At the Alt.NET UK conference there was a good deal of discussion about tactics to test declarative languages such as XAML in WPF applications. Well it seems we have another one coming out of the Oslo project - 'D'. Looks like there is no escape, testing of declarative languages is going to be a ripe area to develop …

Whilst at the Alt.net conference it was pointed out that I have a different view of the role of a tester in a software development team to many other people. It seems a tester, to many people, is viewed as a person who follows manual test scripts and/or monitors automated systems, they are really part of the QA process …

I am sitting on the train heading north. After deciding trying to stream the England/Wales match from iPlayer on the train WiFi was probably not a good idea, especially after just reading the score, I though I should write about the Alt.Net UK Conference; a very interesting experience. It is great to meet so many …

It seems there are still some places left for SQLBits II in Birmingham on the 1st of March. If you want to go I suggest you register fast as these community events do fill up fast.

I enjoyed presenting on TFS at the inaugural meeting of the Peterborough VBug group last night. Thanks to Jyoti Majithia (VBug regional administrator) and Andy Westgarth (VBug chairman) for organising it. Hopefully this will be the start of another thriving user group community. If anyone wants a copy of the slide …

A while ago I made the classic mistake of installing the Beta2 of TFS on our live servers after seeing posts that it was reliable enough for production use. I had stupidly assumed that there would be an upgrade path to the RTM; there usually is from the last beta, but not this time. TIP: Don't ever do this yourself, …

Just heard my session Development Life Cycle using Visual Studio Team Edition for DB Professionals has been accepted for SQLBits II on the 1st of March in Birmingham. Thanks to everyone who voted for it, and I hope to see you there. 

I have been debugging some SharePoint 2007 webparts and have had to resort to TRACE output and the SysInternal DebugView; it is like ASP pages in the 90s all over again! Anyway had a weird problem that only alternate TRACE.WriteLine commands were appearing in the view. I have not found a reason why or a solution as …

If you run the 2008 Power Tools BPA against a TFS 2008 install that has the 2005 Team Explorer also installed on it you will get virtually no reports generated. It runs to completion but the reports are empty. This is due to some clash between the BPA and the TFS 2005 DLLs (V8.0). Removed the 2005 Team Explorer and it …

I will be doing a TFS and Continuous Integration session for Scottish Developers on the 12th of February