I went to the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club last night, the meeting included an Extreme Hour. An interesting experience; the idea is that in an hour you go through a number of 10 minute XP iterations, doing 'development' by drawing the solution on a white board. Yesterday we had three separate groups of six; each …

Today I rebuilt a PC with new drives and all seemed OK, but after 15 minutes or so it kept stopping (no nice shutdown), irrespective of what the PC was doing. I even swapped back the old disks all to no avail, hence I was stumped for a while. The problem turned out to be it was a somewhat full case and a wire was …

The photo I have added to my blog's header is me at the Ripon Triathlon

When your try to remove the McAfee ProtectionPilot 1.5.0 agent using the command frminst /remove=agent you get an error "can't stop service mcafeeframework" if you are using VirusScan 8.5. This is because VirusScan 8.5 has a new option under Access Protection that stops the McAfee services being stopped. So …

There seems to be a good deal of Microsoft stuff over the past few editions of Scientific American (SCIAM), and before you ask yes I do live in the UK, but I find Nature a bit too academic for me and New Scientist has too many job adverts. SCIAM is just 'popular' science enough to read over breakfast. The March edition …

In case you missed it, you can now make submissions for presentation slots at DDD5. Even if you don't want to present, keep an eye on the site for a chance to vote on what you would like to see and to register as an attendee.

I just realised that TeamPlain also makes external access easier for remote users outside your firewall. The problem with external access to TFS from VS Team Studio is that you have to open up the TFS server and the associated WSS 2.0 server ports in your firewall. Not a major issue but opening ports is something you …

As I am sure you have seen Microsoft have purchased devBiz and made their TeamPlain product free to all TFS customers. I have just installed the new free release of TeamPlain on our TFS system and I must say what a pleasant experience it was; run the MSI answering a few questions, go into the newly created TeamPlain …

I had to move our CRM install this week to new hardware, and I had expected it to be a nasty job. However it turned out to be straight forward, though it is really hard to find any useful Microsoft Dynamics CRM documentation beyond the basic manuals. Why do the Dynamics team make it so hard to find things out? Anyway …

If you change the domaintfsservice and/or the domaintfsreports as you would expect your TFS server to stop, and it does. To get it back working you have to reset the passwords in: The various TFS AppPools on the frontend server need the new tfsservice password The datasource in ([frontendserver]/reports) on the …