On my way to work today i noticed that the Easter was initiated in the windows of the shops i passed. This is a discussion you don’t hear so often; the shops starting Easter earlier and earlier each year. I mean the same is said for Christmas … wonder why.

Anyhow - these times are always hectic and this year is no exception;

• 40 years jubilee for the Vasa Corps
• Concert with brass band
• A lot of different meetings and committees
• etc

But - as always - most of these are fun things to do so i am not that worried. Besides - spring is in the air. There is something about the light and air this time of the year that fills you with hope, like “you know what? We just might make it to summer. Again”

Have a good one - peace out.

Found the site InfoQ (do NOT mix this with AvenueQ) that contains some very good articles, presentations and even books about agile development and related stuff. Have up to now just seen and read some parts but it all looks very promising.

Here are my shortlist so far:

• Book on Domain Driven Design
• Great OOP presentation
• Visual Studio tips and tricks

This will be often visited by me in the future. I promise…

During the last months i have snowed in on Agile development. I don’t really know why i first started to look at it but i think it has to do with that all the problems that agile methods claims to solve they always state in the outset of the description of the method. For example:

• Does the requirements often change in your project?
• Would you like a system that improved in quality over time?
• Is your system hard to test?
• Is it hard to predict how long time or how big a change in your system is?
• … and more of the same kind…

It’s all very “selly” and provocative but i have actually ran into most of these points in projects, recent and distant.

Altogether this force me into looking into it more which probably (and hopefully) will reflect on the blog.

Here is a quite annoying...

If you ever are in Russia… in St Petersburg… please take the bus. This is one of the crossings in the town.

No lights. No stop-signs. No speed limit. Looks pretty dangerous. Or like Borat says: to drive like that “.. is like giving gun to monkey. Very Dangerous! “

The last posts has been a bit boring… Sorry, i mean technical. So here is something maybe a little more refreshing.

Mr Kenny Rogers is the great country star of USA (or the world maybe). And apparently The Gambler is his great hits. This version is with Muppets and is quite sweet…

Found this article on Agile Software Development and it made me realize two thing that humbled me:

• I haven’t done to much of Agile development. And reading this article makes me sad… This thoughts that agile development base the whole development process on is solution to many of the problems that i have encountered in different projects. I have even said and been the guys that mr Folwer talks about as “the old, bureaucratic engineering” developers. Brrr - sends shivers down my spine when i think about it :)
• The .NET community is a bit behind… or in any case can only harvest the good ideas invented by the Java-community. This article is written 2000! And! in it he talks about these methodologies as they have been around for some year.

But then again - isn’t this what it is all about. Get some new idea, try...

Found this site http://www.istadensspar.se/.

Apparently this is a guy that used to drive a subway train in Stockholm underground who got tired of getting the same question all of the time; “what does it look like in the tunnels?”. So he brought his camera and took some pretty amazing pictures.

The pictures on the site is just a small selection of the pictures in the book but very very nice. The book will probably be bought and placed on a future coffetable…

The last two days has been spent chasing bugs in production environment.

For non-developers this is a bit like trying to fix a broken bridge with traffic still running, i.e. quite scary, stressful and with angry users thinking that you can go faster.

We have now arrived to a solution on the bugs and the reflection phase sets in. Nice…

On of the problems (non-production I’m glad to say) had to do with ASP.NET and Javascript. The customer wanted the ENTER-button to trigger a login-form to submit. But the page had some other parts in the form that also submitted.

This has been troublesome to solve in ASP and ASP.NET for a long time but with ASP.NET 2.0 there is a very nice solution to this problem, an attribute called DefaultButton.

Here is a nice article describing how to use it.

Update: just after implementing this solution we found...

This weekend i was guest on a wedding. It was all very nice but it struck me how hard it is to keep those kind of parties interesting for everybody.

A quite natural focus is on two persons and if you don’t know them (as i didn’t do - and as often is the case) it will tend to get quite hard to follow.

Then there is the thing with the people around your table. A strange tradition in Sweden is that you are placed with people you don’t know. And this only if you are married yourself - up to that point you are seated with your girlfriend.

So that placed me next to the priests wife. She was quite nice but talked soft and also dozed of into sleep from time to time. This is not a very good grade for me I realize :). To my defense...

This was one of my favorite TV-programs when i was a kid. It quite sad when you think about the quality, but the character has become somewhat a legend in Sweden. And here you can find all the episodes http://www.tv5.org/TV5Site/la_linea/

Got the tip from my father, which is a first, but equally fun.