Got back from DDD6 late last night after our 5am start. After what seemed a short nights sleep I got up to do the Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds this morning with 6000 other runners, posting a 47 minute time, which I suppose is OK given the complete lack training of late due to conferences of late and I was hampered by …

Just seen a post on Brian Harry's blog that the license has been changed for TFS. You no longer need a CAL for all users who connect to the TFS server, a special case of users has been created, those who can create work items, but do little else. You now have an unlimited number of theses as standard. Why is this good? …

While I was presenting yesterday at the second of Black Marble's events on Windows 2008 to a group of IT professionals, I suggested that they look at 'Writing Secure Code' by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc to get a good view of security in depth and risk analysis. On second thoughts, this book might be a bit too …

I have been working on my DDD6 demo, I intend to show eScrum at end of my session on Scrum. I thought I would use the VPC I had from DDD5, this was based on the TFS Orcas Beta1 and had all the tools I wanted configured. To get some more realistic data in the reports I wanted to leave TFS server running for a week and …

Our home grown work tracking system has been through many versions over the years. The current incarnation was using a pre-release version of the Microsoft AJAX extensions. Now this caused a problem when we moved the ASP.NET application to a newly rebuilt IIS server with the 1.0 release version of AJAX. We were getting …

... you end up presenting at TechEd. Yesterday was fun (of a sort) I ended up doing the demo section of the ESB Guidance session at TechEd. This session was scheduled to be done by Robert Hogg (Black Marble) and Ewan Fairweather (Microsoft) but Ewan had to fly home early unexpectedly on Friday morning, so leaving …

I have not been blogging much from here have I, it is not that the sessions are not that interesting, but no single item has been giving me an huge urge to write. As I said in my last post I think this is a conference of best practice ideas and as such you tend to pick up a useful nugget here and there which you store …

The keynote at TechEd was as expected, we all knew about the impending release of VS2008, and still no fixed date yet (so no sausage there) and not really anything announced product wise that was not already in the blog sphere (so no real sizzle). I think this is going to be conference on delivering on last years …

Just come out of an interesting set of round table events for 'community influencers' at TechEd. These are people who are active in both the online and face-to-face communities from all round Europe (and Australia - the reach of TechEd Europe!) attended. In the sessions I went to the general discussion was on the point …

I am now sitting in the keynote waiting for the session to start - they have graffiti artists on the stage - I wonder if it is a homarge to that great Palm Pilot handwriting text entry language? Or is my my chance to say that that 'this keynote I could actually watch paint dry'? Oh... the paint fumes are starting to …