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.

I just realised that TeamPlain also makes external access easier for remote users outside your firewall. The problem with external access to TFS from VS Team Studio is that you have to open up the TFS server and the associated WSS 2.0 server ports in your firewall. Not a major issue but opening ports is something you …

More detail will follow, but great news just in from Reading! The Seedlings, a team of students from Hull University, mentored by Black Marble's Robert Hogg, have just won the UK leg of the Imagine Cup, and are on their way to Korea later in the year! The entry, a program to teach children to progam, MyFPL (My First …

As I am sure you have seen Microsoft have purchased devBiz and made their TeamPlain product free to all TFS customers. I have just installed the new free release of TeamPlain on our TFS system and I must say what a pleasant experience it was; run the MSI answering a few questions, go into the newly created TeamPlain …

I had to move our CRM install this week to new hardware, and I had expected it to be a nasty job. However it turned out to be straight forward, though it is really hard to find any useful Microsoft Dynamics CRM documentation beyond the basic manuals. Why do the Dynamics team make it so hard to find things out? Anyway …

If you change the domaintfsservice and/or the domaintfsreports as you would expect your TFS server to stop, and it does. To get it back working you have to reset the passwords in: The various TFS AppPools on the frontend server need the new tfsservice password The datasource in ([frontendserver]/reports) on the …

When I heard the NxtGenUG were putting on a day conference Fest 07 on the 23rd May, I had assumed it might be in the midlands, as that is where their user groups are based. However it is at Microsoft TVP in Reading - yet another trek south, does nothing other than an occasional MSDN/TechNet road shows come further …

Our SunFire x2100 application servers, running Windows 2003 R2, are configured with Nvidia RAID system (built into the motherboard) to mirror the pair of SATA drives in each servers. Two of these servers keeps losing the mirrors, but a third, and a SunFire x2200, do not. When this happens Windows hanging - not good in …

I did my presentation on Scrum last night for the Extreme programming club in Leeds, seemed to go down well. A lively discussion was had on Scrum and a whole bunch of agile issues. If anyone has questions post them on the club forum. The next meeting on 12th of April an Extreme Hour, an audience participation event on …