Got back from DDD6 late last night after our 5am start. After what seemed a short nights sleep I got up to do the Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds this morning with 6000 other runners, posting a 47 minute time, which I suppose is OK given the complete lack training of late due to conferences of late and I was hampered by …

Just seen a post on Brian Harry's blog that the license has been changed for TFS. You no longer need a CAL for all users who connect to the TFS server, a special case of users has been created, those who can create work items, but do little else. You now have an unlimited number of theses as standard. Why is this good? …

While I was presenting yesterday at the second of Black Marble's events on Windows 2008 to a group of IT professionals, I suggested that they look at 'Writing Secure Code' by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc to get a good view of security in depth and risk analysis. On second thoughts, this book might be a bit too …

Well Visual Studio 2008 has been released either a few days early ( the money was on thursday ) , or a few days late ( the rest of the money was for the TechED Dev Keynote ). Which every way it is a good sight , Microsoft has put on extra download ability to help with all the eager developers who need the power NOW NOW …

I have been working on my DDD6 demo, I intend to show eScrum at end of my session on Scrum. I thought I would use the VPC I had from DDD5, this was based on the TFS Orcas Beta1 and had all the tools I wanted configured. To get some more realistic data in the reports I wanted to leave TFS server running for a week and …

The Microsoft ESB Guidance for BizTalk 2006 R2 has been released. Interestingly it has moved from CodePlex!. The first thing to do is read the manual, it is included in the installer but you will find it useful to read the manual first. The ESB Guidance has some prerequisites that need downloading and I have gathered …

Our home grown work tracking system has been through many versions over the years. The current incarnation was using a pre-release version of the Microsoft AJAX extensions. Now this caused a problem when we moved the ASP.NET application to a newly rebuilt IIS server with the 1.0 release version of AJAX. We were getting …

Well I knew that presenting at TechED would be hard but this week has been one of the hardest I have ever faced. During the week we had been struggling with getting the demo of the prerelease ESB working. We had practiced a good two person rotating handover presentation which looked and ran great and all in all we were …

... you end up presenting at TechEd. Yesterday was fun (of a sort) I ended up doing the demo section of the ESB Guidance session at TechEd. This session was scheduled to be done by Robert Hogg (Black Marble) and Ewan Fairweather (Microsoft) but Ewan had to fly home early unexpectedly on Friday morning, so leaving …

I have not been blogging much from here have I, it is not that the sessions are not that interesting, but no single item has been giving me an huge urge to write. As I said in my last post I think this is a conference of best practice ideas and as such you tend to pick up a useful nugget here and there which you store …