We love Christmas at Black Marble and our Black Marble Christmas Adventure has already begun – please follow the adventure online to find out what peril has befallen Santa this time, and how the team can save him! Our website has it’s Christmas style on - and our office is decorated from top to bottom! Advent calendars …

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning had a section on children not being taught computer science. so says a variety of employers who cannot find the staff they need. It seems entry to Computer Sciences degrees has been dropping over the years and the current ICT course at school are to blame. I was at school …

I had a problem with my LG E900 WP7 phone over the weekend, Outlook stopped synchronising with our office Exchange server. It started when I got back from a trip Ireland. My phone switched back from roaming and started to use 3G for data again, as opposed to WIFI. Also over the weekend we had a connectivity problem …

I did a post at the start of the year about Lab management and VLAN tags, how they are not supported, but you can work around the problems. Over the past few months we have split our old Hyper-V cluster into one for production and one for test/lab development. This gave our IT team a chance to look at the VLAN problem …

Typemock have recently released a new version of Isolator, 6.2. As well as the usual fixes and enhancements you would expect, this is the first version to support TFS 2010 team build out the box. Prior to this release Typemock supported MSBuild based TFS builds (2005/2008) but not the Windows Workflow based version in …

We got a good turn out of Black Marble staff at this years Age UK Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds. We were amongst over 8000 runners who turned out for a cool and foggy Yorkshire Sunday morning run. We had a handicap race amongst ourselves, using a wisdom of crowds poll to estimate everyone target time. This was won by Steve …

In my post experiences upgrading my Media Center to receive Freeview HD I said I thought the reason my Windows 7 Media Center was hanging at the "TV signal configuration” step was down to using mixed tuner cards. Well my second PCTV nanoStick T2.arrived yesterday so I was able to try the same process with a pair …

When you are trying to run a command line tool via the InvokeProcess activity in a TFS 2010 Team build you might see the somewhat confusing ‘Access denied’ error. There appears to be no more detail in the log. I have found that this is usually down to a type on the filename property of the activity. It should be set to …

Whilst I have been on holiday Black Marble have announced some new events and this time they are not just in the UK, we have a couple in our new Dublin office location. The programme up to new year is: 17 Nov 2011 (Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford) Am - [Delivering High Impact WebSites with …

[Update: Also so More experiences upgrading my Media Center to receive Freeview HD] I have used a Windows Media Center as my only means to watch TV for about 5 years; upgrading over the years from XP to Vista and onto Windows 7. ![Picture of Windows Media Center](http://res1.windows.microsoft.com/resbox/en/Windows …