Say Hello to VibeCodr, the ultimate vibe coding accessory designed to enhance your programming flow and productivity. This project combines hardware and vibe coded software to create a unique experience that brings joy with every press.
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Ever wanted to bring some GitHub flair to your workspace? The Octolamp is a 3D printable, GitHub-themed smart light that combines the iconic invertocat silhouette with modern smart home technology.
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Halloween is the perfect time to combine technology with spookiness, and this year I've created something rather special: a build status indicator that brings your CI/CD pipeline to life in the most festive way possible.
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A few folks have been commenting on my camera setup so here are the deets. There are cheaper ways to achieve some of the same results and possibly better ways to - however this is what I ended up with. Sony A6600 with 18-135mm zoom lens.
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There are a bunch of really cool Raspberry Pi based clusters out there such as: 5 years of Raspberry Pi Clusters - From the Official Raspberry Pi blog Jeff Geerling's Blog - lots of tips on building RPi based clusters Turing Pi - RPi cluster in a Mini-ITX sized mount that takes care of network and power.
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Like many developers, I contribute to open source projects at home – usually to scratch an itch, learn something new or just to contribute to something I love using myself. However, I work for the open source .NET Foundation which means I have a dream job of getting paid to work on open source.
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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several people ask me about my dev environment for working with Git on Windows so I decided to write it up here for me to point people to. Of course the first thing that you want is Visual Studio 2013 with the built in Git tooling.
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If you want to work with your local Git repositories in some .NET code then LibGit2Sharp is your friend. It’s the open source library used by the Visual Studio Tools for Git and gives you a very idiomatic way to talk to Git from C# or VB.NET.
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I just got delivery of my shiny new Raspberry Pi. With-in a few minutes I had it all booted and running a stock Debian “squeeze” image, almost too easy and the performance of the diminutive Raspberry Pi was great.
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If you are looking to extend Team Foundation Build using workflow activities, then the first thing you should do it take a look at the latest stable release of the Community TFS Build Extensions over on CodePlex.
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As you have probably heard by now, Eclipse 3.7 shipped today. Congratulations to everyone involved. From a personal point of view I’m secretly pleased to see that one of my own bug reports manage to sneak it’s way in to this release as well which I think means I have managed to do my bit and contribute a little...
Continue Reading This weekend I thought I would get round to a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – a new website for the Radio TFS podcast that I do with Mickey and Paul. I haven’t had the chance to play with WebMatrix before so thought that I would give it a try when building the new Radio TFS site.
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When you create a new build definition with TFS 2010 by default it does a clean build for you every time. That is to say that between builds all the source from the previous build is deleted along with the compiled outputs and then the source is downloaded fresh, built and you are good to go.
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As you may have read over on Brian Harry’s blog, we recently made available a TFS SDK for Java. This is the same core code that we use in Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 to talk to TFS from Eclipse and from our Cross-platform command line client – just packaged up into a single jar file to make it easier to consume...
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[](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470943327/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=woodweb03-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0470943327)I’ve always wanted to write a technical book and when I started getting involved in Team Foundation Server I thought that this technology area might be my chance.
Continue Reading One of the key things about your CI build is to ensure that is runs fast so that you have a very quick feedback loop to see if you have a good build or not. Rob Maher has an interesting blog post up describing how he customized the build process to make use of the test impact analysis feature so that only the impacted...
Continue Reading Tonight I’ll be giving a talk on Team Foundation Build for NW-MTUG at the University of Ulster’s Magee Campus. The event starts at 6.30pm – if you are around it would be great to see you there.
Continue Reading In Team Foundation Server 2010 web access is installed by default. Therefore you can now happily create links to web access resources and know that there is somewhere that you can point a web browser to to find more information.
Continue Reading Today the team released a brand new version of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. You can download the latest versions from here: TFS Power Tools Team Foundation Build Extensions MSSCCI Provider (no updates this release) Brian Harry has a great post highlighting three of the new features in the TFS power Tools up...
Continue Reading I had the pleasure of travelling to New Orleans for the first time to speak at TechEd 2010 North America. New Orleans is now my favourite city to go to for a big conference like this. While there were plenty of hotels that you could walk to (if you can stand the humidity), there was also plenty of things to see and do.
Continue Reading In case you missed it, as part of Bob Muglia’s keynote announcing the launch of Visual Studio 2010 last week he also announced the launch of Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Explorer Everywhere 2010.
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[](http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/) Tomorrow I will be making my making my maiden talk at EclipseCon in Santa Clara. I’ve been at the conference all week manning the Microsoft booth and sneaking along to sessions when possible. I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed my week here.
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When the Teamprise technology was acquired by Microsoft, one of the first non-TFS 2010 feature things that we knew we needed to do was change the name. You’d think re-branding would be simple, just do a global search and replace for “Teamprise” and replace with the official Microsoft name – and then reformat...
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This morning I was creating a new build definition for the Beta branch of the initial Microsoft release of the Teamprise acquired bits. Creating a new build definition in Visual Studio 2010 is remarkably easy, but we have a fairly complex workspace template.
Continue Reading Fellow Microsoft TFS Program Manager Jim Lamb has a good post detailing how to create a custom workflow activity in Team Foundation Build 2010 using the first of what I am sure will be many activities to stamp your assemblies with the build number.
Continue Reading That is the question that I am frequently asked by folks looking at the impact of Team Foundation Build moving to Windows Workflow 4.0 from MSBuild as the master build orchestration language in the TFS 2010 release. In general I would always think carefully about re-writing everything in WF 4.
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Four years ago this month, I joined a small start-up being created called Teamprise after reading about it on Eric Sink's blog. Our mission was to bring the benefits of application lifecycle management (ALM) with Microsoft Team Foundation Server to everyone.
Continue Reading Grant Holliday has an excellent post up on the new public workspaces feature in TFS 2010, why it was created and how to use it. I’ve spoken with a number of Teamprise customers who will benefit from this feature when we add workspace permissions to the cross-platform client as it seems fairly common to share access to...
Continue Reading One of the features in Teamprise 3.3 is the ability to connect to a Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 project collection. The support for TFS 2010 Beta 2 in Teamprise is very similar to the support you will find in a patched Visual Studio 2008 instance – you can connect and work correctly, however some of the new TFS...
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A feature of changeset metadata in Team Foundation Server 2008 is that it is actually editable. If you look at the changeset details for a historical check-in in Visual Studio you will notice that the comment and check-in notes fields are enabled and there is a “Save” button.
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Tonight I have the pleasure of speaking with the Team System Users Group Virtual Edition. We are going to be talking about Team Build 2010 based on the Beta 1 bits.
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As I am exploring programming against TFS 2010, I usually build myself up a collection of code snippets that show me how to do various discrete operations. I thought it would be useful for me to post some of these to my blog so that others might benefit later.
Continue Reading In TFS 2010 quite a few things have been fundamentally changed for the better, but from an end user point of view people hopefully won't notice. Things like hierarchical work items will very quickly because just how work items should work and people will scratch their heads when they go look at a TFS 2008 or TFS 2005...
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I recently stumbled across a handy Team Foundation Build screensaver created by Jim Liddell and wanted to share it as it seems very good. For my team build talks I created a Team Build Wallboard as a code sample, however Jim has created his own as a WPF based screensaver and it looks very nice.
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A guiding principle with Team Foundation Server is that all the flexibility of configuration and all the control should not get in the way of getting work done. For example, if you try to do a check-in that fails a defined check-in policy, you get the following warning.
Continue Reading In the days before I worked for Teamprise, I had a 3 hour, 120 mile commute. Luckily, at that time a new thing called “podcasting” was starting to take off and so my travels were filled listening to the few podcasts that were available back then. We are talking pretty early in the history of podcasting.
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Now that TFS 2010 Beta 1 is publically available, I thought it would make sense to share our plans with everyone. Teamprise has been working closely with Microsoft on the TFS 2010 release. First of all, can I quickly thank all the people at Microsoft who have been helping us so far.
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Last week at TechEd 2009 North America, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Keller to discuss Teamprise past, present and future. If you have Silverlight installed you can watch the interview or you can download the video from the TechEd site. [](http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?
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If bunnies are just a little bit too cute and fluffy for you, then you might be interested in a little side project that reader Terry Humphries just got in touch with me about.
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For a while now, we’ve been helping our Java customers by providing the Teamprise Build Extensions to allow people to easily build Ant based projects using Team Foundation Build and publish JUnit test results into TFS for inclusion in the reports etc. With the release of Teamprise 3.
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This month I called Doug Seven and Daniel Norwood to talk about the work Quest are doing to provide Oracle support inside Visual Studio team System 2010. Doug Seven is a Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft focused on technical advocacy of Team System as an ALM solution and Daniel Norwood...
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The Virtual Team System User Group is great for people like me that live somewhat removed from a major population centre. In fact, as I look out my window I can’t even see the sheep that usually live outside.
Continue Reading Nasty things start to happen on Windows systems when you start having paths that are longer than 254 characters. When NTFS is the underlying filesystem you can have up to 32767 unicode characters in the path, however in parts of Windows (and therefore .NET), a local file path (i.e. "C:\MyDir\MyFile.
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[](http://www.platinumbay.com/blogs/dotneticated/archive/2009/02/18/team-system-on-twitter.aspx) Twitter seems to be going mainstream here in the UK. I know this because my wife asked me about it, so it must be pretty mainstream as I consider her my bellwether on normality.
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[](http://galilee.microsoft.fr/TechDays2009/Default.aspx)On Tuesday February 10th I’ll be popping over to Paris where I have the privaledge of being invited to speak at TechDays 09 courtesy of Microsoft France.
Continue Reading When you create a new build definition in Team Foundation Server, you get to define how the workspace looks for the build. By default this includes the ENTIRE team project. While this usually always works, it is nearly always not what you want.
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We get so used to the words “Important Security Update” that it is easy to let messages like this one pass you by. However if you have Team System Web Access (TSWA) installed – particularly if you have it on a machine that can be accessed over the internet - then you _really want_ to upgrade it to the latest version...
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[](http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/belfast/) After the highly successful Developer Developer Developer event in Galway last year, this time it is moving north to my neck of the woods – Belfast.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/BacktotheFuturewithVMWare_1104/tfs2010_on_mac_2.jpg) One of the many pains of working with the October 2008 CTP of VS2010 (aka Rosario) is that on top of everything else, it actually timebombed on January 1st 2009.
Continue Reading From time to time I hear from people who dislike the automatic check out behaviour common with TFS. One of the great things about TFS is the the pending changes list that shows you the files you have currently checked out and allows you to easily undo any un-intentional check outs.
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[](http://url.ie/11q9) Today is the first day of the new year in the office and so it is time for me to do the dance that I always do after Auld Lang Syne, and that is the Annual Year Planner Shuffle. This morning I threw away the 2008 year planner, moved the 2009 one up and printed out a new 2010 sheer.
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[](http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/) Brian Keller (of This Week on Channel 9 fame) has just announced a new weekly show on Channel 9 called 10-4 where you can learn about what's coming in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. http://channel9.msdn.
Continue Reading Whenever I talk about TFS, one of the things I always mention is the fact that because all the data about the software project is now being tracked in a SQL Server database, Microsoft were able to stick a Data Warehouse over the top of all that raw data to give you a really good view on reporting.
Continue Reading Often when doing some build integration work with the TFS2008 Build API, you will want to get the latest build for a particular definition – for example to show the latest status of the build etc.
Continue Reading When I saw the news about the upcoming Windows Vista SP2, there was a little note right down at the bottom that got me quite excited. "Windows Vista SP2 includes Hyper-V™ technology, enabling full virtualization of server workloads" I know a lot of people that run Windows Server 2008 on their laptops, specifically so...
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/Windows7onMSIWind_9736/windwin7m3_2.jpg) For the record, I like Windows Vista. However, for those of us who remember the Vista beta program and even early days of running Windows Vista it wasn't always fun - largely due to the driver support but there were plenty of bugs...
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During Brian Harry's "Team Foundation Server 2010 Cool New Features" presentation at PDC, he demonstrated Teamprise working with TFS 2010 (codenamed "Rosario"). Not often you get one of the most senior technical people in Microsoft using Eclipse on stage at the premiere Microsoft conference!
Continue Reading [](http://www.teamprise.com/products/accelerator/) At PDC last night Ed Thomson announced our latest product, the Teamprise Remote Accelerator. This is a single user Team Foundation Server proxy designed for use by lone remote developers working off-site.
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[](http://www.microsoftpdc.com) In case you hadn't heard, this week is Microsoft PDC 2008 in LA. Sadly I'm not able to make it over this time due to some health issues, however the Teamprise team will be out in full force.
Continue Reading If you haven’t heard the news already, Microsoft have officially announced the name of the next version of Team System, previously known by the codename of “Rosario”. For Microsoft developers, this will be delivered on top of Visual Studio 2010.
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In TFS 2008 SP1, a new feature was quietly introduced, WIT Client Metadata Filtering. This feature could boost the performance of your Team Foundation Server experience, reduce the amount of traffic flowing over your network and reduce the data porosity of your TFS instance. Yet it is not enabled by default.
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Team Foundation Server uses Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) to provide the project portal infrastructure. If you installed TFS 2005 then you will probably have WSS 2.0 installed, even if you later upgraded to TFS 2008. WSS 3.0 gets installed by default with TFS 2008 installations and is much better than WSS 2.
Continue Reading Now that TFS 2008 SP1 is here, time to create a version of the TFS installer media that just contains the bits with SP1 applied. This is essential for installations targeting SQL Server 2008, but also makes the installation process onto Windows Server 2008 much easier and any installation faster (otherwise you have to...
Continue Reading That's right folks, 2008 SP1 is now available for everyone to download. Get it while it's hot! Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (needed for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System client, including Team Explorer), (exe version) (iso image version) Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (needed for the server, build...
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[](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is32fWJJA-I) Since posting about Brian the Build Bunny, I have been getting a steady stream of emails from people who would like to know more about how it works. Team Foundation Server provides a mechanism by which you can subscribe to events when certain things happen.
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At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston today, Corey Steffen (General Manager of Teamprise and the guy that pays my wages) announced the public availability of Teamprise 3.1. This is a maintenance release free to everyone with a valid Teamprise 3.
Continue Reading [](http://www.thomsonreuters.com/) I am proud to announce that Microsoft have just published a joint case study with us on the success Thomson Reuters have had using Team Foundation Server in a mixed development shop.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/brian/wallpaper/) It turns out that the little video I posted yesterday has taken on a bit of a life of it's own. Last time I checked, it was in the top 10 Science and Technology posts for YouTube in Ireland.
Continue Reading I'm always keen try new and novel ways to keep in touch with the status of my software projects. Fortunately, Team Foundation Server provides many ways to do this.
Continue Reading [](http://www.infragistics.com/Default.aspx)Infragistics is the world's largest publisher of reusable presentation layer development tools for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, Tablet PC and Java (JSF) environments. I think they can count most of the Fortune 2000 as customers of theirs.
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Sigh. Apple are really starting to get on my nerves. Not only is iTunes on Windows consistently very buggy, slow and foreign looking in the Windows OS - they are now trying to trick Windows users into installing Safari. On this particular machine I have never installed Safari, and I never want to.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/TFSBuildAPIbyExample1Queueabuild_C1CE/BuildAPI_2.gif) As we all know by now - the build system in TFS2008 was substantially improved. Along with the many improvements came an official API for talking to the build system.
Continue Reading I've just posted the fourth episode of Radio TFS. In this episode Paul and Mickey talk about Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition while I ask dumb questions and go off on tangents. Despite this, it is actually one of our better episodes to date.
Continue Reading Thanks to everyone who attended my session this afternoon at IMTC 2008 in Dublin. As promised, here is a copy of the slide deck. Automating Builds with Team Foundation Server 2008 (pdf - 1.
Continue Reading UPDATE: Just heard from Brian Randell that the VPC is now ready to download. Updated links are below. Anthony Borton just pointed out to me that the new version of the Team System evaluation VPC is available.
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At EclipseCon 2008 this morning, we just announced that Teamprise 3.0 has been released! If you've been wondering why I have been quiet on the blog lately - but also why anything I have been talking about is Team Foundation Build related, then you are about to find out why :-) First of all, I'd encourage you to go...
Continue Reading The fantastic team at CodePlex have just rolled out yet another great feature - this time it is statistics for your CodePlex project. I dropped by my TFS Plug-in for CruiseControl.NET to take a look... [](http://www.codeplex.
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[](http://www.radiotfs.com/) Paul Hacker, Mickey Gousset and I have recently started a Team System related podcast called Radio TFS. While it is not going to win any awards any time soon, we've been having a lot of fun so we are going to continue to try and get one or two episodes out a month.
Continue Reading I like my build numbers to be the same number that my assemblies are versioned with (and my end deliverables). It just makes things easier to track, that way if I get a bug report in from a customer I can look at the version and easily look at the label in source control to see what code that included.
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One of the most frequent questions I get when talking to people about TFS if how to upgrade from the freely downloadable 90-day TFS 2008 trial to a full version of TFS. Our TFS 2008 license key arrived at the weekend, so I thought I would take the opportunity to record the process.
Continue Reading In a previous post, I talked about how Windows file sharing sucks over the WAN. This is particularly annoying for me when trying to view the log of a TFS Build - especially if that build has failed and I want to know why in a hurry.
Continue Reading I swear, one day I'll learn. Despite having promised myself to steer clear of the initial release of any Windows version of iTunes because they are consistently broke in some pretty severe ways - I read this report on Engadget and decided to upgrade thinking that they may finally haved solved the issues I have been...
Continue Reading Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 has a great new improved build system (often referred to as "Team Build"). An advantage of running your build from Team Build is that (by default) all changes between your current build and the last good one are reported in the build report and any work items that were associated...
Continue Reading I just noticed that on Wednesday January 16th at 5pm, the Minnesota Visual Studio Team System User Group are having a talk by Mac Noland. Mac is a good guy with some very interesting real-life experience in the use of TFS, and I would expect this talk from Mac to give people a great understanding of TFS could fit in...
Continue Reading As a follow up to my post back in August when we put TFS Beta 2 onto our production box, I just thought I'd mention that here at Teamprise we have now been running Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008 for over 6 months now.
Continue Reading Update: With Teamprise 3.0 we included this work into the freely downloadable Teamprise Extensions for Team Build. The source is also provided under the MS-PL if you are interested. You should definately look at the new version as it contains some fixes and additional features based on feedback during beta testing.
Continue Reading Recently, I noticed a small change in the way TFS 2008 (RTM) handles history calls between date ranges that unfortunately breaks the existing CruiseControl.NET integration to TFS. Should you want to carry on using CC.NET using TFS2008 as your source control then the following 1.4.0 release may be of interest.
Continue Reading I had the pleasure of meeting James Dawson at TechEd in Barcelona this year, and recently he dropped me a note to let me know about a Team Build plug-in for CruiseControl.NET that folks still on TFS 2005 might find interesting. It basically allows you to use CruiseControl.
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So, at the risk of starting one of those annoying meme's, I've kinda had this conversation with a few folks before and people of my age always seem to enjoy it so here goes. My first computers. #### My First Computer The computer I first learnt to code on was a Commodore Vic-20.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/talks/TFS2008_Whats_New.pdf) Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to my local .NET User Group (NIMTUG) on what is new in Team Foundation Server 2008.
Continue Reading As promised, here is the code we created during the TFS 2008 Build session at TechEd 2007 in Barcelona. The idea was that this is "Wallboard" that is designed to run on a machine in a public area of the office.
Continue Reading Thanks to everyone who came along to the talk today in Barcelona. We had a big crowd who seemed to enjoy the session. I had a few people coming up afterwards asking for a copy of the Wallboard code that we built during the session - I'm currently in the process of adding some extra comments to the code to explain some...
Continue Reading So, to stop my Beta 2 VPC image from expiring this week, I thought I'd try out an "upgrade" of one of the VSTS + TFS Beta 2 VPC images to a full copy of Windows Server Enterprise Edition with a retail key (as provided by my MSDN account, that Microsoft kindly supply me as a perk of being a Team System MVP).
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[](http://www.microsoft.com/europe/teched-developers)I'm joining my good friend Brian Randell to do a session on Team Build 2008 at TechEd Developers in Barcelona on November 8th. If you are at TechEd then please do come along - it is shaping up to be a fun talk.
Continue Reading If you are customizing a team build, then there are only two things you need to know to get you started. The rest you can (mostly) figure out from there. Your build is defined in a file called TFSBuild.proj for your particular Team Build Type. You probably figured that bit out already.
Continue Reading Yesterday, Version 2.0 of the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux were released on the Microsoft Download Center. Officially, this provides addition support for Virtual Server 2005 SP1, however I have read reports from the beta program suggesting they may also work under Virtual PC (albeit unsupported).
Continue Reading Some interesting news seems to be coming out of the Alt.NET Conference in Austin. I'd got a few IM's from folks at the conference talking about Scott Guthrie's talk. According to Jeff Palermo's blog, Scott Guthrie showed off a new ASP.NET MVC Framework. This looks very interesting and might well tempt me back into ASP.
Continue Reading An odd smirk followed by "You come here a lot" is not what you want to hear when at the customs desk waiting to come into the US. Immediately I expected the worst - an armed SWAT team absailing from the ceiling to lead me off into a quiet room for interrogation while the snapping sounds of latex gloves ricochet out of...
Continue Reading A neat (if not well known) feature of Windows Vista is the built in ability to do a "Command Prompt Here" by selecting a folder, keeping the shift key down and right clicking on the folder. While this is neat, I've sometimes found myself needing an Command Prompt with full administrative privileges.
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RC0 of Windows Server 2008 was made available earlier this week. I am currently installing it inside a Virtual PC and I have to say I'm impressed so far. The installation process is much faster and smoother.
Continue Reading Skype seems to have been having trouble this morning. At first I thought it was a set of Windows Vista Updates I'd applied - but when the problem started affecting my hardware based Skype phone as well my suspicions went to my ISP. I was thinking that they were doing some traffic shaping or something to Skype traffic.
Continue Reading Paul Julius just announced that RC3 of CruiseControl 2.7.1 has been released from the Agile 2007 conference. From my point of view this is fantastic news, because it includes a patch I submitted to the project to include integration between CruiseControl and Team Foundation Server.
Continue Reading As I've mentioned before, I love Resharper from those crazily clever folks at JetBrains. Today I installed an Early Access version of 3.0.2 into Visual Studio 2008 and all the goodness has returned.
Continue Reading Yesterday I sat down with my freshly downloaded Orcas Beta 2 media (thanks to the Secure Content Downloader from the good folks at Microsoft Research in Cambridge) and upgraded our production TFS instance.
Continue Reading If you are going to get into the Zen of TFS Team Build, then at some point you are going to have to read the TeamBuild .targets file (located in %ProgramFiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets).
Continue Reading With Team Build in Team Foundation Server, you can have multiple build types for multiple projects. For example, we have a build that runs fast that we can have running Continuous Integration on, and a slower build (that does obfuscation, release packaging etc) that is run on demand when we want to perform a release...
Continue Reading A new project has been released over on CodePlex from the Patterns and Practices folks which attempts to improve the guidance generation process. "The interim solution makes it easier to customise the narrative guidance than the current mechanisms, but I should emphasize that it will be replaced by our longer term...
Continue Reading The blogosphere today is buzzing with news of the other launch happening today, but there is one a bit closer to my own heart - Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) has been released. I'm downloading it right now. I've been running Eclipse 3.
Continue Reading By the time I post this, you'll probably see it posted a hundred places, however on the rare chance that you only read my blog and not one of the many other great blogs about team system, can I point you to the upcoming Team System chat.
Continue Reading I don't travel as much as I used to, but there are some things about a hotel that caters to business travelers that they should get right. Forget about your fancy shmancy decor and strange taps that take you 5 minutes to figure out how to turn on, I'm talking basics here.
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This morning we had a power cut which killed a particular tricky upgrade mid-way through trashing the machine I was attempting it on. Luckily the machine in question was a VM Ware image and I had recent taken a backup snap-shot so I only lost a few hours work.
Continue Reading Anyone who has spent time on the inside of the Microsoft LAN knows that they have a ton of great internal tools and utilities that never make it into the outside world. One of those ones that did is Microsoft LogParser.
Continue Reading If the recent announcements about Silverlight have your interest and you can get to Dublin on June 7th this year then I would urge you to take a look at this years Irish community conference IMTC.
Continue Reading I've just got back into the office after a week and a bit on vacation and was pleased to see a few announcements have been made while I was off sunning myself. We will be making our Java API for TFS available for license later in the year We released 2.1.2 of Teamprise Client Suite The Java API thing just makes sense.
Continue Reading I wasn't at SD West this year, however I'd heard that Brian Harry was going to be doing an interesting keynote. Jack Vaughan has recently published some of his "take-aways" from Brian's presentation and it certainly looks like there was some good stuff in it. My favorite quote is:- “In version 1.
Continue Reading Sigh. Why do I only experience travel delays when I am coming home and never on the outbound journey? Last night, my first plane from New York to Belfast suffered a hydraulics failure. Luckily they had a spare airplane lying around that they then got cleaned up, filled up with gas etc and let us on.
Continue Reading As you may have seen elsewhere, the VSTS team will be available for you to talk with on Friday. This is a great opportunity to talk directly with the team, get answers direct from from the folks that know as well as pass along any feedback you might have.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/VistaTopTipHowtogetTelnetBack_952B/vista%5B6%5D.png)When debugging network issues, I tend to fallback to good old telnet as a way of opening a port to a machine.
Continue Reading Those of you lucky enough to have an MSDN subscription can go download Beta 1 very shortly, according to the announcement it is available now (but it isn't showing up in my MSDN subscription yet) - I suspect that the lovely bits on on the way through the MSDN distribution pipe as we speak.
Continue Reading The Team Foundation Server Version Control Proxy is a wonderful thing - despite the not so catchy name. It sits between a remote office and your Team Foundation Server Application Tier and caches requests for file downloads from that remote office so that the second person to request that version of that file will get...
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/YouarenotrunningVistaRemoteDesktopwarnin_9654/Remote%20Desktop%20Connection%5B5%5D.png) When running Remote Desktop from Windows Vista I've been getting the following error popping up everytime I connect.
Continue Reading Today, I am pleased to announce that Teamprise are offering complimentary licenses of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to use Teamprise to connect to an open source project on CodePlex. If you want to take advantage of this offer, see the sign up page.
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Yesterday we made version 2.1 of Teamprise publicly available. If you've previously installed Teamprise, then I recommend that you upgrade to this version as it includes a number of bug-fixes that while not critical are definitely useful. People who purchased a Teamprise Client Suite for Version 1 or 2.
Continue Reading So in my previous post, I introduced the concept of a TFS workspace. If you only have one TFS workspace then you might have so far been blissfully unaware that you had one.
Continue Reading Today, I received a fancy new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter 8000 mouse courtesy of Microsoft. This is a Bluetooth enabled mouse with some useful extra buttons for slide advance and a built in laser pointer when presenting. It is a nice mobile mouse that, while not without flaws, I would still recommend.
Continue Reading Here at Teamprise we've recently changed our build numbering scheme. We use the traditional Major.Minor.Revision.Build approach with Major.Minor.Revision being the only thing an end user should care about and Major.Minor the only thing we would every do any marketing for.
Continue Reading I'd been having trouble getting Visual Studio Team Suite up and running on my new vista install. I was assuming it was something nasty in the long winded installs of Visual Studio Team Suite, Team Explorer, SP1 for both and the Beta of the Vista GDR for Team Suite.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/WindowsVistaTipWindowsXforMobilityCenter_ED77/mobility_center4.png) I was having trouble getting my external monitor to work properly.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/IvemovedtoWindowsVista_E50A/m70_experience%5B7%5D.png)Well, the time came. I got too jealous of everyone with Windows Vista and decided to upgrade myself. Before I start complaining, the reason I installed Vista on my main dev box is because I like it.
Continue Reading Dave Glover has held onto the title of world's smallest Team Foundation Server instance since August 2006. However, I have a confession to make. On Tuesday I was doing an MSDN webcast demonstrating the Teamprise plug-in.
Continue Reading If (like me) you are using the tf.exe.aspx>) command line to access your Team Foundation Server via a Version Control Proxy from a remote office, then the following tip is extremely useful - much more so than my previous registry hack.
Continue Reading I'd been seeing this for a while now, the game of Blogtag has been running riot over the internet. Blog memes are kinda like the blog equivalent of a chain letter or a pyramid marketing scheme but very slightly less dumb and hopefully have more positive consequences.
Continue Reading This morning I have been installing Team Foundation Server SP1 onto some test TFS instances. A handy hint for you is that you need to apply KB919156 before installing SP1.
Continue Reading I'm loving Windows Vista RTM. I'm actually considering moving my main development PC over - just need to be certain that everything I use will work just fine - in the meantime, I'll stick with it running from my Core Duo based Mac Mini. Today, I stumbled over a great blog from Tim Sneath, a Windows Vista Evangelist.
Continue Reading On the off chance that you read my blog and not Scott Hanselman's (shame on you) then I wanted to draw your attention to some invaluable registry tweaks he just posted - especially if you've been forced into installing Windows Desktop Search 3.0 to enable Outlook Instant Search - but also if you are a developer.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/VistaRTMonIntelMacMini_B4B1/startupdisk6.png) Just as a follow up to my previous post, I was having trouble switching back into Mac OS X once booted into Vista. As part of the Boot Camp process, Apple allow you to burn a CD containing the Windows XP Drivers and Utilities.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/MacVistawithFries_9450/TeampriseOnVistaOnMac2%5B12%5D.png) At the moment, we are going through a heavy testing phase on Version 2.0 of the Teamprise Client Suite.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/HomefromTechEd2006Developers_9F0A/booth%5B1%5D.jpg)I'm back home from sunny Barcelona, and just wanted to post a quick note to thank all the folks who stopped by. It was great to meet some old friends again, and also to make some new ones.
Continue Reading I've been having one of those days today. It's setup day at TechEd Developers and I'm down at the Teamprise Booth. Still not really ready as the pedestal that we've got turned out to be far too big and we're swapping it for a couple of smaller ones. Hopefully everything will be ok for 10.
Continue Reading This morning I took the sort and pleasurable flight over from Belfast to Barcelona to join the Teamprise / SourceGear advance party ready to set up at the TechEd Developers conference in Barcelona.
Continue Reading I've used my old iPod Mini nearly every day for 2 years (since I discovered Podcasting for the first time). Tomorrow I have a rather long car journey ahead of me and I have been saving up a few episodes of .NET Rocks, Slacker Astronomy, In Business and a new episode of Today in Parliament for the trip.
Continue Reading Team Foundation Server source control has a great feature called Shelving. Shelving lets you set store a batch of pending changes onto the server and optionally remove them from your local workspace.
Continue Reading So, this isn't exactly original material - but I was having a chat with somebody today who I consider very knowledgeable about Visual Studio Team System and they were not aware of these so hopefully re-posting some will help more people discover them.
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Just wanted to let folks know that Preview 2 is now available for download to our preview program customers. If you want to take a look at Preview 2, then you can sign up here.
Continue Reading We've just been having a discussion internally about ways of numbering our builds. It seems a sensible idea to qualify a build with the changeset number in our TFS repository, that way we are able to easily identify the exact status of all the files included in that build without the need to add a label into TFS.
Continue Reading Brian Harry has recently posted an excellent word document talking about some guidelines to follow when developing custom TFS extensions. The document is definitely worth a read as it gives you a better understanding of the issues behind the guidance.
Continue Reading We have some friends staying with us from out of town at the moment. They are actually friends of my parents - the type of people that were always around when I was growing up and I called my Aunt and Uncle even though they are not blood-relatives.
Continue Reading Recently, I've had a surge of emails asking various questions about Team Foundation Server and how to do certain things. While I always (eventually) respond, it can sometimes take me a while. If you have questions about Team Foundation Server then the best place to go is the MSDN forums.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/PintSizedTFSProxy_F31B/tfs_proxy%5B3%5D.jpg) I use Team Foundation Server over the end of a VPN connection to from my house in the UK over to Teamprise HQ back in Champaign, IL.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/WindowsLiveWriter_A58B/live_writer.png) On Rob's recommendation, I've installed Windows Live Writer today. Up until now I've written most of my blog posts in BlogJet - however so far I'm liking Windows Live Writer and may well stick to it.
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Showing branch history in a visual way is not something that the current version 1.0 of the Microsoft Team Foundation Server client is great at. In fairness to the team, showing the branch history of files in an graphical way is pretty complicated and would involve many lines of code – especially when you build a...
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I know it only seems like a few moments have past since we released version 1.1 onto the unsuspecting public, but today we opened the doors a little on Version 2.0 as we start our 2.0 Preview Program.
Continue Reading Poster child of the Web 2.0 movement and all round general legends Meebo have just launched a new service called MeeboMe that allows you to host a flash based chat window on your website and allow people to send you IM messages. It is in Alpha stages at the moment so may well cause problems.
Continue Reading I recently did an interview for Port 25 (the website for Microsoft’s Open Source Lab). If you would like to listen to the podcast then it is now available here. The interview was recorded in a week when NTLM authentication was high on my mind (as you can tell).
Continue Reading UPDATE: Brian Harry has posted a new utility to help you determine the trial expiration dates on your server. View Brian's post for more details. Like a lot of early adopters, we installed the Team Foundation Server 180–day trial edition so that we could use is right away while we were waiting for our TFS license key.
Continue Reading I’ve just learnt something today from our resident tech-writer that I feel needs sharing. Apparently it is “old” to put two spaces after a full-stop (or “period” for you American’s out there). See the following articles for evidence:- http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html http://www.press.uchicago.
Continue Reading Thanks to the folks that dropped by the webcast early today. Hopefully it was ok – I found it very weird talking to the sheep in the field outside my house while all you folks were “out there”. Anyway, here are some links that I promised to people during the Q&A Session.
Continue Reading As announced yesterday by Brian Harry and also by Michal Malecki in the TFS Version Control Forum, version 1.1 of Team Foundation Msscci Provider is now available for download here.
Continue Reading Apologies for being quiet on the blogging front lately, we’ve been busy getting ready for TechEd in Boston next week. I’ll soon be able to share some exciting news so stay tuned.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/CIMG3334.JPG)Back in February Microsoft were asking for feedback on the installation for Team Foundation Server Release Candidate. During the early betas TFS got a lot of flack for being hard to install.
Continue Reading Ok, I’ll admit it. My name is Martin Woodward and I am a gadgetaholic. I have a few USB memory keys and a couple of external USB hard-drives. However, I’ve been thinking about getting a new memory key for a while because my other ones are either too small or are a bit battered looking.
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Thanks to Ben for passing this on. You can now do a straight forward “apt-get install sun-java5–jre” and have it install on Debian and Ubuntu. Due to the old licensing restrictions you used to have to package up the installation yourself and was a real pain.
Continue Reading OK, so the odds that you read my blog and not Scott Guthrie’s are pretty low, especially if you have any interest in this topic. However, Scott just announced that the VS 2005 Web Application Project has gone V1.0.
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Thanks to everyone that came along to my talk at the 2006 Irish National Developers Conference yesterday. As it was Jedi Day, the session was appropriately aimed at being a deep-dive into some tips and tricks when using Team Foundation Server in the real world. As promised, here is the here is the slide deck (1.9 MB).
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/28dayslater.png)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/28dayslater.png)The time had to come. When I booted up VSTS after the May-Day holiday weekend I got a message warning me that I had 28 days left of my evaluation period.
Continue Reading If you are going to be doing more than the basic check-in / check-out options then it pays to get to know the command line client – tf. The command line client is actually the most flexible and powerful client to Team Foundation Version Control. For more information, consult the MSDN help documentation.
Continue Reading For those of you morning the loss of Monad as it henceforth becomes known as Windows PowerShell (it’s impossible to say that without putting some inflection into your voice to try and sound like a voice over for a cheesy advert) – we now have a new name to make fun of thanks to Nintendo renaming there next generation...
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I’ve seen a few forum posts on this topic and talk about it a lot whenever meeting new users to Team Foundation Server so I thought it worthwhile posting on the subject.
Continue Reading The day that Intel Macs first started shipping I walked into an Apple store, downloaded Teamprise and tried to run it to see if it would work. It didn’t. I wasn’t that surprised, but I had kinda been hoping that the magic of Rosetta would just take over and automagically make it work.
Continue Reading A lot of people were asking about this when I was in Dublin. Brian Harry has announced the version 1.0 of the TFS MSSCCI provider allowing you to access the power of Team Foundation Server from the following platforms (among others):- Visual Studio .
Continue Reading If you came along to my talk last night in Dublin, then thanks for your time. I really enjoyed the chat as folks got stuck in and asked questions rather than just listening to me drone on. It’s also the first time I’ve spoke at an event and then wandered through into the bar to have pints lined up in front of me.
Continue Reading With Apple about to celebrate it's 30th Anniversary, Wired is running a piece on the best Steve Jobs' comments ever. While I don't particularly like the proprietary way in which Apple goes about things - you have to admire the man's presentation skills, charisma, vision and the ability to go from a two man in a garage...
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I have a lovely Dell Precision M70 as my main development machine. It's a notebook so is great for when I am travelling around and has more than enough grunt to handle a few VMWare images running at once for cross-platform demos etc.
Continue Reading As I have mentioned before, when you check out a file for edit in Team Foundation Source Control, you are actually telling the server that you are going to edit a particular version of a particular file that you have in your local workspace.
Continue Reading Quick post to say that I got an RTM version of Team Foundation Server installed inside a VPC over the weekend and it worked seamlessly (as we've come to expect - kudos to those involved). Once little caveat: don't attempt to install from media over a network share.
Continue Reading According to the in flight map, I am currently 36000 feet above Baffin Bay, traveling at 550 Mph with mild amusement towards Foxe Bain. The temperature outside is a balmy -53 degrees Celsius.
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[]()Recently I was looking at some screenshots from my good friend Clark Sell and I spent more time admiring the theme on his copy of Windows than looking at the error he was trying to show me.
Continue Reading Tonight, I finally sat down and recompiled the CruiseControl.NET plugin to work with the RC version of the Team Foundation Server API. Turns out there was only one change – the TeamFoundationServer object now has a public constructor to pass the credentials to rather than using the factory as I has previously been...
Continue Reading I’ve been coding for around 25 years, since my parents bought me a VIC-20. I think it was probably a similar advert to this one by William Shatner that convinced them to buy it after seeing how much time my borther and I spent playing with our Atari 2600.
Continue Reading Via Rob, Microsoft have now released a MSSCCI Provider that works in Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 6. According to the overview on the download site, “The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider enables users of Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio .
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[](http://www.teamprise.com/)Preview 6 of Teamprise is now available for registered users to download (registration is free). This release is compatible with the RC version of Team Foundation Server only - Beta 3 and Beta 3 refresh users should stick with Preview 5 or upgrade TFS now to claim your free T-shirt.
Continue Reading [](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/vsts_google_toolbar.jpg)Well, having tried new new beta of Google Toolbar I just had to try implementing my own toolbar button. Here is one that will give you the top previous posts from folks around the VSTS blogosphere.
Continue Reading Anyone who watches the Simpsons or Ghostbusters (555 2368) is aware that numbers beginning with 555 in the states are usually fake. While looking for information about international dialing from the UK, I stumbled upon the official Ofcom list of fake numbers - UK number ranges reserved for drama purposes.
Continue Reading You'll probably be seeing a lot of these type of posts around the net, but I just wanted to say that I've got the RC version of Team Foundation Server up and running in a VPC. Apart from my only allocating the virtual server 384 Mb of memory for the first part - the installation went very smoothly.
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I am in the pre-workshop conference VSTS for Everyone: Best Practices for the Whole Team. It is really interesting watching other people learning VSTS and also what common questions that they ask.
Continue Reading [](http://www.teamprise.com)Preview 5 of Teamprise is now available for registered users to download (registration is free). This release is compatible with Beta 3 and Beta 3 refresh of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.
Continue Reading If I were clever like Eric Sink or Bill Caputo, I'd be able to turn that catchy title in to a witty and insightful post about the software industry. But sadly for you, I'm not and (as witnessed in this blog) my writing skills are pretty awful.
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[](http://tools.netgear.com/skype/)Like buses, you wait for ages then two come along at once. Following a wave of Skype announcements at CES, Creative have announced a new Skype phone.
Continue Reading Buck Hodges recently posted about a problem with locks based on files types and shelving in VSTS Source Control. In the post he mentions a system called Gauntlet that is used internally in some teams at Microsoft. The Gauntlet system is very interesting to me.
Continue Reading It's probably obvious this one, but it took me a minute to figure it out. In VSTS source control, file version numbers do not go 1,2,3,4.. but they are versioned by the changeset number that the change was in.
Continue Reading Scott Guthrie has posted about a new web project type that will be available for VS 2005. I know quite a few people have been running into difficulties with the shipped way that web projects work in VS 2005 (especially when it comes to automating the build process outside of Visual Studio) and this new model sounds...
Continue Reading Problem: Use ssh tunnelling to access a Subversion repository using SSH tunneling (i.e. with a subversion repository url of svn+ssh://myservername/myrepo) using the Subclipse subversion integration with Eclipse. I tried various things and used each of the three interfaces for configuring Subclipse (Window, Preferences.
Continue Reading If you had the mis-fortune of hearing me speak at the Belfast launch event for SQL 2005 / Visual Studio 2005 / Biztalk 2006 this morning then the following links may be of interest:-Rob Caron's Blog - Best place for VSTS related information Visual Studio Team System - Official Microsoft pages VSTSPlugins - Open source...
Continue Reading This week Siemens have demonstrated a cheap paper thin display using OLED technology. Sounds very promising, they are talking about displays being manufactured using print style processes making displays cheap enough to appear in magazines. See The Guardian or Physorg for more information.
Continue Reading Just posted a reply to the VSTS Forums, but this is such a common question that I thought I'd post the response here in a place that Google is more likely to stumble across it. The problem is when somebody leaves a file checked out from Team Foundation Source Control (formally known as Hatterras).
Continue Reading Finally got round to packaging up and releasing a CC.NET plugin for VSTS compiled against VSTS Beta 3. Great thanks to Troy Gould who did all the changes to the source files from the Beta 2 version. Now all I need to post some instuctions to give people a clue as to how to install it...
Continue Reading I know I probably shouldn't be this excited, but I've just installed VSTS B3 into a single VPC image, and it worked first time!! Still a couple of funnies, reports don't seem to be working doesn't look fatal, probably a configuration setting missing somewhere but apart from that everything is good.
Continue Reading Skypehave done it again. Using the latest windows beta version (1.4.0.47) you now have access to Call Forwarding features. If you are offline or do not answer a skype call then you can configure Skype to automatically forward the call to your landline or cell phone (using your Skypeout credit to pay the the forwarded...
Continue Reading I've been struggling with a known issue with nDoc where it tries to generate filenames that are bigger than 256 characters. So instead of generating my documentation within the build folder, which is under the project folder - I'm going to have to create a temp directory at the root of my current drive with a really...
Continue Reading This site may dissappear for some spells over the next few days. I'm currently in the process of moving house so it may take a while to get the old server located in my new garage. The good news is that I have some Cat5 cabling in the new house and a fancy 3Com router courtesy of Clark Sell.
Continue Reading I sometimes come across code that I consider posting to The Daily WTF, but I find the old career preservation instincts usually kick in. One of the most common problems occur when code is copy/pasted into lots of places. Tonight I accidentally stumbled upon this little tool for java - the copy/paste detector.
Continue Reading A friend of mine called Mike Becker just passed on a tip that I am now committed to passing on to as many people as I know. You ever needed access to the information in one of those annoying modal dialog boxes? Well now you can.
Continue Reading I couldn't find this with a quick google, so guessed the answer. If you want to pass login credentials to the Hatteras command line client (h.exe or soon to be renamed tf.exe) then you can use the /login command line parameter. The bit I couldn't find in the helpfile is that the format is /login:username,password.
Continue Reading Bill Caputo has posted an interesting article discussing inheritance in C#, especially when using interfaces. I learned about OO while learning how to write Java, so I still struggle with the fact that methods in C# are not virtual by default.
Continue Reading Just found this interesting article on documentation in Agile projects by Scott Ambler. As with everything in the Agile world, we must strive to do _just enough_ to meet the business objectives - this includes documentation.
Continue Reading I'm currently thinking a lot about different testing strategies. Martin Fowler has an intesting post entitled Mock Aren't Stubs in which he also discusses the differences between State testing and Interaction testing.
Continue Reading Via Wired, there is now a WinAmp plugin that allows you to sync your iPod from WinAmp. Called mlipod, it also allows you to copy songs from your iPod back onto your computer - fantastic. Anyone know a plugin for WinAmp that downloads Podcasts?
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Just reading Ben's blog. He has been playing with 2D Fractal Terrains (as you do). Seeing the landscape Ben generated instantly brought back so many memories. A school friend of mine, called Robert Parsons, used a similar algorithm to generate 2D landscapes that look just like Ben's.
Continue Reading In an effort to keep my Java skills up to date while also using some of my new-found dotnet knowledge I've joined the team trying to put together a VSTS SCC plugin for Eclipse that talks to the source control functionality in Visual Studio Team System.
Continue Reading Interesting news from Javaworld. BEA are to announce that they are to join the Eclipse foundation. Hopefully this signals that Weblogic Workshop will be integrated with Eclipse (just as IBM integrate at the moment for WSAD). This only leave Sun and Microsoft as the major vendors staying out of Eclipse.
Continue Reading Jet Brains have just announced the opening of the EAP for their new .NET Profiler, available for download. Resharper by Jet Brains and of course IntelliJ are excellent tools, however the future of Resharper and now the .
Continue Reading I have been investigating several ways of generating files suitable for use in Excel from a C# application. As with most problems, there is more than one way to crack a nut.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/20041118_snow.html)It's the 18th November and it's snowing!!! Really heaving. Looks cool - might go outside and build a snowman. Wouldn't mind but I have to drive across 3 countries tomorrow. Doh!
Continue Reading Interesting article in Wired about "Numbers Stations" that broadcast on Shortwave. These are high-powered transmitters across the planet are are broadcasting strings of numbers, letters, backwards music, or even the noise of a fruit machine.
Continue Reading I've recently come across Podcasting (or blogcasting as it is sometimes called). Basically it makes use of a feature in the RSS spec called enclosure that allows links to downloadable content - in this case audio content.
Continue Reading Been using Visual Studio 2003 lately, not a bad editor (no where near as good as intellij for Java for pretty good). Today, all of a sudden the autocomplete feature - called Intellisense (TM - M$) stopped working. Now normally, this is because of an error earlier in the code, not yet displayed to you (dumb).
Continue Reading As I may have mentioned to anyone that will listen to me - I am currently getting up at a daft time of the morning to beat the traffic into work. On my journeys I have noticed a completely new invention that I have never noticed before but one that is such a good idea.
Continue Reading Just installed Pocket SharpMT on my HP4150 (what is rapidly becoming my favourite gadget). So far it seems pretty fully featured. In fact I think some aspects are easier to use than the full version. However my handwriting needs to get a lot better if I want to use it in anger. Either that or I need to buy a keyboard..
Continue Reading I'll be working in America for a few weeks soon and I wanted to try out ways of calling home cheaply. BT have recently announced Yahoo! Messenger with BT Communicator. I will install this and give it a go - particularly as the calls get billed to my home phone line. However, been playing with www.skype.
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[](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000139HAA/woodwardwebcom)I've just treated myself to a new toy. A brand new HP4150 PDA. After much looking, the cheapest place seemed to be Amazon. Been very happy with it so far. Has both Bluetooth and WiFi.
Continue Reading So, took the plunge and installed XP Service Pack 2 today. Wanted to see if the changes to Internet Explorer did anything strange to website I have designed, but also if the Service Pack would work on my HP Compaq nx7010.
Continue Reading Just discovered SharpReader a pretty decent free RSS reader. My lunchtime trawl of the net may have just got a lot faster. The interface is functional, and the pop-ups notifications are very well done.
Continue Reading I've been a regular user of programs from Sysinternals for a while now - today they just saved me again. I've just been getting an "Access is deinied" error when I was trying to delete a directory telling me that it was is use by another process. I re-booted the machine and the directory was still in use.
Continue Reading Ever wanted to connect your toaster to the internet, turn a skyscraper into a giant display, add a web server to your filter coffee machine or make a furby say things that will severely disturb the kids - then have a read of Hardware Hacking Projects _for Geeks_ by Scott Fullam.
Continue Reading Been using the Beta version of Intellij 4.0 on my last project. It is now on late release candidate builds and is fantastic. Previously I was an Eclipse fan, however this version has me sold. Haven't tried out the generics support for Java 1.
Continue Reading I've finally joined the broadband masses as my exchange has just been enabled and my nildram account has been activated. Works a treat as well, which I was suprised about.
Continue Reading My order for broadband has just gone in to Nildram. Decided to go with them in the end as I wanted a static ip address with an email account and webspace etc. According to ADSL Guide they have been consistently rated as one of the fastest ISP's. I have also heard nothing but good things about their Customer Service.
Continue Reading One of my collegues pointed me at the css Zen Garden. I have to admit, I knew CSS was powerful - but I had always avoided learning it due to the flakey support in some browsers. Now nearly everyone is using a decent browser it may be time to stop using tables for layout purposes.
Continue Reading I'm trying Blogger for the first time to publish to my site. I design and build around content management systems all the time at work - about time I try some of my own medicene. I have to say, the functionality on Blogger is pretty good, considering the price (i.e. nowt).
Continue Reading Demonstration of the CONTENTEDITABLE attribute that was introduced in IE 5.5 Show Example.
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