Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Chapter of the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp taking place in several locations globally on the April 27th, 2013. This free community organised event is one day deep dive class where you will get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep …

Kinect for Windows has just had a update to version 1.7. The Kinect team are calling it "our most significant update to the SDK since we released the first version" And they are right, it is just awesome , will be talking a lot about Kinect 1.7 over the next few months. The new version includes Kinect Fusion …

I have been battling setting up a DB deployed via the SQL 2012 DAC tools and Powershell. My environment was a network isolated pair of machines DC – the domain controller and SQL 2012 server IIS – A web front end As this is network isolated I could only run scripts on the IIS server, so my DB deploy needed to be …

You don’t half get strange errors when building a test environment if when you run SYSPREP’d each copy of your VM base image you forget to check the ‘generalize’ box If you forget this, as I did, each VM has a different name but the same SID. Basically the domain/AD is completely confused as who is what. The commonest …

The great people over in the Windows Team have set up a rewards program to thank developers for producing great Windows 8 Applications if you are developing or want to develop for Windows Look at and Register with http://www.appbuilder-rewards.co.uk/ for some great rewards. The amount and value of the rewards are …

With Microsoft Fakes moving to the Premium SKU of Visual Studio in 2012.2 (CTP4 is now available) more people will be looking at using them. I have just installed CTP4 and have seen a behaviour I don’t think I have not seen in the previous version of Visual Studio (I need to check because as well as CTP4 I have …

Worth noting that when you create a new TPC in TFS 2012, when the TFS configuration DB and other TPC DBs are in SQL 2012 availability groups, the new TPC DB is not placed in this or any other availability group. You have to add it manually, and historically remove it when servicing TFS. Though the need to remove it for …

Whilst upgrading our Lab Management system we lost the SC-VMM DB. This has meant we needed to recreate environments we already have running on Hyper_V hosts but were unknown to TFS. If they were not network isolated this is straight forward, just recompose the environment (after clear out the XML in the VM descriptions …

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 …

Another post from Rik Fixing Lab Manager environments with brute force following our Lab Management upgrade