Maybe it’s just the teams I’m helping but there seems to be a spate of analysis paralysis occurring in the IT world.  Of course if I was a media outlet I be calling it an breakout, nay an epidemic! No! A pandemic!! Run for the hills people we might all be infected!!! If you are experiencing... Read more

This just in: Your Birds of a Feather Session Proposal, BOF003 "Alt.Net Lightning Talks" has been approved and will run at lunchtime (1245-1345) on Thursday 10 September in Meeting Room 7 So, we’ve got an hour to fill with fun and giggles.  If we take a few minutes for setup and so forth we'll have enough... Read more

I’ve been interviewing candidates for developer positions for over a decade now.  In my early years I was very much hit and miss in terms of finding the right people and it wasn’t until a horror hire that I realised what I was doing wrong. Previously, and like so many other people I’ve seen, I would... Read more

As you may be aware, if you want to install TFS 2008 on SQL 2008 you have to slipstream the TFS install media with SP1 so that the installer will talk to the SQL database correctly. There’s info in the install guide if you need instructions on how to do this. The problem is that install... Read more

I get to work with a lot of developers as part of what I do, and in far too many cases I find myself asking questions when I look at their code and see how they develop.  That question is usually Why? Why do you write code without any tests?  Why?! Why is there Hungarian notation... Read more

One of the things people often ask me when talking about Team Foundation Server is how they can easily get a Release Notes report from it. Unfortunately there isn’t anything out of the box that does it and various searches on the net haven’t returned anything useful. So this report idea has been on my backlog... Read more

Let’s assume you’ve got a Windows 7 Virtual Machine and you want to do networking between the Host and the Guest operating systems with it. I’m going to give you a run through of how I set this up on my laptop using the loopback adapter.  There may be other ways, but this works quite well... Read more

Nothing new here, but I was talking about it with a colleague today who wasn’t aware of the feature, so if you haven’t seen it before you might find this useful Let’s say you want to wrap or break lines in your source code at the 80 column mark or 120 columns (or whatever your team... Read more

For those of you using NUnit with TFS you may want to go and visit the NUnit4TeamBuild project site on CodePlex and get the latest release. It fixes some issues with support NUnit 2.5 and test names longer than 255 characters, but most importantly it removes the need to have MSTest available for publishing the results... Read more

What do you call the ‘\’ and ‘/’ symbols? Do you call the ‘/’ a slash? Do you also use the same name for the ‘\’?  Most people do (even if they think one of them is called the backslash) and they’ll use the names interchangeably, unless of course they have worked for Microsoft for more... Read more

I’ve just spent the morning helping a client with a few team build problems they were having using a newly installed TFS2008 server and a new build server. Where’s LC.exe? The first problem they had was that when they were running their build they were getting an error as follows: Task failed because "LC.exe" was not... Read more

I’m lucky enough to get to do some public speaking about agile from time to time and a large part of my job involves helping teams improve their agility and one of the things I’ll talk about when introducing people to agile concepts is the role of the software developer.  If you’ve heard me blather on... Read more

I’ve been writing this blog for a few years now (since June 2005 in fact) and in that time I’ve been asked this question quite a few times, typically from people who I think like the idea of writing their own blog but get put off by what a lack of confidence and doubt.  Questions like... Read more

We’re currently trying to gauge the level of interest in having an Australian Alt.Net conference on the day before Tech.Ed AU. Putting a conference together (even an open spaces one) takes quite a bit of effort so before we go down that path please help us out by responding to the poll on the sydney.ozalt.net site... Read more

Sometimes you just have to wonder how the things that show a lack of attention to detail can make it to production.  Especially when there are sooo many eyeballs that would have looked over something before it’s release. Notice anything suspect about the latest Zune HD marketing shots?  Hint: It’s inside the circled area :-) A... Read more

At the most recent Oz Virtual Alt.Net meeting I gave a run through of the various things I have installed on my box for making Visual Studio work the way I want it to, and making myself much more productive in the process.  The recording of that session can be seen either down below or over... Read more

I talked recently about Linq and Extension methods and showed how you could refactor For Each loops into simple linq statements.  When using Linq one of the things you will often come across are Lambda functions (anonymous methods declared inline). If you’re a curious type, then you might ask yourself “How can I make it so... Read more

I performed an upgrade on my Vista SP1 based laptop today to the Win 7 Release Candidate and after the upgrade everything looked OK, except for the All Programs folder under the Start Menu being blank, empty, vacant, non-existent. What was strange though is that I could search for programs via the Start Menu and it... Read more

While it’s true that .NET 3.5 has been out for some time, many people still haven’t had a chance to learn some of the new .NET features as yet simply because they are still tasked with working on .NET 2.0 code and the opportunity hasn’t arisen. This post comes as a direct result of a session... Read more

It’s been a busy time for me this week just gone.  I presented (well, it was really more a case of leading and guiding a discussion) at two alt.net meetings this week. The first was the Australian Virtual Alt.Net meeting that happens every fortnight on a Monday, and the second was at the Sydney Alt.Net user... Read more