As you may have seen from my recent tweets, I was fortunate enough to attend //Build again this year in lovely San Francisco. In what appears to be an emerging tradition, conference attendees received not one, but two Windows 8 tablets: A 128Gb Microsoft Surface Pro with Type Cover, and an Acer Iconia W3 with keyboard …

Right now I am putting the finishing touches to my deck for an event Black Marble are running at Cardinal Place next week. As many of you will know, for the past ten years we have run the annual Tech Update covering moves and changes across the entire Microsoft spectrum of products. Until now that has only taken place …

On Wednesday 15th May 2013, Black Marble travels north, as Steve Spencer and I will both present sessions for the great guys at NEBytes. Whilst Steve covers fun hardware and software dev using Gadgeteer, I will be talking about our experiences with TFS 2012 Lab and SCVMM 2012. If you have seen some of my earlier posts, …

I’ve just had a really infuriating half an hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the keypad to appear during a call on my Lumia 920. When I took my phone away form my ear the screen stayed black. Pushing the power button made the display switch on and then immediately switch off. Power cycling and even resetting …

As you’ve probably seen, our Lab Manager/SCVMM 2008 R2 upgrade to SCVMM 2012 SP1 was not the smoothest in the world. The end result was a clean lab manager and SCVMM install, but a raft of virtual machines that had previously been part of environments. In tidying up, Richard and I learned a few things about picking …

As you will have read on both mine and Richard’s blogs, we have recently upgraded our Lab environment and it wasn’t the smoothest of processes. However, as always it has been a learning experience and this post is all about building VM environments that can be sucked into Lab and turned into a Lab environment that can …

Richard has posted a group effort article on his blog about our System Center 2008 R2/Lab Manager upgrade to System Center 2012 SP1/Lab Manager. All did not go swimmingly… I have more helpful notes that I am writing up myself and will post over the next few days around the steps to fix virtual machines that are part of …

We had a great time at the Imagine Cup North East Hackathon this weekend. Black Marble turned out in force with myself, Steve, Richard, Robert, Linda, Josh and Riccardo all helping out. Andy Westgarth and the guys at Sunderland Software City had done a solid job on the organisation and we were well looked after. There …

It’s a busy week this week and I’m really looking forward to being involved with the Imagine Cup Hackathon for the North East Region this Friday and Saturday (1st and 2nd February). Black Marble have a long history of supporting the UK Imagine Cup teams and it’s great to be able to continue that support. We’ll be in …

Our good friends in the UK TechDays team have announced another raft of events in their fantastic IT Camps series. I’m hoping to be there for at least on of them and if you’re at all interested in Windows 8 or System Center 2012 I cant recommend them highly enough. No slides, no marketing – just technical content, demo …