I have thrown together a small application for generating index cards from a Excel-based backlog list. This is very handy when you do sprint planning meetings. A printed index card is easier to move around on a withe board than a row in Excel.

The ScrumIndexCardCreator reads an Excel-file and lets the user select one or more to print. Its not very fancy but it still get the work done. To the right you’ll find some screenshots of it.

Anyone interested in it can contact me marcus,hammarberg (a) avega se

Another demo, another day! The demo yesterday went very well and more important the people that attended the demo was please and the project is running well.

I am most impressed with the output that SCRUM gives… We have been coding for three weeks now and actually have something useful to show to the customer. They understood that this was only a part, but a full part, of the final product.

More so - the team members seems to enjoy themselves in the project and we have great “flow” right now. It the project-heaven I always heard about… I hope I don’t have to experience the counterpart of it…

Today is the first Sprint Demo for our project… We have cover quite a distance during the project so far so I am very proud to show this to the customer and to lift up the achievements of the project members.

Still there is always the risk of the dreaded demo-ghost - but I pray for it to keep away today. I also have a brand new shirt on… that have to count for something.

After just one sprint I can warmly recommend SCRUM to anyone who hasn’t tried it. It WILL get you so much more productive, with greater focus and the ability to react to changes. All these three has been major factors for our success so far.

So, I humbly list myself after those who witness of the greatness of SCRUM. As a colleague of mine said “If you want quality - it’s the only way to...

Yesterday we moved! From our 30 square meters to 63 feels like a move from a closet to a hangar…

It was very, very nice to be able to take a shower without having to stand above the toilet (called Stockholm-shower) and to walk from a room to another.

When you move from a small apartment, like ours, it doesn’t take that long time either. Also we move one floor down - which helped the tempo a great

I’ll include some pictures from the apparent.

A special thank you to the nice folks at Indiska Odenplan, who stored our bench for 1 1/2 month. Thanks - it worked out great.

My favorite radio show - the Listen to the Band - show from the BBC Radio 2 has done a retrospective show of the European.

A great part of the show is spent with focus on the Goteborg Brass Band. Some great playing and a very nice (and clarifying interview with Clare Farr). Thank you!

I am so proud to have been a part of that band and that great history that now is finished.

And finally; again thank you Bengt!

Got a tip from a friend about this marvelous appearance from the Melbourne Staff Band of the Salvation Army. I really the idea of using the band as more than just a concert outfit… Just think what could be done surrounding a story or a sketch. I’ll have to do something about that I think…

Well here you go in the right order:

Ran into another problem just now…

If you have code in the Load-event of a Windows user control, it will fire when the user control is shown in Visual Studio at design-time. This can be troublesome if the code doesn’t compile or needs some runtime-only variables.

However all Windows forms controls (forms, user controls etc.) inherits from ComponentModel which in turn has a property that’s called DesignMode. This property is true when the Component (control in our case) is shown in design-mode in Visual Studio.

Beware for this special case though…

I think I finally found a solution to a very annoying problem. As always the solution (once found) was almost trivial…

Here’s the problem; in many modern system architectures there are at least one web service involved, sometimes more than one that call each other in sequence. When such a system is debugged in Visual Studio it now-a-days works very fine.

But… if you have a long running debugging session (like, for example, yesterday when I demonstrated some features for my team) the debugging fails all of a sudden with a time-problem. The error description doesn’t point you to anything good either.

I think i finally found a solution to a very annoying problem. As always the solution (once found) was almost trivial…

However - some colleagues of mine showed me the possibility to start several projects at once when debugging. Right-click the solution in Visual Studio 2005 and choose...

Got a link from a colleague… This is bi-ig… and quite good also

The Göteborg Brass band is no more… This is not news for the band and many of the fans, including me, but it feels weird and very sad.

I must say that I fully understand the reasoning behind the decision and that it’s probably the right thing to do - but still it so sad…

For me personally the band has been something of my idols (and almost legends) for a long, long time. Then, in 2005, I got to play with the band myself. I still remember the day in the office - doing cartwheels and scream (like many other days, I hear some people say :)). That also was the start of 2 fantastic years with the band. Very very hectic with many travel hours to rehearsals and lots of time away on tours.

I wouldn’t change a thing! It was so great, so many memories surface;...