I have been trying to track down a performance problem today on an ASP.NET MVC. It all turned out to be down to an incorrect connection string in a nLog.config file for logging to a SQL DB. As soon as I commented out the Db target for nLog my login to the web site was virtually instant as opposed to taking 30 seconds …

It seems that the EPG problem with Media Center has been fixed by Microsoft. The are publishing the EPG data again, so we don’t have to rely on the 7 day guide embedded within the TV signal. It is interesting to see the happy MCE users coming out the wood work on The Register’s comments section. We MCE users might not …

The BizTalk team recently announced that the next version of BizTalk is to be a major release not R2. Feature Updates ESB Toolkit integration – ESB Toolkit is now fully integrated with BizTalk Server and the ESB Toolkit configuration has been simplified. Dependency tracking - The dependencies between artefacts can now …

Signal Strength Since upgrading my Media Center PC to Windows 8, on the same hardware, I have seen that it seems to perform better that on Windows 7. However some channels seem to be dropping out, the usual digital pixilation or a message saying no signal (but often with some audio). As I had not changed any hardware I …

We’ve been receiving fabulous feedback for our Christmas ‘card’ this year! To mark our 15th Anniversary, we decided to put together ‘A Fight Before Christmas’ based on the poem, ‘T’was the night before Christmas …’. We are delighted with the response and I thought I would put together some of them here. If you would …

We love Christmas at BM HQ and this year , we have a very special Christmas Card … Inspired by the the poem ‘A Visit by St. Nicholas’ (more commonly known by its first line, ‘T’was the Night before Christmas …’), the Black Marble Brigade have another great Christmas adventure, in book form – “The Fight Before …

With TFS lab management you can build environments from stored VM and VM templates stored in an SCVMM library or from VMs running on a Hyper-V host within your lab infrastructure. This second form is what used to be called composing an environment in TFS 2010. Recently when I tried to compose an environment I had a …

December's Agile Yorkshire, on the Tuesday, 11 December 2012, will be Lightening Talks covering a range of agile topics and be held at a new venue The Round Foundry Media Centre. Submissions for Lightening Talks are still arriving so the precise agenda may change but proposed topics included: Visual agile assessment …

Updated 4th December 2012 – Roku setup I have been a happy user of Windows Media Center since (even) XP. I have found it reasonably stable and more importantly it has a nice user interface compared to most pvr/set-top boxes I have owned. So as my Windows 7 based system has been stable for just over a year (since a move …

For those who attended Black Marble’s event today I mentioned there was an upcoming TFS and Visual Studio 2012 Update 1. Well I was out of date whilst talking, it had already been released overnight. See Brian Harry’s blog for details and Grant Holiday’s blogs for a nice explanation of the download options.