Here is a story about when my dignity was shredded. True I am afraid.

This weekend the Salvation Army Congress was held here in Sweden. We played with a small band on the last meeting, which of course was way to long for my tired eyes. So afterwards I rushed to get out instruments and packing.

Coming up from the basement I found a small boy (4 years maybe) pointing to a toilet saying: “He’s bleeding”. And right he was - in the toilet was another boy bleeding from his nose. A lot. Inside the toilet was also an old Salvation Army missionary women. And she was not afraid of digging in. I found her (ca 90 years mind you) wiping the floor and pinching the nose of the boy at the same time.

Of course I told her that she didn’t have to do that. I took over the...

Again - the Swedish summer proved to be a very good choice for marriage. A week and a year after Elin and I got married, Elins younger sister did the same. Her husband (now-a-days ;)) is a very nice guy and they were a splendid couple.

Also it again made me realize how happy I can be that have such nice relatives and the once “added” to the family is equal nice and good to be with. I really enjoy spending time with them.

When that is said; the weekend was quite hectic involving me driving back-and-forth Vallentuna and Stockholm (3 Swedish miles one way) more times than I care to remember. Also the weekend was topped of with playing at the Salvation Army Congress here in Sweden. It was quite fun also, but I was so tired…

Refactoring support for VB.NET in Visual Studio is not very good out-of-the-box.

No fear; here is a tool that introduces refactor support for VB.NET - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/tools/refactor/

It also has a very funky GUI…

I searched a while for this, actually… which is strange since all I wanted to do is to find the current user name and the current user domain.

It’s dead simple with the following lines: Dim userName As String = System.Environment.UserNameDim userDomain As String = System.Environment.UserDomainName So if you ever look for how to find the information about the current user - here it is

I ran into some problems when creating my addIn. Here are the solution to them:

1. When I used the OutputTaskItemString the items was shown in the Error list, but when I double clicked on them nothing happened. I also noticed that only the first error was shown in the Output-window, where all the errors was supposed to be shown. This was a real small but annoying problem. The strings you write to the output window (and to the task) needs to end with a newline. Quite obvious when you know it. When I changed that everything worked out just dandy
2. Deploying my add-in was (and maybe still is) a pain. Mostly this probably has to do with that my current customer has the My Documents-folder on a network share, but I am not sure. I found two good articles surrounding this: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/AddinCustomAction.asp and http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/19dax6cz(VS.80).aspx.

Just some...

As frequent readers of this blog probably have noticed, I am not that impressed with VB.NET. Don’t get me wrong it is a great language but I think that there are a lot of improvements in Visual Studio for C# that you are missing when you’re using VB.NET.

One of those things you miss is the possibility to get warning for missing and faulty XML comments used for documentation with for example NDoc. I wrote about this before and won’t go into anymore details - but you can’t get these warnings and it sucks. So - I have now hacked together an add-in for Visual Studio that finds missing and empty XML comments in VB.NET. The tool reports everything missing on all public and protected code-objects as tasks in the task list (see picture).

For our, quite big solution (11 projects, 55 000 lines of code) it takes...

In Sweden most people enjoy at around four weeks of summer leave from their work. Since you can take this leave whenever you want during the summer the “slow” period tend to drag out.

Also we start to think about that period or at least plan for it long ahead of it.

But not here, I can tell you! (for real). We have been hacking away in a furious tempo at work and rounding up some things from the moving. And then there is the wedding of Elins sister this weekend…

Been busy - so not that many blog post has been produced. But then again - now I can still claim that I only write when I have something interesting to say… Like this post ;)

Here is something that always is a point of discussion in software development projects; “How many lines of code is this, anyway?”

This is a add-in to Visual Studio (worked like a charm on my 2005 version) that counts the lines of code, in- and excluding comments and blank rows if you want to.

Really nice actually and quite fun also. It is at least some kind of measurement, for the project management anyway.

Oh yeah - in six weeks we have produced 48 000 lines of code… We’re so proud! But also, I once heard that typically a programmer introduce a bug with every 100 lines of code he write; that gives us 480 bugs in the system. For that we would not be so proud.. :)

There is a movement growing in Sweden called “The humanist” or something. They are not that many but since they are high profile people the tend to take a lot of medial space. Also they have a very hard and condemning tone in many of their articles and appearances.

Their main thesis (according to a TV-interview with their leader Christer Sturmark yesterday) is that they are against religion but all the bad things religion leads to.

Well, well, well - that is something extra I must say. (sarcasm coming up:) Because all we religious people think that is the bad things that people do in the name of all religions are the thing to focus on. In fact - I think that, that is the whole idea with religion. Or isn’t it?

Seeing an embarrassing debate in TV yesterday, surrounding this, I thought of two things:

• What is the...

This took us a while to find and put together. I don’t want to have to go through it again.

This function takes a xml-string and transforms it with the sent-in XSL (also string). The output is returned as a memory stream that, for example, can be set in a web browser controls DocumentStream property.

Here is the code (yes, in my favorite new language VB.NET ;)):

Friend Shared Function TransformXML(ByVal xmlString As String, ByVal xslString As String) As MemoryStream Dim memStream As MemoryStream = Nothing Try ' Create a xml document from the sent-in string Dim xmlDoc As New XmlDocument xmlDoc.LoadXml(xmlString) ' Load the xsl as a xml...