We use the TFS Alerts system to signal to our teams what state project build are at. So when a developer changes a build quality to ‘ready for test’ an email is sent to everyone in the team and we make sure the build retention policy is set to keep. Now this is not the standard behaviour of the TFS build alerts system, …

I was at Jodrell Bank to see Sigur Ros last Friday. I could have really done with the low light features of Nokia 925 as opposed to my 820. The shots I took of the projected light show onto the radio telescope disk were not as good as I hoped. But the panorama earlier in the evening worked well

My wife’s desktop computer is eight years old. In fairness, it was good kit at the time, and the dual core, 64-bit AMD CPU and it’s four gigabytes of RAM are still more than enough to run her apps today. But the disks are slow and, frankly, it’s just getting tired. Time to get a new one… I had no real preference …

I’ve been mulling this blog post for a while. Those of you who know Black Marble will have seen that we all believe very strongly in encouraging young people to take up computing and put time into sharing our knowledge and expertise. I thought it was worth sharing how I got to where I am today, which would not have …

This is one of those posts to save me searching the web every time I need to install .Net 3.5 on a Windows 8 (and now 8.1) system. If the automated installation via add/remove features fails then you need the correct DISM command. For those who have not yet encountered it, DISM allows you to perform actions on Windows …

DDDNorth registration is now open, and I am sure will soon close and move to a wait list. So if you want to attend I would get in early

I have just been reading Software Testing using Visual Studio 2012 by Subashni. S and Satheesh Kumar. N from Packt Publishing This book does what it says on the cover, it is a general introduction to the testing tools within the Visual Studio 2012 family. My comment is not about how well it is done, it is a clear …

I have been using a Nokia 800 (Windows Phone 7.8) for a year or so and been happy with it. It does what I needed i.e. phone, email, media player mainly for podcasts. So given all the reported issues with WP8 and podcasts (no Zune client to manage the subscription/sync and you can only subscribe through the store if you …

You can now vote for the sessions you wish to see at DDNorth2 Hope to see you there on Saturday 12th October 2013 in Sunderland

I finally got time to upgrade my Surface Pro to Windows 8.1 Enterprise. One of the things I most want to test is DirectAccess, as I live and die by this on my main laptop. However, despite the computer object for my machine being in the group that the DA group policies are applied to, no DA settings appeared. TIP: On …