture …

I'm using the Mini9 quite a lot lately, at least in part to fiddle with Windows 7. I decided it would be nice to be able to access our Hyper-V servers so I went looking for the management tools... It turns out that Windows 7 ships with the Hyper-V management snap-ins. No real surprise there as my understanding is that …

Applications to attend Software Craftsmanship 2009 have opened, this is a free conference that aims to discuss ‘the "hard skills" that programmers and teams require to deliver high quality working software’. If you have not heard of Software Craftsmanship take a look at Peter McBreen’s book Software Craftsmanship: The …

The next meeting is on the 10th of December at Victoria Hotel in central Leeds at 7pm as usual. The speaker is Gary Short who is speaking on Design Patterns. Come to this free event to find out more about this vital subject to developers in any language from an excellent speaker. As an added bonus we will all head off …

Typemock announced today a new product Isolator for Sharepoint – which allows unit testing of Sharepoint code without needing Sharepoint installed. Now this is something I have been using the full version of Isolator for of late, and there are more blog posts on the way from me, so watch this space. So if you are a …

On Saturday I was pleased to have been chosen to present on Microsoft “Oslo” at Developer Developer Developer 7. The event was a runaway success and there will be more. I would like to thank everybody who attended my talk and especially those who were kind enough to provide feedback ( good and bad ). The only downside …