I am speaking at the Scottish SQL user group on Wednesday about VS2008 for DB Professionals. Hope to see you there.

There has been a good deal of discussion on Blogs and Forums as to if there is a need for a developer edition of Sharepoint (WSS3.0) so you can develop against it under Vista. Historically your options were: Run W2K3 on your client PC - licensing issues and maybe drivers if using a laptop Do all development in a VPC …

I forgot to say in the last post the thing I noticed most about Spain - the quality of the roads and the courtesy of the drivers. Both excellent. As a cyclist in the UK I am used to pot-holes and being cut up all the time. None of this is Spain, drivers seem happy to wait for cycles and overtake safely giving loads of …

I have had a week off on holiday at a triathlon club training camp (some holiday some might say, 26 hours of training sessions in 6 days). We were staying at Idle Breaks just outside Malaga. A location which I cannot recommend highly enough, great location, facilities, food and owners. However, I have to say you do get …

Phew what a name, well if you want consistent style across developers this is the tool for you. Previously known as StyleCop inside Microsoft. Microsoft Source Analysis is pretty much a mandatory addition to any team development toolkit. In the same way the FxCop helps "focus" developers towards consistent …

Yesterday we had the first drop of the VS2008 SP1 Beta, well there is also one for TFS2008. As with the main VS2008 service pack there are loads of fixes and some new features. Support for Windows Server 2008. Support for SQL Server Codename Katmai CTP6. The Add to Source Control dialogs have been improved to be easier …

14 May UPDATE - Due t illness the speaker cannot make it , so this session is being rescheduled to next month. Check the XP Club site for what is on in its place Remember tomorrow is monthly meeting of the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. The session is by Chris Mills a developer …

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta is out for testing. Scott has a great blog post on SP1, but the highlights (which are numerous)

• Classic ASP intelisense and debugging is back
• Faster application startup time
• Better client side rollout
• New Windows Form Controls
• WPF Performance Improvements
• WPF Extensible shader …

Thanks to everyone who attended my session in Glasgow yesterday, I hope you found it useful. The slides will appear on the DDS site at some point but you can find them now on the Black Marble site. There is also a web cast of a virtual identical presentation on the Extreme Programming Club site. The noticeable …

Since updating to TFS 2008 we have lost our Sprint Burndown chart in eScrum, not a major problem as we use the cumulative flow in its place. However, I have eventually got round to fixing it. It turns out the problem is down to the the way the dates for the start and end of the Sprint are converted to measure names for …