Soo - today the Europeans will start. My thoughts and hopes are of course with the Gothenburg Brass Band. I had the opportunity to hear the band a few weeks back I can say that they are in very good shape indeed.

But - I don’t think it will take them all the way. There are some insanely good bands competing this year.

Here is my very “from-the-hip” prediction of how the Europeans will end:

1. Cory
2. Stavanger
3. Gothenburg

It of course will have to do with how and what the judges think about the different styles of playing.

When I was on Sardine we went to a nice (and expensive) jet set place at the top of the island, called Porto Cervos. And there outside the Hotel Cervo, that looked like one from a James Bond-movie, we found the car on the picture above.

When looking closer we found that it had Swedish plates. So we checked with Bilregistret and checked who owned it. It was mr Behernad von der Osten-Sacken!

After we had laughed for about 10 minutes to that name we found out that not only was the name real, he is an economical doubtful person in the news in Sweden right now.

So he’s probably hiding away in Sardine, at Hotel Cervo. Did I mention that the car wasn’t paid in cash? Very nice car though…

Just started the first day after a trip to Sardine (?) in Italy, with Avega.

What a great bunch of people! I really enjoyed myself during this trip. On the way home I had a feeling that often have come over me when I been on tours or camps… you know: “so - now it’s over I we will never have this much fun again. Just think if it would last forever”. Only difference this time is that it will last.

So a big thank you to all the organizers for the trip and to all the Avega People that made this trip into what it was - great fun and a great feeling of “we can do anything”.

I’ll upload some pictures to this post - some that not is to … exposing

I love the new System.Transaction found in .NET 2.0. I have been and will continue to use it in my applications.

When you compare it with for example the Enterprise Service management it’s so slim and lightweight. And the scaling up to SQL 2005 Transactions when need is a feature that will be nice when that kick in.

My favorite among them all, though, is the TransactionScope, which makes a nice and easy visual way of showing what is part of the transaction and not.

However, I found out a small glitch yesterday. Apparently there is a configuration value (maxTimeout) hidden away in the machine.config-file on each computer. This value defaults to ten minutes and that value overrides any values found in other configs (web.config or app.config).

So - if you need long running transaction you will have to tweak that value. See this articles for more information.

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Chuck is back - a few years (i think) back there was some sites around the Internet listing how hard the ex-action-hero Chuck Norris is.

You know Chuck, I presume - he’s the hero of such great epic movies as missing in action and foremost the long runner Walker Texas Ranger. They are both crap and probably mr Norris shouldn’t have gone into making movies at the first place. He’s a karate guy.

Anyhow - here is a list of the top quotes about how hard Chuck Norris is. http://4q.cc/index.php?pid=top100&person=chuck

Something says me that I’ll be needing this link further on http://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html

It is a good introduction to TDD and very down-to-earth and practical. Which we of course like a lot.

When trying to force something to be what you want you have to know when to give up and when to keep trying a little while longer… that’s my lesson from this week.

Last friday (?) i wrote about namespaces in VB.NET and how to make them appear a the top of the class file automatically. Well I learned a lot about VB since then (actually!) and one of the things are the philosophy of VB.NET. VB.NET comes from a long row of Visual Basic releases, who all are alike in the way that the frees the user from having to care about the stuff behind the scene.

(If you don’t like VB.NET please feel free to exchange the word “frees” to “hides” in the previous sentence :))

Although there are lesser and lesser stuff tucked away there are still some inheritance from that traditions and Default Namespace is...

OK, the weekend is over (yes, prolonged I know) and my list of scary stuff is now down to almost nothing. Which I take that I am not afraid of nothing anymore - good!

On Sunday I was presenter on the last concert of Gothenburg Brass Band. Sad - but I tried to keep the focus of that fact and keep focus on the music instead. For me the concert also was a milestone since the conductor was Nicholas Childs - the musical director of Black Dyke Band, brass band personality extraordinaire and one of my childhood idols. I still have posters of him (and his brother Robert) on my boy room wall.

The concert went well with a bit of awkward twist since an early flight spoiled the order of the program. From what I heard in the audience that didn’t interfere much. The band was also in...

(UPDATED 2007-04-26 after reading this see https://www.marcusoft.net/2007/04/chose-your-battles.html)

When converting myself from C# to VB.NET I found one thing that annoyed me very much; when you create a new class in VB.NET the namespace is not included in the file.

After a long and hard search I found out that there is a bit of a cultural difference here that comes into play. On the project-file for VB.NET project you’ll find a setting called Root Namespace. The text you write here gets pre-pended to all classes a compile-time. So if you project has a namespace called Marcusoft.Business and you create a class called Product, the complete namespace for the class is Marcusoft.Business.Product.

Note that the Root Namespace gets pre-pended even if you state a namespace in the class. With Root Namespace to Marcusoft.Business and Namespace Entities above the class declaration the complete namespace for the class would be Marcusoft.Business.Entities.Product.

Apparently...

Just for the record I also need to add a small notice as an answer to my battering of VB.NET…. It’s not to bad actually.

I switched syntax in about a day and feel quite at home with it now. A few things that is a bit strange for the kind of language that VB.NET is (i.e. helpful and forgiving):

• The refactor menu from Visual Studio 2005 is gone! Why is that? It so good… Well found a freeware download which I am using now. The GUI of that download is really cool, maybe a bit irritating after a while, even.
• Namespaces are a bit troublesome. If you create a folder in your project and then add a class into it, the class still get the project default namespace. I’ve been doing some googling about it but cannot find a solution to it…

But all in...