Do NOT update your Mac’s Firmware

I knew and understood that Bootcamp was in beta under OS X ‘Tiger’, but I never expected a firmware update that requires you to reformat your disk!
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/11/26/tiger.update.data.loss/
Luckially I saw this in time… otherwise I would have trusted Apple next time I started my Mac and saw a ‘new update’ available.
Look Apple, I love your hardware/software, [...]

Useful information about Project Server 2003

Registry Entries

Rebuilding Views and OLAP Cube to Remove Corruption
Error message when you try to build an OLAP cube in Project Server 2003 or in Project Server 2002: “The cube scheduled to be built on Date Time failed.”
Discussion on OLAP Cube creation problems
Creating Portfolio Analyzer Views

Do we need 64-bit Team Foundation Server yet?

I saw a forum complaint today regarding the lack of 64-bit support in the application tier of Team Foundation Server 2008.
To be honest, although it would be nice, I can understand why not:

Resources

Microsoft can dedicate more resources to TFS if it is only targeting one platform (32-bit)
Service packs can appear more quickly
Cool features like the ‘Power Tools’ [...]

Code Metrics as a Checkin Policy

‘Code Metrics as a Checkin Policy’ – This is a fantastic idea, but too often brushed aside by both senior and junior developers alike as ‘Getting in the way’.
It would be great to measure a project’s success not just by delivery but by it code quality as well. Currently you get an award for shipping [...]

Laptop Resolution for Presentations

Great article today from Joel Spolsky. He has just completed some major cities on his tour to promote FogBugz, and had some nice presentation tips.
In there was one really important tip that seems to be a great problem in the technical community and close to my heart:
“Set the screen to 800 x 600. Make everything [...]

Must stop reading Slashdot.org – False story about C# memory leak

I have no problem with a news site, even with an anti-Microsoft bias, reporting facts but this story was obviously written by someone who has no knowledge of modern programming languages:
“Princeton DARPA Grand Challenge team member Bryan Cattle reflects on how their code failed to forget obstacles it had passed. It was written in Microsoft’s [...]

Get into Business Intelligence

Currently I am getting familiar with Business Intelligence (BI)
When creating an application, developers always focus on the engineering problem. There is often a feeling that the business requirement is important (take Extreme Programming (XP) for example) but it always takes second place to the immediate requirement of ‘how do I solve this threading issue?’.
Business Intelligence [...]

Windows Live Writer 2008

Microsoft Windows Live Writer 2008 is a free blogging tool that makes posting to your blog much easier. It has just left beta and has become a full release.
It works well with Microsoft Live Spaces and WordPress, and there seem to be a great deal of plugins that allow you to (for example) add Flickr [...]

User Experience

I spent a few happy weeks playing ‘Half-Life 2′ last year, and yesterday I bought Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for my Wii  and the differences are interesting.
Half-Life 2 was a beautiful game and I enjoyed every detailed scene. Metroid on the other hand doesn’t look as good.. it runs at 480p on my HD Television, and [...]

Open Source SOA Projects

Udi Dahan’s .NET service bus project, NServiceBus, is now being hosted on SourceForge.
I thought a quick list of some open source projects I’m looking into might be in order:

Project
Description

NServiceBus
A service bus for the Microsoft space

Web Service Factory
A ‘Patterns & Practices’ tool to produce web services

WCF Robust File Transfer
A demonstration project demonstrating how to ‘chunk’ large [...]