My band, the <span id=”SPELLING_ERROR_0” classVasa band of the Salvation Army, is entering the busiest season of the year - the Christmas season! I counted to 9 gigs during this season with different sizes of the band.

If brassbanding had as much to do during all of the year as under the Christmas season there would be a lot of more professional bands around, I can promise you.

One thing that strikes me every year this happens (i.e. almost every year) is that it’s so easy to get lost in the busy-ness surrounding Christmas. This is also well known, we say this to each other each year; but do we remember the true reason for Christmas: Jesus and his coming to this earth for you and me.

During the gigs we have we will have lots of opportunities to introduce pieces and this will be my main theme this year;...

I’ve looked further down the documentation (this chapter in fact) and found some more, very interesting stuff on generics that make my solution with delegates a bit clumsy and non-elegant. When declare a generic class or method the type parameter can be limited to what types it can take using constraints. So in my solution the row:

public static TWebService CreateWebService(string WebServiceURL) where TWebService : SoapHttpClientProtocol

means that TWebService must be of SoapHttpClientProtocol type.

However I ran into a bit of confusion when I wanted to instantiate TWebService. The compiler was not happy when I wrote: // This won’t compile TWebService t = new TWebService();

That is until I discovered another constraint - the Constructor Constraint. By using this constraint you can constrain the types that is allowed to types with an empty (parameterless) constructor. And that will allow you to instantiate TWebService and...

Just a short notice….

Went to a marvelous concert last night with Mnzoil Brass. Great, great stuff! This is a really good example on how to do something very well and then adding humor to it. Magic!

If they are in the same part of the world as you - don’t miss it!

The Swedish brass band championships took place this weekend and as i hope it became the best brass band competition ever in Sweden.

Also to my prediction the Gothenburg Brass band went home with the first price. I am quite proud of getting the first three band, in the right order a month ahead of the competition. The only thing I missed was the points. See for yourself

To my opinion Gothenburg was best on the own choice program (the part i heard) - but not with as much as I expected. Windcorp really made a very very good effort with Tristan Encounters - which is a very hard piece indeed.

Full results from the competition can be found here

This now contains an update http://marcushammarberg.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-about-generic-webservces.html. Be sure to look it up for a more elegant solution. ====================================================

Yesterday was spent with my nose deep down the documentation of .NET 2.0, pondering poses and headscratching.

But the reward was a quite cool little hack that solved a tricky problem in our solution.

In my current project we’re are using some webservices and these all need to be configured in the same way. These configurations has to do with setting the URL in runtime, using other credentials, caching and maybe other things that we want to be able to do for all webservices.

So what I wanted is a WebServiceCreator with metods that creates the webservices and does the requested configurations. So my first thought was to use generics - and that was right for quite a while.

I created a class WebServiceCreator that has one (and so many overloads...

Yesterday we had a coffee with two of our best friends that are becoming parents in a few days…

Really exciting and it made me ponder for a while; How is it that when you met some parents and children it makes you feel like you never want to get children of your own and others have the quite opposite effect.

The first group of parents you all know - it’s the ones walking three baby carries on a line, taking forever to order in McDonald’s and still needs to go there on rush hour and meeting for a mum-coffee (6 mums also) in the small coffeeshop on the corner and still demanding the room at the far end, children running around.

The other group is like my friends; the children is a wonderful enrichment to their life but the don’t become hardcore-parents from the same day they knew they...

For the first time BBC has included a complete listening of a winning performance on the show Listen to the band…

It’s Grimethorpe playing the Les Francs Juges by Berlioz in arrangement of Frank Wright.

Great stuff and I always enjoy hearing the cheering at the end of a great performance. Listen for your self

This is also a good example on how hard some of the “easy” pieces is. Since the standard required to win on a “easy” piece will go up every mistake will count and that in itself will maybe create more nervousity …

Well - this is a great performance.

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This might be an obvious thing for some, but I have missed its full potential for a while. And thank you, Stefan, for pointing it out to me.

There is a new feature in Visual Studio 2005 called Solution Folders. These are only a structural feature and do not affect the namespace or naming of the items within them. The primary use for Solution Folders was probably to hold things common to the whole solution, like snk files, build scripts, etc.

But another very nice feature is the ability to structure projects within the solution. Say that you have a number of projects (see top pictures to the left). Often, you will only be working in one project at a time, and it can be quite hard to get an overview of them. By simply introducing...

Ran into an old “friend” compiler error…

This error - actual warning, but if you like I have “all errors as warnings” this will stop you in your steps - will occur in Visual Studio 2005 when you point to a snk-file from the AssemblyInfo-file.

Since this was the way to refer to snk-files in VS2003 this will probably happen to you on your first try. There are a lot of people that has written how to solve this, for example http://davidkean.net/archive/2005/08/25/1162.aspx

The solution is to point to the key-file from the properties of the project. However this has to be done by editing the projectfile in a text editor. The article above gives instructions on how to do that.

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To do this, following these instructions:

1. Open the project file (.csproj for C# or .vbproj for VB) in a text editor
2. Look for the <AssemblyOriginatorKeyFile> attribute within...

Got a new CD this weekend, Paul Anka - Rock Swings. This is so good! And Mr. Anka sings great—I can’t believe he’s over 70 years old.

On the CD, he (or someone) has put together some hits from the Rock and Pop world from the last two decades and turned them into Big Band pieces. They are all executed in a way that makes you feel that this is the way the song was supposed to sound. I love it.

I realize that some people would probably knock me out for saying so, but I really like this. This is one of those recordings that could (and would) have been destroyed if it weren’t for the great musicians, great arrangements, etc. Songs like “Jump” by Van Halen and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana would probably make some fans cry…

Also,...