I have been on holiday for a week and I see that registration for DDD6 has opened and closed - good job my session was voted onto the agenda else I would not be going. Thanks to anyone who voted for my session, see you there.

The Imagine Cup Software Challenger 2008 has opened with a new format for 2008. You will need to get your idea in by December the 14th and then (hopefully) onto an innovation accelerator and then to the final UK round. I think the new format will help level the field a lot allowing teams to shine with innovation not …

I see Bradford, where the Black Marble offices are, has been ranked the greenest city in the UK. Strange that at the technology centre we are in there is no recycling at all, not for paper, cans or plastic. We have asked if such a service can be laid on (developers drink a lot of can of coke), but were told that …

Just got home from a long day of Black Marble hosted presentations. This morning I was presenting on SQL 2008, seemed to go well. This afternoon it was a very busy MSDN session by Martin Parry and Daniel Moth from the Microsoft DPE team on VS2008 and .NET 3.5. Finally this evening there was a interesting community …

Craig Murphy has just posted a podcast we did at SQLBits last weekend. Enjoy............

The voting for DDD6 is now open - as I always say vote early vote often. I hope my submission of a proposal for a session on Scrum is of interest. I know I have had feedback on my previous sessions that people want to know more on this area. Also saw today on Colin Angus Mackey's blog that DDD7 DDD Scotland will be in …

Last night went to an excellent free meeting at the Yorkshire Extreme programming Club given by Clarke Ching entitled : Programmers may be from Mars, Customers may be from Venus ... but why does everyone think that Project Managers are from Uranus? From the title I was unsure of the content, other than it would be …

Well it can be told I have been offered a speaking place at TechED Barcelona, I am very chuffed. I am presenting with Ewan Fairweather who is a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft on Implementing ESB using the Microsoft best practices. It looks, even though I say so myself to be a great talk. if you are at TechED 2007 …

I had been quietly predicting that visual studio 2008 would be available around the time of TechED 2007 Barcelona ( 5th-9th November ). But today a patch for Beta 2 has been released which would suggest otherwise The Patch covers faults with C# and intelisense. Update: Having run the update on some machines it is …

I have just got back from SQLBits after giving my session on Unit testing in SQL. As I said at the start of my session, at developer events I often feel a bit of an outsider when I say I am talking on testing as opposed to development; today it was doubly so when surround by so many DBAs. I have to say some of the …