It is the last day and so far it has been a great ammount of fun. This morning the SQL team came to discuss the implementation of the CLR in SQL Server 2005. The most enjoyable part of the day was a round table discussion. Robert

Jeff Sanquist organised a BBQ which was a trailer in the car park (remember it is February Folks) manned by a Hairy Biker; it must be said there was a point where I thought Jeff had lost the plot, I should have had more faith, the food was great. When I ambled down to the lecture room Channel 9 had just started filming …

Today we started with a presentation on VSIP program, Chris Lovett presented "Whidbey XML editor and language service framework", the XML editor and XSL debugger (isn't Whidbey just great) are shipped as standard and Chris showed how this was done. One of the most interesting parts showed how Visual Studio …

I am over at Microsoft in Redmond attending a Compiler Dev lab. Compiler developers for all sorts of interesting compilers are here producing Cobol, RPG, Eifel, Delphi and others. The event is run under NDA, so there is unfortunately a large number of ommisions. John Gough provided an overview of producing your first …

On the 26th of January we ran our ever popular Technical Update Seminar. This seminar was supported by Microsoft as part of their Partner Program. The areas discussed were Microsoft products that were released in 2004 and what is going to be seen in the coming year and more distant future. The associated white paper …

Black Marble is developing a trial framework for the next generation of Pervasive Mobile games, with the University of Bradford and Microsoft UK. We will be blogging more about this in the new year. Robert

Richard presented a guide for IT managers and developers on current development methodologies including eXtreem programming, MSF and Scrum and pressed the point of why they are necessary even in a relatively small project. I presented a guide for IT managers who don't necessarily have a development background on …

Richard presented a comprehensive guide to network and server based security, I covered a detailed view on software security and Nick provided a series of impressive demonstrations on how it can affect web sites. The segment that hit home for most of the attendees was on Social Engineering and how despite the system …

Another successful event, though many of our attendees thought EPM was a step to take in the future, rather than now. The interest in Sharepoint was resounding. Linda

The 40th Anniversary James Bond Exhibition is now in Arizona, with new terminals and updated software. Linda