A few day’s ago, conference chair Jim Newkirk tweeted his top 10 reasons why you should attend this year’s Agile Conference being held at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel. I thought they were compelling enough to warrant an entire blog post! So, here goes, in reverse order: 10 - Something...

Jim Newkirk’s Top 10 Reasons To Attend Agile2010 →

I posted back in January about the upcoming Agile 2010 Conference in Nashville, TN . Just a reminder that the submissions deadline for the Agile 2010 conference is rapidly approaching. The system will close on February 26th, so get your submissions in by then. Register here: Agile 2010 – Be A Speaker...

Agile 2010 Conference Submissions Deadline →

The dates and venue for this years Agile Conference have been announced. The conference is from August 9th to 13th in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find out more details about being a presenter or attending the conference at http://www.agile2010.org/ . The submission system will be open soon if you have...

Dates And Venue For Agile 2010 Announced →

I was looking through some back issues of Director magazine today, and stumbled across an article that was written in March 2008 entitled Terminal 5 Comes Alive. It is an interesting read that discusses the leadership approach taken when BAA built Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport. The first thing...

Heathrow Terminal 5 - The Agile Terminal? →

There is a chain of coffee shops in Shanghai (maybe all of China?) called SPR Coffee.  I really like the slogan that they use on their paper cups - "No Full Stops In Quality".  It reminds me that, no matter how high your quality is now, or how good your processes and practices are...

Post Game Huddle : No Full Stops In Quality →

I travel a reasonable amount for work. I live 25 miles from London's Heathrow airport and 20 miles from London's Gatwick airport and neither is conveniently accessible to me using public transportation. As a result, I regularly need to use a taxi company to deliver me to and pick me up from the requisite...

Customer Satisfaction: Why 95% Isn't Good Enough →

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 . The release is intended for Web Developers and Designers so that they can be ready to take advantage of the new features that are offered. There are a number of important changes from a developer's perspective. The main areas (unashamedly cut-and-pasted...

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Released →

As you can probably tell (unless you are reading this in a feed reader) I have spent the last few evenings in my Shanghai hotel room creating a new layout for dasBlog. It has been a while since I coded any HTML or CSS, but it was great fun. I need to go back and clean up a few things (too many bad habits...

New Design For phammond.com →

Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM) on Monday just gone. Here is a link to the main Visual Studio 2008 Developer Center . Scott Guthrie has a blog posting about the VS2008 release here. More importantly, he has a posting about uninstalling Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008...

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released →

I attended a number of excellent sessions at the Agile 2007 conference in Washington D.C. this year. One of the most thought provoking for me was the session by Bob Martin on Developer Professionalism and Craftsmanship. I have worked as both a developer and as a manager of developers for many years....

Developer Professionalism and Craftsmanship →

I spent Monday and Tuesday on an offsite with my team, and one of the things we talked about was Myers-Briggs Personality Types. In case anyone is interested, I am an ENTP . I stumbled across a Programmer's Personality Type test this morning, and thought it would be fun to share. Just as in Myers-Briggs...

What's Your Programmer Personality Type? →

Further to my post last week regarding the Visual Studio SP1 Beta, SP1 has now been formally released - links below. General Information . Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite SP1 (covers Standard, Professional and Team editions). Visual Studio® 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1 Visual Studio® 2005 Express Editions...

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Now Available →

A couple of weeks back I blogged about getting Web App Debugging working on Windows Vista RC1 , and I mentioned an annoying "attempted to read or write protected memory" error when building your solution. Brian Peek (whose solution I originally quoted in my first post) kindly left me a comment with a...

Possible fix for Visual Studio 2005 build error on Windows Vista RC1 →

I recently got a new laptop and am running Windows Vista RC1. I had been having a bunch of trouble getting Visual Studio 2005 to behave, particularly when trying to debug web applications. It took me a little while to figure out, and I had to pull together a few different resources from the web in order...

Windows Vista RC1, IIS7 and Web App Debugging. →

One of my favourite sites is the Daily WTF . It features true horror stories from the technical trenches, as submitted by avid readers. Examples of the worst coding skills, the most arrogance and the stupidest people are abound. A post appeared the other day that is one of my all-time favourites: “...

The Daily WTF →

Microsoft has made the Consolas font available for download . Consolas is one of the 6 new fonts previously only available in Window Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina, Corbel). It is a fixed-width font which makes it a great replacement for all text editors, including Visual Studio...

Consolas Font Now Available For Download →

I just wasted about an hour of my time. I should have known the answer to this sooner really, given recent pushes for locking down security out of the box. I restored a SQL 2005 database from another server onto my local development box. Then I tried to connect to it from within some ASP.Net code. Every...

Broken SQL Users and SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration →

Just found this over on ScottGu’s blog – the App Offline feature: Basically, if you place a file with this name [ed: app_offline.htm] in the root of a web application directory, ASP.NET 2.0 will shut-down the application, unload the application domain from the server, and stop processing...

Nice ASP.NET 2.0 Feature - App Offline →

A while ago, some of the guys in one of the UK Developer and Platform group here at Microsoft started putting together “MSDN Nuggets” – short videos (under 10 minutes) that demonstrate some new feature or technology. This is a great idea, and is a very convenient way of getting an overview...

MSDN Nuggets →

Just found out from the IEBlog that Microsoft have released a beta of the IE Developer Toolbar . It has some pretty nice features - you can view the HTML DOM of the current page, update attributes and styles of items on the page, toggle various useful pieces of info (such as image size, image path etc...

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar →