Tomorrow we have the last demo of the project. It feels great when you think of what we have accomplished in this short while:

• 4-5 persons
• 6 months (including the famous Swedish vacation month of 6 weeks)
• 100 000 lines of code
• Implementing and learning new architecture and Scrum

I am really proud of the project and the members in it. Thank you guys for the opportunity to do this together.

The last few weeks there have been a lot of really strange and sad things happening in my network of friends and relatives. There have been deaths, suicidal, people nearly dying, relationships ending and several friends with some pretty serious problems to handle.

At the same time I feel like I am on the right place and at the right time in life. I experience the best project and learning experience of my life at work, I love the band and my corps and most of all Elin and I have never had it better.

Why is this? It feels really strange to still feel … not happy but strong, maybe. I can only take it as a blessing from God and that I hope that I can be of support to anyone who needs me. I cannot count the number of times it’s been the other way around.

My...

Just some short lines of praise to an excellent web GUI to access TFS (Team Foundation Server) - Team plain.

Via this GUI you can easily access most functionality for TFS in a very nice manner. And this have to be the nicest Web-GUI i’ve ever seen. I could possibly be because it’s using AJAX - and then my friends the future promises good thing for us.

We are closing in on the end of the project (the development phase) and it a mixture of feelings that comes over me.

First and foremost I would say it’s a bit of sadness. This is the best project i’ve been in so far - a lot of fun, speed, wild discussions and great flow in the group. Much to this I have to credit SCRUM for - which promotes just those things; building teams and delivering software.

Then of course I am proud of what we have accomplished. 100 000 lines of code in 4 months, 4 people. And the structure of the system feels very nice too - the bugs that are found now is quite easy to fix.

So the project is, in all right, slowing down while we are transiting into the testing phase. Oh how I would have loved to have testers in our team....

Here is a video with the Cory Band and a singing group. Really nice and made the hairs of my arm stand on end.

Pretty cool in the beginning when the band takes the stage (i.e. mountain)…

Every Monday morning I usually listens to the last broadcast of Listen to the band. This week there are some serious playing going on… Grimethorpe and Black Dyke.

This is very, very good playing indeed - and live. Don’t try this a home kids… Please keep all limbs inside the computer until it has come to a complete stop. :)

It’s out for a week. Don’t miss the chance to hear some great playing.

There’s been a lot of blogging about computer stuff for a while - that time in the project I suspect… Well - this one is not.

For a while I have been disturbed about the fact that many young people in Sweden today doesn’t “feel good” or “have issues”. Often that means that there some psychic problems, but it’s not considered good manners to use that words. “Burnt out” is another phrase, used too much to capture the true sense.

This hits everyone, it seems. Students and working, young (13?!!) and older, happy and sad. It has gone so far among people I know that everyone knows somebody who has these kind of problems.

Just this day I met a friend of mine that always seems to be in a good mood. He’s very, very successful, a Christian and always seems to have time. But now he looked slow, almost...

OK - this is driving me mad. Arrays in VB.NET really, really annoys me. Here is a short list on how to work with arrays, in my example an array of strings.

1. Declaring an new empty array: Dim arr() as String = {} or (this is where the pain begins…why is there a choice?) Dim arr as String() = {}
2. Declaring an array with three elements: Dim arr(2) as String
3. Declaring an array with two elements and initializing the values Dim arr as String() = {"Element 1", "Element 2"}. So - again the pain of VB.NET comes from the urge to want to help us all the time. Why, oh why, are there several ways of doing one thing?

I will sure get back to this post a lot because I forget how this is done every time - much...

Estimations can be quite tricky to do and even trickier to get from an developer. One way to go around that is to play planning poker. Follow that link for some great explanations by the SCRUM-guru Henrik Kniberg.

And as the Internet is a fantastic thing someone of course as made an online version, that can be found here http://www.planningpoker.com/

I think that it’s more important to get together than to do the actual poker playing, but if you don’t have that option this will have to do.

Got a tip of a quite harsh and depressing page today: What Great .NET Developers Ought To Know (More .NET Interview Questions)

It’s a list of thing that you should know to be great, according to Scott Hanselman…

I am not sure - but it is well worth reading.

Apparently you can find answers to many of the questions on this site: http://www.ayende.com/Blog/PermaLink,guid,b6e3e8ce-4a6e-4cf0-af70-d360be9e8c76.aspx