For a while I have been suffering that when I switch on my Acer Core2 Duo Vista laptop, both cores sometimes go to 85%+ utilization, so the PC is slooooow. Usually after a few reboots it seems to clear. This can happen after a resume from hibernate and complete restart; there was no obvious pattern. Task manager only …

Richard and I are currently in Redmond for the SOA conference at the Microsoft conference. if you are at the SOA conference come over and say hello b.

I have been on holiday for a week and I see that registration for DDD6 has opened and closed - good job my session was voted onto the agenda else I would not be going. Thanks to anyone who voted for my session, see you there.

The Imagine Cup Software Challenger 2008 has opened with a new format for 2008. You will need to get your idea in by December the 14th and then (hopefully) onto an innovation accelerator and then to the final UK round. I think the new format will help level the field a lot allowing teams to shine with innovation not …

I see Bradford, where the Black Marble offices are, has been ranked the greenest city in the UK. Strange that at the technology centre we are in there is no recycling at all, not for paper, cans or plastic. We have asked if such a service can be laid on (developers drink a lot of can of coke), but were told that …

Just got home from a long day of Black Marble hosted presentations. This morning I was presenting on SQL 2008, seemed to go well. This afternoon it was a very busy MSDN session by Martin Parry and Daniel Moth from the Microsoft DPE team on VS2008 and .NET 3.5. Finally this evening there was a interesting community …

Using class member variables will not work if you want to persist state between invocations. This seems to be due to the way sharepoint manages timer jobs. A solution is to use the Properties property which is exposed to all SPJobDefinition subtypes. This is a hashtable which accepts a key value pair. Usage: 1public …

I was looking for a way to store references to forms libraries.. web services etc from sharepoint workflows and also infopath forms hosted by MOSS forms server. They both run under the same process therefore can access configuration settings in the web.config of the container web application.

They all run under the w3wp process In both cases you want to debug "workflow code"