DDD5 Registration has opened, register fast the DDD events fill up fast.

For any of you out there currently using Live Writer, check out the New Version. If you aren't using Live Writer for blogging , I would recommend you at least look at it. Some of the nice features Direct Add a Plugin ( there are some great code formatting ones ) Inline spell checking ( a must for me ) it supports …

I see the agenda for DDD5 is up, thanks to everyone who voted for my session on TFS. I better write it now!

I can confirm that putting a Corsair Flash Voyager USB Stick in 40C Mixed Cotton wash is not the best way to clean it of old data. A traditional format remains the best solution for dirty data. However, it does show these rubberized USB sticks are tough, two hours in a washing mean seems to have done no harm. Also the …

Black Marble has moved to bigger offices, don't worry we are in the same building so we are easy to find. The building management company has refurbished the conference center for us. The new offices are three times bigger than the old ones and wait for it , we are nearly full again :) Rik , Richard and Andy had a fun …

Still no Windows Mobile 6 update for my Orange SPV M3100, but they did release an update to WM5 recently. Installing said update turned out to be slightly trickier than I expected. I don't know if anybody else has experienced the same problem, but a word to the wise - don't try the update on Windows Vista! The first …

Went to a great session last night at the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club, a intro to Test Driven Development using just Excel. The presentation was given by Clarke Ching, you can find out more about him and this presentation on his blog I just had not occurred to me that Excel is a great way to show TDD principles …

I have finished a mini 3 day tour of York , Hull and Manchester Universities with Ed Gibson Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor (CSA) for the UK. I was the opening act for Ed and provided the context for his talk, hopefully we will be revising the event in the Autumn for other universities as well as a Secure coding …

I have just watched an episode of "Lewis" with Caitlin and she was getting quite concerned that a murder hadn't occurred within the first few minutes and I started to speculate on the formula for occurrence of deaths in detective dramas. Having had some thought, the area around Midsummer seems to have a …

On Wednesday 19th of September I will be speaking at an evening event organised by Guy Smith-Ferrier of the .NET Developers Network in Bristol. The session will be on Microsoft Team Foundation Server. For full details have a look at http://www.dotnetdevnet.com/Meetings/tabid/54/EntryID/7/Default.aspx