We’ve been receiving fabulous feedback for our Christmas ‘card’ this year! To mark our 15th Anniversary, we decided to put together ‘A Fight Before Christmas’ based on the poem, ‘T’was the night before Christmas …’. We are delighted with the response and I thought I would put together some of them here. If you would …

We love Christmas at BM HQ and this year , we have a very special Christmas Card … Inspired by the the poem ‘A Visit by St. Nicholas’ (more commonly known by its first line, ‘T’was the Night before Christmas …’), the Black Marble Brigade have another great Christmas adventure, in book form – “The Fight Before …

With TFS lab management you can build environments from stored VM and VM templates stored in an SCVMM library or from VMs running on a Hyper-V host within your lab infrastructure. This second form is what used to be called composing an environment in TFS 2010. Recently when I tried to compose an environment I had a …

December's Agile Yorkshire, on the Tuesday, 11 December 2012, will be Lightening Talks covering a range of agile topics and be held at a new venue The Round Foundry Media Centre. Submissions for Lightening Talks are still arriving so the precise agenda may change but proposed topics included: Visual agile assessment …

Updated 4th December 2012 – Roku setup I have been a happy user of Windows Media Center since (even) XP. I have found it reasonably stable and more importantly it has a nice user interface compared to most pvr/set-top boxes I have owned. So as my Windows 7 based system has been stable for just over a year (since a move …

For those who attended Black Marble’s event today I mentioned there was an upcoming TFS and Visual Studio 2012 Update 1. Well I was out of date whilst talking, it had already been released overnight. See Brian Harry’s blog for details and Grant Holiday’s blogs for a nice explanation of the download options.

It was bound to happen in the end, the wrong environment got deleted on our TFS Lab Management instance. The usual selection of rushing, minor mistakes, misunderstandings and not reading the final dialog properly and BANG you get that sinking feeling as you see the wrong set of VMs being deleted. Well this happened …

It’s been a while since I have used PowerShell on a client operating system. I have been running Windows 8 for a while now, but have not needed to use Powershell. I wanted to write a small Powershell and thought I would use the ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) provided by Microsoft. I was surprised to find that …

A common problem with getting software developed is the needing to get everyone aiming for the same goal. This too often gets lost in the development process; the real goal of the business is not communicated to the development team. It maybe that the goal professed by the business is not the one they even really want, …

Update 17/12/2012: Neno has now published his official 2012 version. The .exe can be found here A number of our customers use the TfsSyncIdentities tool by Neno Loje. When running the TfsSyncIdentities on a 2012 instance the following error appeared: I fired up an instance of ILSpy to try to understand what the …