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A webcast recording of SQLBits IV session ‘Making the SQL developer one of the family with Visual Studio Team System’ is now available on the SQLBits site. This discusses the features of the VS2008 Database GDR Edition.
Unfortunately I will not be proposing a session for this years SQLBits community event on the 21st of November 2009 at Celtic Manor in Newport, as I will be travelling back from the Microsoft PDC in LA
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Doron at Typemock has posted a nice description of how they use Kanban for managing support. A good introduction for those unfamiliar with lean
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Thanks to everyone who attended my two Nxtgen session on Sharepoint and Typemock in Birmingham and Manchester. You can find copies of the slide on the Black Marble site.
There was a good deal of chat in how Typemock could be used for more general ASP.NET testing; if this is of interest to you I would strongly recommended Typemock’s next webinar on the 25th of August on Unit testing ASP.NET with Isolator and Ivonna
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Cool, I just noticed that on Windows 7 Media Center with a Hauppauge Nova 500 T Tuner card the red button works; so at last I can get Digital Teletext and interactive channels on the BBC without having to know their actual channel numbers (and as I remember they were actually ignored by previous versions of Media Center without a registry hack anyway).
This makes using MCE just like a standard Digital TV – should help general acceptance. This has certainly improved since the older versions.
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A reminder that next week I will be speaking on ‘Developer testing of SharePoint projects using Typemock’ at two Nxtgen user groups:
Hope to see you there.
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I am speaking at Epicenter 2009, the Irish Software Show at the end of the month. The conference runs from the Wednesday the 26th to Friday the 28th. My sessions on TFS 2010 are both on the Thursday the 27th as part of the ‘Microsoft zone’
- Application Lifecycle Management - Moving beyond source control
- Making Testers Part of the Development Team
This is an interesting conference as it aims to address a wide variety of technologies i.e. not just Microsoft or Open Source. I find this type of conference a great way to catch up on technology I am not usually that exposed to; just the same ethos as Agile Yorkshire where Java and .Net developers can constructively compare their worlds.
Tickets for Epicenter are now available
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Over the past couple of days I have upgraded my Vista based Media Center to Windows 7. After my previous experiences upgrading from XP here, here and here I decided to do a new install onto a new 1Tb disk as opposed to an in place upgrade. This all went OK, there was nothing major to note, Windows 7 shipped with a driver for everything in my 3 year old AMD/ASUS based PC bar the sound card built into my motherboard, but that was easily downloaded. It is worth commenting that my Hauppauge Nova 500 T digital TV turner was found OK, but I had to get it to scan for channels three times before it got a signal. Why it worked the third time I don’t know as I did not change anything.
The problems I had were when I wanted to copy on media (photos, music and TV recordings) from my old hard disks. The first problem was when I connected them (using external USB cases, one was SATA the other PATA) to a Windows 7 laptop they were not seen. The physical disks were detected but the partitions were not present. When I tried them on a Vista box at work the partitions were seen but marked as foreign when I looked in the administrator disk management tool. Once I selected the ‘import foreign disks’ option they both appeared OK as drives on the Vista box (at this point I copied the files to a network location as a backup, that took a while!). I then tried the disks again on another Windows 7 box and another Vista box, in both cases it now said the drives were dynamic and corrupt. However back on the working Vista box they were both still OK. I was now confused. However, as I now had a backup of the data, on the second Vista box I tried to convert this corrupt dynamic disk to a basic disk, this ‘worked’ but the ‘corrupt’ partition disappeared. When I tried to quick format that failed too, but a full format worked, but seemed slow (a couple of hours for 300Gb). Now once this disk was formatted it could be read and used on all the Vista and Windows 7 boxes. I copied the data back from my network share backup and used the fixed external UBS drive to move the files back onto my new Media Center at home.
Sorry I don’t have a better solution to the disk issues than a format. I have no idea what was gong on there, but I now have a fully working Windows 7 Media Center with all my old media on it. Probably not a quick as an in place upgrade, but I know it is a nice clean install. First impression of the RTM version of Windows 7 Media Center is that it is fast and the interface clean. We shall see how it is to live with it.
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Thanks to everyone who attended my VBUG session yesterday on ‘Enabling agile development with Visual Studio Team System 2010’. I have just posted the slides on Black Marble’s web site
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I love the new paste preview selection in Word 2010
This really is cutting down the number of paste, undo, paste special, damn undo again that failed so paste into paint or notepad, reselect and copy try again sequences I am going through.
