Indigo and Avalon Beta1 (RC) has been posted at Avalon and Indigo Beta 1 RC This beta targets Visual Studio 2005 Beta2 and the only words I can use to describe it is totally awesome. We migrated all our Visual Studio 2005 installations to Beta2 at release due to the dependences for Avalon/Indigo/DSL tools we will not …

Black Marble's latest seminar, Web Enabling your Business, takes place next Wednesday (18 May) at Touchbase. Come for the usual high standard of content ... and stay for the food! If you want to reserve a place, check out our website for details.

Testing of software, and specifically the automated testing of software, is an area I have always been interested in. Recently I have been working on ways of automating the testing of .NET Windows Form applications. Today I have posted an article The automated testing of graphical user interfaces in .NET as a taster as …

**The Problem **The graphical user interface of a computer system is one of the most troublesome sub-systems to test. Though some products have been marketed to address this area they have not been that well-received or effective. All such products have tended to be based on macro recording systems that are awkward to …

Today we ran our second spring seminar, this time on technologies to enable Web Business. As usual the white paper associated with the event can be found at http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/WhitePapers/2005/Seminar Notes - Web Applications for Business.pdf In the morning we discussed how ASP.NET, and specifically the new …

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 …