This week my Team Toolbar Office add-in for Team Explorer disappeared preventing me from uploading any new Work items to Team Foundation Server. After some searching in Excel (and MS Project) I acc...

I find that I am increasingly relying on the computing power of my Android smartphone (a HTC Desire) and finding novel ways of using it to make my IT life easier. Sometimes I just want to connect t...

{.w-50 .left} Recently I have acquired an additional desktop machine on my desk and quickly saw the potential to expand the amount of screen real estate at my disposal (you can never have enough sc...

Whilst watching Die Hard 4 the other day I noticed the funky transparent console windows that were being used to battle out cyber warfare, and being a traditional geek I immediately liked the ide...

I’m pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.0 of my Windows Live Writer (WLW) Source Code Highlighter plugin for Wordpress.com hosted blogs. For those not aware of this plugin it enables you...

When building an ASP.net application it’s important to understand the authentication solution that you are planning to implement and then ensure that all your developers are aware of it. On a few p...

Whilst checking the Windows Event Log on my server I found this worrying error being reported by the Team Foundation Server Power Tools Backup & Restore Tool : Error: Tfpt Backup Restore : ...

Recently I have been witness to rapid, often painful, change within my own internal IT division over the last few years and observed the on-going developments in the industry. It is clear that IT d...

I would recommend everyone interested in technology to read Ray Ozzie’s (Chief Software Architect of Microsoft) memo - “Dawn of a New Day”. It’s a fascinating insight into the vision of a key playe...

Microsoft’s recent announcement that the key Drive Extender feature is to be removed from the new version of Windows Home Server codenamed ‘Vail’ has resulted in much dismay within the community. M...

Anyone using my Windows Live Writer plug-in for Source Code highlighting will find that after upgrading to the latest Live Writer version the preview feature is not working. The latest version of W...

The 1980’s iconic “programmable electronic vehicle” BigTrak is back and in the shops now. I always wanted one of these when I was a boy and now I finally get to buy one, and I can also justify th...

I have finally posted a new version of my Windows Live Writer Syntax Highlighter for Wordpress.com hosted blogs, you can find it here. Version 1.2.0 has been a while in the making but I have includ...

At last – backup is built into the TFS product, well via the Power Tools at least. Backing up TFS has always been difficult and non-intuitive without a SQL DBA in your pocket, even the documentatio...

Well its been an interesting few weeks for cloud computing, mostly in the “private cloud” space. Microsoft have announced their Windows Azure Appliance enabling you to buy a Windows Azure cloud sol...

In my previous post (“Backing Up TFS 2010 Using PowerShell: Part 1”) I covered how to backup up the TFS SQL Server databases using Windows PowerShell and the SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) API...

In a previous post I covered how to install Team Foundation Server 2010 onto a Windows Home Server. The installation was a TFS Basic Configuration installation and whilst it was geared towards Wind...

Last October I posted about the fact that Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server 2010 was going to be shipping with a “Basic” configuration that more light weight and seen as more of a Visual SourceSaf...

Whether you manage thousands of Windows boxes in an enterprise environment or you just want a more powerful shell environment with which to manage your backup scripts on your PC, Windows PowerShell...

In this post I’m going to cover the Entity Translator pattern and provide a useful base class for implementing this pattern in your application. The ‘Entity Translator Pattern’ (defined here and h...

After my trusty Pentium 4 home build finally bit the dust I’ve invested in a new desktop. Whilst performance was important for this build (as it’s my main desktop) it had to be cost effective. Luck...

There are occasions where you are aware of multiple exceptions within your code that you want to raise together in one go. Perhaps your code makes a service call to a middleware orchestration compo...

If like me you’re always on the lookout for neat little icons and images to add to your shiny .Net applications then you might like to know that Visual Studio includes an image library for you to u...

Keeping up with the latest trends, applications, techniques and platforms can be very difficult. The amount of excellent resources available out there on the web is phenomenal, so much so that ther...

For those of you unfamiliar with the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) it is a very capable web application framework for building web forms based thin client applications. It was created as part ...