I think I've mentioned before how I've been updating our IT infrastructure. Company growth has meant a need for expanded services. Add to that new versions of SharePoint and Exchange, mix in a need to run virtual servers for development and you have a need for more tin. Over the past six months I've expanded our domain …

I went to the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club last night, the meeting included an Extreme Hour. An interesting experience; the idea is that in an hour you go through a number of 10 minute XP iterations, doing 'development' by drawing the solution on a white board. Yesterday we had three separate groups of six; each …

Today I rebuilt a PC with new drives and all seemed OK, but after 15 minutes or so it kept stopping (no nice shutdown), irrespective of what the PC was doing. I even swapped back the old disks all to no avail, hence I was stumped for a while. The problem turned out to be it was a somewhat full case and a wire was …

The photo I have added to my blog's header is me at the Ripon Triathlon

Thanks to Kimberly Tripp for pointing this out. Always nice to have the latest version of the SQL Server books online and the link below allows a "live" search format for accessing content. Using IE7 you can also add the online books as a search provider. SQL Server Books Online Scoped Search

When your try to remove the McAfee ProtectionPilot 1.5.0 agent using the command frminst /remove=agent you get an error "can't stop service mcafeeframework" if you are using VirusScan 8.5. This is because VirusScan 8.5 has a new option under Access Protection that stops the McAfee services being stopped. So …

There seems to be a good deal of Microsoft stuff over the past few editions of Scientific American (SCIAM), and before you ask yes I do live in the UK, but I find Nature a bit too academic for me and New Scientist has too many job adverts. SCIAM is just 'popular' science enough to read over breakfast. The March edition …

Well , I could not have predicted the last week. A great event on Thursday on Sharepoint , hot foot to the train station on the way to see my students compete in the UK Imagine cup. But I was in Linda's car and the Cam shaft decided to make a break for it out of the top of the engine. Thanks to the lovely AA I still …

First a criticism of Microsoft , why oh why oh why do Microsoft send out the notifications about the MVP awards on April fools day. It's not like I would suspect foul play from the guys in the office but .... More importantly a heap of thanks to the nice people at Microsoft for awarding me an MVP and even more thanks …

In case you missed it, you can now make submissions for presentation slots at DDD5. Even if you don't want to present, keep an eye on the site for a chance to vote on what you would like to see and to register as an attendee.