When Software Attacks!

CITP

Received in an email today from the BCS: I am delighted to inform you that your application for Chartered IT Professional (CITP) status has been successful.

Comment Spam and Contacting Me

You may have noticed that I have disabled comments on my old posts. You may also have noticed that I have now disabled the Contact Me function on my blog. Why? Comment spam, and more recently, a huge influx of spam via the contact form. I will try to find a solution via some kind of community server plugin. In the meantime, posting comments will be open for 14 days after I make a post and will then automatically switch off.

Congratulations Richard!

Well done Richard, who has been given the accolade of Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Visual Studio Team System.

Problems with Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint 2007

If you are using Forms Based Authentication and try to access Site Policies you may well find that you get an Access Denied response. If you do, this post will help you! I’ve been meaning to post this for a while because I’m sure it may help somebody. As usual, it’s been pushed back and back until now I finally have some time. I also have another, workflow-related post on another problem which will follow shortly.

Workflow History and SQL Error

When trying to view an item in a list which has workflows run against it, you get an error: Some part of your SQL statement is nested too deeply. Rewrite the query or break it up into smaller queries Problem Background Trying to explain the exact nature of our configuration in this case would break many people’s heads. This, therefore, is a bit of a simplification. We have a custom webpart which allows users to log an enquiry.

Catching Up

I’ve been far too busy lately and whilst there have been lots of things I wanted to post about, time has not been on my side. Before I start to forget some of the points I thought a quick post was in order. @media 2008 was great. Slides and audio are just filtering onto the blog now. A highlight for me was Indi Young’s talk on Mental Models. I now have her book on my desk (waiting for having the time to read it) and I’m excited about how the technique might interface nicely with the User Stories we use for feeding requirements into our Scrum development process.

Blogging On The Move

We try to dogfood here at Black Marble so I’m writing this on my HTC TYTN. How? With Richard’s new app

Community Launch Events

A big thanks to everybody who came to the Server 2008 launch event last week. Andy and myself had a great time presenting to such an enthusiastic crowd. In the end we ran long because of the amount of dialogue around the new features of Server 2008 and I hope everyone went away having got something useful. Now I need to reduce the two hours of material down to a perky 45 minutes for delivery at the VBug-hosted launch event on April 30th.

Hats off, lads

Just seen the sad news of the passing of Arthur C. Clarke. The world was better for his having been in it, and will not be the same without him.

Insightful

Joel Spolsky has a biting and articulate article on the IE8 standards debate.