From Monday to Wednesday next week, I'm on a Microsoft training course in London. The course was free, as the organisation I work for got some free training vouchers included with our Microsoft Enterprise Licensing agreement.

The course title is Core Distributed Application Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Over three days, it covers .Net remoting, web services and message queuing. I'm looking forward to the course, as I haven't studied distributed development since the VB6 days, so it will be interesting to compare the old with the new. Sadly, though, I think the course content is mostly redundant now that remoting and web services have been superseded by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in .Net framework 3.0.

Started back at work today. I doesn't take long for the Christmas feel-good factor to wear off when you're having to deal with the usual staff issues and problems. There seems to be a winter bug going round that is affecting the whole Council. It's called Norovirus and sounds particularly nasty. I hope I don't get it!

I'm hoping to start working on a new development project, which is to design and create a new Contract Management database for the Commercial Waste team within the Council. Ideally, I'd like to use this project to try out some of the agile programming practices I've been hearing and reading about so much lately. I'm particularly interested in trying out test-driven development, but need to do a bit of research first to evaluate the various tools that are around.

If you can recommend a good (and free) testing tool that integrates with Visual Studio 2005, I'd like to hear about it.