So you might have heard that Oxite was released recently.  You know the one – it’s the all new, all shiny, singing and dancing blog engine that is meant to show off how great ASP.NET MVC apps should be built.  The system used to run the MIX web site.  Yeah, that’s the one.  And it’s meant... Read more

For those of you who are interested in having your very own continuous integration build light for TFS or want to be able to tweet build status information automatically, a new version of the TFS Build Monitor (formerly the Twitter Build Publisher) is now available from Codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/BuildMonitor The changes in v0.3 are that the... Read more

I haven't tried this yet - I'm more curious than anything else as to your opinions. I use Ventrilo (a VOIP utility) for gaming quite a bit and I never seem to get the voice glitches that Skype & Live Messenger seem to get. It's low on CPU (important when gaming) and high on sound quality... Read more

Tonight was the night for the normal ALT.NET user group meeting and since Dave Thomas was in town and wanting to speak to the Sydney user groups we combined with the Sydney Java User Group, SyXPAC and the Scrum user groups to have a listen to what Dave had to say about cloud computing in return... Read more

One of the big gripes people have about the CSM (Certified Scrum Master) accreditation is that you can get your CSM simply by attending a 2 day training session.  You could all but sleep through the course and still be certified. Well, that's all about to change.  I had a heads up on this earlier this... Read more

Many thanks to Rob Sanders for pointing this one out. If you're a road warrior like me and you aren't always connected to a Team Foundation Server then you probably want to stop Team Explorer's default behaviour of trying to connect to TFS when starting Visual Studio.  Waiting for Team Explorer to time out before realising... Read more

For those of you in Wollongong (and the deep south of Sydney) I'll be presenting at the Wollongong .NET User Group this Wednesday on Agile Development.  I like my agile sessions to be very interactive so if you're going to be there make sure you bring along your questions and we'll have a great chat and... Read more

In case you haven't seen the news yet with all the other PDC hoohah about Windows 7 and Azure going on, Unity 1.2 (and EntLib 4.1) were released today.  You can get all the bits you need from www.codeplex.com/unity. Here's a quick "What's New" as far as Unity is concerned (stolen from Grigori's blog): Added an... Read more

I've seen a lot of people test WCF services using integration tests.  You know, where you create a small program as a test harness that creates a client for a web service, calls the service and checks what happened.  Similarly when you want to test your client side code is using the service properly then you... Read more

It appears that the agile dam in Australia has finally burst! Hooray!! First there was the Brisbane Scrum Group organised by James, then Lachlan started the Sydney Scrum Group, and now Martin is getting a Melbourne group together. Awesome stuff!  So, if you're interested in Scrum and all things agile and you're in Melbourne then point... Read more

We couldn't let Brisbane have all the fun!  Now Sydney is getting a Scrum group all of it's own, thanks to Lachlan.  Well done, mate! All the details are here: http://www.scrum.com.au/2008/10/14/sydney-scrum-group-5-november-2008 Read more

Consider the following hypothetical situation I was talking about with Aaron a while back: Fictional company ExWhyZed has 8 people in a Scrum team doing a 4 week sprint. The team is comprised of developers with some specific skills; basically 4 front end web developers who love their Silverlight UI's but suck at DDD and persistence,... Read more

You may remember a few posts back that I was working with a team trying to use a pure stored procedure approach to access a database, and trying to do so using an OR/M. One of the commenters on the post mentioned iBATIS. Now I always thought iBATIS was a competitor to NHibernate, Linq2SQL, et al.... Read more

I've been doing a fair amount of requirements gathering lately across a number of projects that I've been working on. At the start of each project I needed some way to get a handle on the size of the project and I wanted to do so in a way that improved customer collaboration while helping me... Read more

Last night I did a presentation on Rhino Mocks 3.5 at the Sydney ALT.NET user group.  I demoed the new AAA syntax (arrange, act, assert) as well as doing a run through of some of the more advanced usages of Rhino such as using mocks to test events and event handlers, the ability to throw exceptions... Read more

This is just a very quick reminder that the Sydney ALT.NET group gets started tomorrow night at 6pm.  More details at http://sydneyaltdotnet.blogspot.com/ Hopefully I'll see you there! Read more

Do you live in Brisbane? Are you interested in Scrum and/or other agile methodologies?  If so you might want to get along to the Brisbane Scrum Users Group.  Kudos to James Brett for getting this up and running, especially outside of Sydney. If you're in Sydney and you want a regular meet up then get in... Read more

I've been working through some architectural choices with a team starting a new project recently and the ever running debate over database access philosophies came up (as it was bound to). Personally I'm in favour of letting an ORM manage all the CRUD operations as I see very little benefit in writing CRUD stored procedures (as... Read more

I posted previously about the Twitter Build Publisher (aka the BuildTweeter) - a little utility that lets you publish build results and quality change events from Team Foundation Server and Team Build to Twitter. Well I've finally managed to find enough time to put the project up on codeplex for public consumption.  If you want to... Read more

I'm happy to let you know that we now have some details for where and when the ALT.NET user group meetings will be.We will be meeting on the last Tuesday of every month at the Thoughtworks offices in Sydney. Many thanks go to Thoughtworks for letting us make use of their facilities. Their generosity is greatly... Read more