Black Marble hosted the first Architecture Forum in the North today and despite the treacherous weather conditions, there was a great and enthusiastic turnout. The day opened with Matt Deacon, Chief Architectural Advisor from Microsoft espousing on Sustainable IT, followed up by Simon Thurman, a Microsoft Architecture …

I'm using the Mini9 quite a lot lately, at least in part to fiddle with Windows 7. I decided it would be nice to be able to access our Hyper-V servers so I went looking for the management tools... It turns out that Windows 7 ships with the Hyper-V management snap-ins. No real surprise there as my understanding is that …

Applications to attend Software Craftsmanship 2009 have opened, this is a free conference that aims to discuss ‘the "hard skills" that programmers and teams require to deliver high quality working software’. If you have not heard of Software Craftsmanship take a look at Peter McBreen’s book Software …

The next meeting is on the 10th of December at Victoria Hotel in central Leeds at 7pm as usual. The speaker is Gary Short who is speaking on Design Patterns. Come to this free event to find out more about this vital subject to developers in any language from an excellent speaker. As an added bonus we will all head off …

Typemock announced today a new product Isolator for Sharepoint – which allows unit testing of Sharepoint code without needing Sharepoint installed. Now this is something I have been using the full version of Isolator for of late, and there are more blog posts on the way from me, so watch this space. So if you are a …

On Saturday I was pleased to have been chosen to present on Microsoft “Oslo” at Developer Developer Developer 7. The event was a runaway success and there will be more. I would like to thank everybody who attended my talk and especially those who were kind enough to provide feedback ( good and bad ). The only downside …

I am back from a few long weeks away both at the PDC in Los Angles and TechED IT in Barcelona, it was been great fun out at the PDC finally seeing “Oslo” out in the wild but the week at TechED talking to lots of great people about the joy of BizTalk brought me firmly back to reality. Microsoft has started to put …

Another long day over the weekend at DDD7, but worth it. An excellent selection of sessions; I particularly liked Ben Hall’s on Pex and Jon Skeet’s on Linq. A big thank you to the organisers for putting on such a successful event. It was noticeably fuller than past events, as we know DDD7 filled up in about four hours. …

We are always pushing automation of our processes at Black Marble … and here’s one that gadget that would only require minor tweaking to make my life easier now I just need to replace that little animal with a developer … (my thanks to Engadget for inspiration)

The call for speakers at the DDS event on the 2nd of May 2009 is now open. So get your session proposals up and see if there is any interest. I am not sure what I will propose, maybe something about testing Sharepoint