As many might know there are not many bands in the Salvation Army left. In the Stockholm area we have four that is functioning every week. And now there have been considerable moving from one band to another; it is in reality only two families that has moved from the Södertälje Band to the Stockholm Southern Band. But that makes up about 8-10 playing persons so it will make a impact. Since Södertälje is my home-band i really feel for them loosing so many players at once. But in one way that makes it all much easier - there is now only one way forward: lets start building something from the ground up. Build the band as the christian fellowship it is supposed to be instead of clinging to old merits that the band did 15-20 years back. Build the group not the reputation. It reminds me of a story...

As I’ve written before the refactoring support in Visual Studio 2005 is non-existing (or at least very very bad) for Visual Basic. So we have to settle with third party products. The best I’ve found is Refactor! but it’s not very good either (my studio hangs from time to time after installing Refactor!). But now there are new hopes; a new version of Refactor! is highlighted when the studio is started. Download the new version here for free and see a movie about its use here. Refacator! still has the coolest GUI I’ve seen for a long time. Not that usable maybe but cool. I am keeping my fingers crossed for the product to be better than earlier versions… which is pretty hard when you are programming ;)

In the brass band one of the most neglected instrument is the tenor horn. It’s however very important for the sound of the band to have good horn players. But since the horn players seldom get the opportunity to “shine” not many player plays it and there is the dilemma. So it’s rare and really fun to here really good horn players and the best one around right now must be Owen Farr. He is featured this week on Listen To The Band in finale of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. It’s simply breathtaking! I can’t believe some of the sounds and technique he produces. I am for the first time in my life thinking of buying a CD with a tenor horn player. I am doing it! Now!

From one of the Visual Studio videos I got this tip: http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/ It is a site that holds a lot of free templates (CSS and XHTML) that you can use to build websites with. So now you have something to start off with instead of hacking it all by yourself. Especially good for me since i don’t have any design-related cells at all.

Found some introduction videos about Visual Studio 2008 that look quite promising: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb655906.aspx

Do you remember a year back when we all was so happy to start using Visual Studio 2005 - it’s old, my friend. Old i tell you. Microsoft is releasing Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 which usually means that they are about half a year from releasing a stable version of it. This time even i feel that things are moving quite fast in our world… I read this white paper about it yesterday and it doesn’t seem to be any big revolutions in the release, such as the 2.0 version of the .NET framework was.

OK - something has happened on the net when i was on vacation. The new site www.facebook.com has suddenly exploded. With people, with functions and foremost with activity… I just heard about before leaving but suddenly everyone has a account and is writing in guestbooks and adding photos. There are some quite cool functionality in there but all in all i am getting a bit annoyed by all these stay-in-touch-sites. I mean, who really has the time to maintain a work-network on LinkedIn, friend network on facebook and a network of old schoolmates on whatever.com. Well, well it’s always fun to meet friends so i’ll tag along

I am home again after four weeks vacation. Feels great and i am really in the mood to get down and do some programming again, and playing, and all the other stuff that i normally do. The vacation has been filled with wonderful sights (pictures from Croatia included above) and experiences. But, as it always do, you long for home in the end - and that is a good thing right? I mean that means that you like your home the best of the places you been so far - good for me. :) The news i promised in an earlier post is that we are going to have a baby! still five months away… I promise some more facts and my thoughts on parenthood etc. in posts to follow. For now we are just very happy! And no And yes - there are a lot of twins in the...

Today is the last day of work for me… for the summer. Now a wonderful 4 week period of doing nothing much is starting. For me the summer holds the following: First two weeks of vac cation in Croatia with Elin and my sister (the first week) which should be very nice. We’re going to Pula but the plan is to go around and see other places. The main goal though is slow, nice and mind-winding vacation Then home for a short while to wash up The last part of the vacation is planned to be celebrated (yes, that’s the word :)) on Hypplen in the Gothenburg archipelago. So as you can see not much in there about computers, agile development or euphoniums and brass bands. That’s the whole idea! Vacation. So i how that you all will have or are having a nice one too. See ya’ll in the...

When converting from C# to VB.Net (not liking it though) i often find myself wondering “what is that keyword in VB.Net”. There are tons of pages that answer that question, this one is quite good and it can be nice to have one stop for all your questions: http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/vbnet_c__difference.asp If it fails for any reason try “[keyword in C#] vb.net” in Google.com. First hit will tell you the answer, never fails.