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...

At my new customer (a big insurance company in Sweden) I have met so many friends and people I know from the past, that I am just amazed over how small Sweden is. Or IT in Sweden are a more correct way of putting it.

Here is a small list of people I’ve met so far:

• First day - met a friend that I knew from my first IT-job, at Skandia. Henrik something. I haven’t seen him since I stopped work there in 1999
• Second day - learned and met the chief business architect for my project… He is my neighbor from a year back. He met me the first time when I locked myself out and tried to pry the door open. He helped…
• Third day - met a friend from university that I hung with for the major part of the time there. We haven’t seen each...

The presentation yesterday went well. Just thought I’ll drop that in here since I have being bringing it up again and again.

About 120 people in the auditorium and circa 20-40 people listening in via video-link… quite cool, even though it made the presentation a bit harder. A funny (but nice) calmness came over me the minute I stepped up on the stage. I also managed to keep the timing of the presentation down to the minute (a first for me :))

The presentation was about SCRUM and it was quite well received. I’ve heard several people talking about it (both positive and negative word) already - which I take as a good thing. I could post the slides here if only BlogSpot allowed me.

So - continuing today on my road to a working environment, but much lesser amount of butterflies in the stomach…

When digging around for TDD stuff I have started a small series (?) about how to actually implementing the good ideas and promises from TDD.

Found another good article on the practicalities for Test Driven Development. This one is about Mock Objects.

The minute after you start to think about doing TDD through all your code you find yourself pondering about how to test only the current layer. For example the business layer has references to the Data Access layer (as it often do) but I only want to test the business layer. This is solve by Mock objects, which the article is about.

Also some issues about configuration arises. Like; how can I assure that the mocked objects are used in a test run but now in a debug run… There are some references about that also in the article.

Yesterday I started a new assignment. Still the insurance business but a very different company. This is so big in comparison. The IT-department has 150 employed developers to be compared with the three person from the last place.

This also reflects in the administration, some of it is quite cool - with some really impressive login-scripts and some is not so cool like waiting for a day for admin rights on your computer. But all in all its fun to do something new.

Soon the scary presentation will start… The butterflies has a gathering in my stomach. A short prayer and knowing that I have prepared will probably make them disappear…

Got a this link from a friend.

Check out step number 23 in this description on how to get from New York to Dublin in the easiest, fastest and safest way.

Also - I am now entering one of the more hectic periods of my life (with two free days for the next four weeks, if I remember correctly) so the blogging will probably stand back for a while. But I’ll keep you all posted.

The things I am going to do during this time include (strange combination, I must say):

• Playing solo at a concert with SolnaBrass
• parting new assignment within my work
• and ending the previous one
• Presenting talk about SCRUM in front of hundreds (brrrr)
• Presenting two concerts with Gothenburg Brass Band
• ing host at the get-together after Bengt Eklund’s funeral
• Standard playing with the Salvation Army at Vasa

Well - interesting times are ahead. I am sure it will be fun… also