We are getting very excited, as in less than two weeks we will be in San Francisco for //build! We attended before, back in 2013, and it was great fun. Plus San Francisco is an amazing city, looking forward to be being back. Keep reading our blog or follow Calicowind on Twitter for our thoughts on the conference.

Thanks to the great people in the Azure team, I was able to make use of the Dreamspark offer for students, and put the Calicowind website up in Azure! Why not check it out!

All my active personal projects are now stored on Github You can find specific projects in the following locations (including legacy ones). Azure DevOps Extensions I have a number of extensiions for Azure DevOps, the most popular are detailed. They can be installed on Azure DevOps via the Azure DevOps Marketplace Title …

I have worn a Polar s610 heart rate monitor as my watch for years (probably 15+), as I write it needs another battery swap, which means sending it to Polar, something I have done a couple of times in the past for servicing The batteries in the watch last 5 years or so, in the associated heart rate monitor strap maybe a …

Updated 6 Feb 2016 - See the newer post about the new vNext build task I have written to do the same job Virtually any automated build will require some customisation beyond a basic compile. So as part of my upcoming Techorama session on TFS 2015 vNext build I need a demo of using a custom script as part of the build …

All change again on Visual Studio SKU licensing, have a look at the blog post on new SKUs for the 2015 release and also the 2015 product site. Basically it is a simplification. You can find the detailed feature break down on the comparison site

I have been preparing for my Techorama session on TFS vNext build. One of the demo’s I am planning is to use the Node based cross platform build agent to build something on a Linux VM. Turns out this takes a few undocumented steps to get this going with the CTP of TFS 2015 The process I followed was: I installed a Mint …

Black Marble are hosting, at our offices, a Microsoft event on the 18th March on ALM with Visual Studio & TFS 2013. This is a repeat of the sell out event we hosted in the autumn. For details of the event and registration see the booking site

As I have now left Black Marble for pastures new I have moved this blog to http://blogs.recneps.net/. Thanks for reading

Today I was lucky enough to present one of Rob Miles legendary “Rather Useful Seminars” For my talk on “Being Disruptive for Fun and Profit” I was awarded an award, hand carved by Rob from a much bigger award. Rob assures me there is no other one in the world apart from the second one he gave me. Thank you to everybody …