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

Just now something happened here at the office that really showed some major differences between SCRUM and RUP.

I was asked to send the list of demands to a person, to be used as input for their work with tests. This is our product backlog which we have created and worked with during our 6 sprints.

• “Yes, but it will not look the same as when you saw it last, three months back. It has changed very frequently, almost daily.”
• “OK? But give it to me anyway”

So I wrote him an email; “Here is the list of demands as it looks today, 2007-10-02”

At the same time a person from another project (not SCRUM, mind you) walked by. He was talking in the phone and from the pitch and sound of his voice we could make out that he was quite angry.

• “So, I heard that...

Yesterday Avega, my company, released it’s new, better, bigger and nicer website. And it really is! Go there now: http://www.avega.se/

Well worth the wait and a major, major improvement over the last one. Really nice design and easy on the eye. And quite informative also - lots of interesting content to read about Avega and the consultants.

Right… almost forgot; I am on the site. If you go to the first page and wait for a while I’ll flash (no pun intended) before your eyes. My 10 seconds of fame on the net.

This site adds to the proud feeling I already have for Avega. The best place I’ve ever worked on. If you’re interested of joining us, please let me know.

This has been a hard case to crack for quite sometime now… And it’s really annoying since at first the task seems so simple. Bare with me for a short history:

Very often users of a system want to send emails through the application, or send things in the application (document etc.) via email.

That is no biggie, I’ll use SMTP-mail - you think… until they add the demand “and of course we need to know if the mail reach the delivery address”. Often that last part doesn’t come up until the system is in production and the situation occurs.

Now you have some real tricky questions to handle. SMTP is a fire and forget protocol. There is no waiting until the mail has reached the recipient. Until .NET 2.0 that was also the case for us programmers. And of course you don’t want to integrated with Outlook or whatever...