The keynote today was all about MSR, interesting as ever. I particularly liked the demos of Second Light (Surface computing that reaches beyond the surface of the physical pc) and Boku (a system to help children program). The latter is close to our hearts at Black Marble due to the work we have done on FPL, another …

Well it was all end user focused today; Windows 7 and experience in Live systems. All looks very nice, given the usually question you have to raise in a connected environment over personal data security. I am sure Microsoft have done a good job of physical and logical data security, but the whole concept of mesh …

It has been a while but I knew a conference would turn up some good buzzwords Meshify – to add Live mesh functions to a site

At the PDC expo drinks last night I was asked to show age ID to get a drink! Just me it seems, nobody else from the company. I thought I was doing well to be carded on my 30th birthday whilst in the US, but 10 years on it getting silly – You must ask how do I keep my youthfully countenance? Wish I knew, but they say it …

Though not really mentioned in the keynote there are a lot of sessions on VSTS 2010 at the PDC; it is going to be a major really major release. Chatting in between the sessions with other delegates there seems to loads of interest in the new testing features, but we know this is pain point from Alt.net meetings. It …

So it seems we are going to have themed days at the 2008 PDC and day one is all about the Azure services platform. Though judging by the expo stands the key announcements for tomorrow - Oslo and Dublin are out there too. As conferences go it seems a bit confused to me, I guess Microsoft are aiming for three big bangs …

I won’t repeat Robert’s blog entry on the Black Marble founders reunion, but just to add the missing photo

I got this error when installing TFS 2008. In the error log I could see the problem was when the TfsGssInit.exe was run, it said Detailed Message: TF213000: A required user account could not be added during installation or repair of Team Foundation Server. The installation or repair failed with the following exception …

Whilst doing a new TFS 2008 dual tier install I was getting a failure with a TF220050 error when I entered the data tier DB instance name. The setup wizard just said ‘failed to connect to data tier’, but you can find the actual error number in the install logs to be found under C:Documents and Settings[setup user]Local …

So that took about 6 hours by my estimation. Popular or what!