Brian Harry posted last week about a hotfix for TFS 2012 QU1 (KB2795609). This should not be needed by most people, but as his post points out does fix issues for a few customers. Well we were one of those customers. When upgrading from 2012 RTM to 2012 QU1 we had attempted what with hindsight was an over ambitious …

There has been a hot fix that fixes some issues in Update 1 some from the RTM. Issues Addressed Collections that are attached to a server that is running TFS 2012 Update 1 may lose permissions Group scopes may incorrectly cause permission errors Severe decrease in performance after TFS 2012 Update 1 is installed …

I have had a Nokia 920 with Windows Phone 8 for several months and I thought it worth the effort to put some notes down Good Bits The screen is large and clear, pinning apps in small and large format allows me all of the configuration I need. Nokia Drive + is just awesome, maps for the whole world, all available …

On the 23rd of January I am doing a short presentation on the various options for Windows 8 development in Visual Studio 2012 as part of the Modern Jango ‘Tools for Windows 8 - Tips & Tricks on Visual Studio 2012 to inspire beautiful app development’ event. For more details check out the UK MSDN site

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 …