Our January Event with Ed Gibson ( Microsoft UK's chief security advisor ) went really well and everybody thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Ed has a very specific set of ideas he is keen to share , one of them is that all parents should spend 10 minutes speaking to the little people ( children) and I agree , I also know …

The big Microsoft launch is nearly upon us , Windows Server 2008 , Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. We have run Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 events in the last 6 months to get everybody up to speed and ready to go , but we haven't run a specific visual studio event. If all goes well over the next day …

Well Vista is one and what an un remarkable year , not many patches , no problems with hardware , no problems with wireless networking. While it may lead you to think that there is nothing to celebrate , I think not , it just works. bar my hate hate relationship with UAC kindly telling me it is turned off , I like …

You know, one of these days I'll find the time to properly redesign this blog. In the meantime, the excellent Kid Congo theme from the latest version of Community Server will suffice, albeit with the alteration of colours to match our corporate blue.

After sadly missing last year due to workload, I am excited to be able to attend @media 2008 in London along with Tom and Lauren from Black Marble. If you know me and you want to meet up please get in touch!

I've watched the debate with interest but not posted anything until now. The news of Internet Explorer 8 keeping it's new rendering engine to itself unless you tell it otherwise caused a strong outpouring of opinion around the web. I must admit, my initial reaction mirrored that of many others - that it's just plain …

Microsoft released an hotfix rollup which solves a lot of performance and usability issues. you can find the link along with the rest of my Visual Studio 2008 master links list here b. Technorati tags: Visual Studio 2008, Hotfix

I felt it was time for a new banner image, my triathlon photo had been up a while. So I have used one of the new cartoons our designer Lauren has done for all the staff at Black Marble. Commemorative limited edition collectors plate will soon be available.

At the Alt.NET UK conference there was a good deal of discussion about tactics to test declarative languages such as XAML in WPF applications. Well it seems we have another one coming out of the Oslo project - 'D'. Looks like there is no escape, testing of declarative languages is going to be a ripe area to develop …

Whilst at the Alt.net conference it was pointed out that I have a different view of the role of a tester in a software development team to many other people. It seems a tester, to many people, is viewed as a person who follows manual test scripts and/or monitors automated systems, they are really part of the QA process …