It has just been bought to my attention that this Blogs server had been set to not allow new users to create accounts. This was due to an overly tight security review, sorry to anyone wo has wanted to post comments on either BM-Bloggers or Musapaloosa. New member registration has been re-enabled - comment away Richard

I decided to build a MCE PC for home (replacing a £200 DigiFusion PVR), I thought how hard can it be, it is just XP and a TV card. I don't intend to go into the gory details of the build, suffice it to say one blown motherboard and a true understanding that this is an OEM product (for dedicated hardware) not for the …

I had a great time at the Office Developer Conference in Hammersmith last week. It covered Infopath 12, SharePoint V3 and Workflow, some of my hot topics at the moment. It was great to put faces to names (and bloggers) like Dave Gristwood, and to see a few others speak again (like Mike Ormond). I also enjoyed Jessica …

I have just finished moving a large Embedded Visual Studio 4 (MFC) project to Visual Studio 2005. It was somewhat a painful experienece which I would not want others to have to endure. I am sure anybody else will have different problems but the solutions that helped me were

1. build a new Visual Studio 2005 MFC …

I had to have a new motherboard in my Dell 5150 laptop, one of the memory slots failed on the old one. Since the repair my laptop seems to have been running hot. Also when using Virtual PC 2004 SP1 the sessions seems to pause for a second or two from time to time. I have tried the hotfix for VPC 2004 and this seemed to …

A day or so ago our CruiseControl stopped working, I was seeing loads of problems in the Get source stage. Basically it was timing out, but it had work last week! OK I had been trying to get MsTest integrated but that should not have effected the source control. After much fiddling including: Creating a new VSS DB …

I have been trying to get Visual Studio 2005 Team Developer style unit tests working within CruiseControl. The documention says it should work, but is a little scant as to the detail of how to do it. So now I have it all going I thought an example of the working ccnet.config file with some comments might help other …

In my demo last week I extended a string class; I am pleased to say that after some ( quick ) investigation as predicted the calls to the class are identical. To explain extensions we can use the following code class Fred { string MyStringMethod ( string s ) { // do something } } string x = Fred.MyStringMethod(x); …

Last Saturday I presented on LINQ at Developer Developer Developer. I stated that that much of LINQ was syntactic sugar ( very good low fat sugar) and in fact much of the work being done by the compiler effectively did repetetive work that we do day to day. I see this as very solid reoccurring theme in Microsoft …

WinFX 3.0 is now .Net Framework 3.0 With the aim of providing us with consistency Soma has announced that from now on WinFX consisting of Windows Presentation Framework (Avalon) , Windows Communications Framework (Indigo) , Windows Workflow Foundation (WinOE) and Cardspace ( the product formaly known as Infocard ) will …