I am speaking at Epicenter 2009, the Irish Software Show at the end of the month. The conference runs from the Wednesday the 26th to Friday the 28th. My sessions on TFS 2010 are both on the Thursday the 27th as part of the ‘Microsoft zone’ Application Lifecycle Management - Moving beyond source control Making Testers …

Over the past couple of days I have upgraded my Vista based Media Center to Windows 7. After my previous experiences upgrading from XP here, here and here I decided to do a new install onto a new 1Tb disk as opposed to an in place upgrade. This all went OK, there was nothing major to note, Windows 7 shipped with a …

Thanks to everyone who attended my VBUG session yesterday on ‘Enabling agile development with Visual Studio Team System 2010’. I have just posted the slides on Black Marble’s web site

It is good to see that at last Expression Web and Blend have got source control integrated into their IDEs. This is a vital feature if developers and designers are to work together effectively on the same code. It is a shame that the integration is just for TFS, it would be nice to support other source repositories to …

I love the new paste preview selection in Word 2010 This really is cutting down the number of paste, undo, paste special, damn undo again that failed so paste into paint or notepad, reselect and copy try again sequences I am going through.

I have been a long standing fan of Richard Feynman and so I have spent the last few days watching some of his best lectures, Uncle Bill in conjunction with Microsoft Research has made ( both technically and financially ) the Messenger Feynman lectures available under the banner Project Tuva The MSR team has spent a lot …

Since I installed Outlook 2010 technical preview I have not been able to search emails using the ‘search mail’ boxes in Outlook (which links into Windows desktop search). I had not realised how much I used the feature until it did not work. When I tried a search I was shown a dialog saying there was 40000+ items …

You can connect a Visual Studio 2008 IDE instance to a TFS 2010 server, as detailed in Martin Hinshelwood’s blog, but I cannot stress enough you have to have VS2008 SP1 installed. If you don’t, you get an error dialog when you enter the URL for the TFS server saying the URL contains invalid characters. This seems a …

With all this coverage of the moon landings I am surprised that the other major news item of 40 years ago today has not been covered – the Fennell family moved house. I ask you just what are the priorities of the news media?

I downloaded and installed the Office 2010 technical preview today. All seemed to go OK (after I realised I could only do an in place upgrade from 32bit Office 2007 –> 32bit Office 2010), once the upgrade was done I could load Word and using our VSTO based document templates all seemed to work fine. However when I …