Saturday of brass band, presenting and fun

I am on my way home after presenting at two concerts with Windcorp Brass Band. Exhausted but very happy.

It all went down quite well. The band was in excellent form and played well throughout the evening and their rendition of The Cossack will stay in my mind forever. Also the thing surrounding the concert was, as always, good.

My own part in the whole thing went well, even though I had missed the fact that the concert didn’t had a intermission. Quite embarrassing when I told the audience that a break was coming up, just to then call them back in their seats. Well, well – it became a joke and was quickly forgotten.

I love doing this! If there was a way to make a living presenting concerts I would take it immediately.

Thank you WindCorp Brass Band, Alex, Swedbank and all my friends in Gothenburg for an excellent day.

Learning JQuery with Firebug

Got a tip from Daniel about this video, that shows an easy way to learn and understand JQuery:

With this and Selenium I cannot stand back anymore – I need to install FireFox for the first time.

Scott Guthrie in Stockholm

I’ve been attending a full day of presentations by Scott Guthrie, who seems to be involved in most things interesting at Microsoft. The output from this guy is just amazing; blogging, products, teams and thoughts… A lot.

I really looked forward to hearing him live and specifically what he had to say about ASP.NET MVC 2.

It was all good – even though the tempo in the presentation was breakneck speed. Many of the new technologies from Microsoft nowadays aims to be extensible and possible to tweek to your preferences.

From ASP.NET MVC 2 I especially like

• The xxxFor HTML-helper methods
• The EditorFor helper methods
• Areas (which I understood for the first time during this presentation, thank you Scott).

I’m now enjoying his presentation on Silverlight 4, which will be my introduction to Silverlight…

This was a great day that learned me a lot and also made me realize what I don’t know… A lot…

Online diff tool

Found this nugget today when comparing numerous of very long SQL-strings. Yeah, yeah – I know; data access is a solved problem – but this app still got them. In spades!

And I also agree with the developer of the tool:

“Now, although pretty much every IDE (and various stand-alone products) have sophisticated diff utilities built in (like Eclipse), my favourite, I got very tired of having to create two files just to paste in fragments of code or other bits of texts just in order to perform a diff and see the differences highlighted.”

Except for the Eclipse-part maybe. The diff tool worked great and helped me a lot yesterday. And probably today… and the day after that, and the day…