I’ve been away on a short trip to Paris for a few days. It was my surprise-birthday-present to Elin. She was really surprised also - i went to her workplace and played (of course) “our song” on my euphonium. I guess that it wasn’t too good since two people guessed that it was the fire alarm. This is, by far, the worst criticism i ever have gotten :).

Then we went to Paris and saw all the great things there; Sacre Couer, Eiffel Tower (yes - we went up. No - walked the first two levels, then elevator), L’arc Triumpic and Paris town in general. It really is a nice town. I’ve been there before and didn’t like it too much but now it was great.

The hotel we stayed in was not to great (Altona - don’t go there) and was run by two brothers that each...

Today i will introduce a great choir when they release a new CD. They are VasaGospel and i am so proud to have a choir like that in the ranks of our corps (church for all you non-salvationists).

I have been a secret fan of them and have listen to some of their earlier CD’s and they really rock! If you ever get the opportunity to hear them - don’t miss it! Great singing, great band and some great testimonies.

So - tonight they release their latest CD “In need”. Observatoriegatan 4, Stockholm. Don’t miss it.

Also, another first for me - introducing a CD-release

I’ve finally got around to work a bit more with our buildscript, which we are running on top of Team System. I’ve once coded a build script based on other products (CruiseControl.net, NUnit etc.) so i hoped and thought that this wouldn’t differ to much. However sometimes your hopes gets fulfilled and sometimes… well, you’ll see.

Firstly building buildscripts for Team Systems are more like responding to events that gets fired by the Team System build engine, than writing the flow yourself. Which events get fired and which order they fire in can be found here.

Also - the start of building buildscripts with Team System is a wizard, which is nice but all that it’s really doing is generating the stub for the MSBuild-script-file for you. If you want to tweak it (and you want) you’ll have to code in the “scary” MSBuild/XML-langauge.

And finally the Team System...

This is really fun and maybe useful also: http://www.midomi.com

What the site does is that it allows you to sing or hum a part of a song and then it finds the song for you. But wait, there is more; when you find the song you can also hear how others has … interpret the song.

This will be so fun in a few months when there are loads and loads of songs.

Speaking of nerds i found a new functionality in .NET 2.0, well to me anyway; String.IsNullOrEmpty.

And of course an ongoing religious discussion (and here) about it’s use and superiority to other ways of validating empty strings.

Aaaah - so nerdy and so important…

I have to warn all non-programming nerds for this one. Made me laugh out loud…

http://www.tlc-systems.com/babbage.htm

The next project will definitively be programmed in Babbage…

Thank you Pål, for making my morning

Oh - how i love to be right…

A few months back i was very upset about the ban of mobiles-phones on the subway and buses in Stockholm.

In that post i also wrote that we would laugh (“No really, i promise. For a while the subway had banned mobile phones…”) about that a year from then… Today we took the first step to the laughs since SL has revoked the prohibition.

It surely was one of the dumbest… no i think you get what i mean

In our project we have had great problems when debugging web services in Visual Studio. For about half of the the request on of two exceptions has been thrown:

• System.Net.WebException: The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request.
• System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: The underlying connection was closed

After some looking into i found a solution and it was (as ever) quite easy. You simply have to set credentials on the web service as follows: Dim m_wsService wsSystemName.SystemNameService = New wsSystemName.SystemNameServicem_wsService.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentialsm_wsService.PreAuthenticate = True I have not observed this problem in C# so i presume that it is VB.NET related… or i might just be bad.

I have under the last days trying to get our build script to work….

What we are trying to do is simple enough, but i can’t understand how to use the build mechanism in Team System to do what i want… We want to do the following:

• Compile all projects
• Update some config-files
• Run VSTS-tests
• Publish a ClickOnce-application and deploy it to a “latest version” folder
• Generate documentation

It’s the ClickOnce-part that’s not working and I’ve got an confirmation from Microsoft that what we want to do not is supported by default in VSTS. You need some third part products.

I think i am a solution in the tracks but there is still some things left. I’ll post a solution when (if???) i find it.

In my research so far i have had great use of the following resources:

• http://blogs.vertigosoftware.com/teamsystem/default.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/gautamg/archive/2006/01/04/509146.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/echarran/archive/2006/08/09/693284.aspx
...

The Göteborg Brass Band is terminated (as it’s said on the web) and it’s now very interesting to follow the different members on their way to other band.

Top of the list must be that Patrik Randefalk is the new soloeuphonium of the world-famous Eikanger-Bjørsvik band in Norway. This band is one of the best bands in the movement if you ask me and i am sure that Patrik will contribute to their continued successes. Good luck Patrik. Looking forward to hearing the band with the low brass led by you!

Windcorp Brass Band has signed several bandsmen from GBB already. In all honesty the band is made up from former GBB players from the outset so that is all in the same mindset. With these new players they will be very hard to beat. Also it will be very interesting to hear the band. I sure it...