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 post now contains an update https://www.marcusoft.net/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 head scratching.

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 web services 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 web services.

So what I wanted is a WebServiceCreator with methods that creates the web services 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...

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 Judges 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 nervosity …

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 project file in a text editor. The article above gives instructions on how to do that.

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>...

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,...

Today, it’s the day before a holiday in Sweden. That means that most people either don’t work at all or work only half the day.

But… you’ve guessed it. As a consultant, those rules don’t apply. We don’t work half days, which I think is a good thing, but what I don’t think is good is being left all alone in the office. I am struggling to keep the tempo up.

Above

This week I found out that I good friend of mine is dying in cancer.

He has battled one form of cancer during the spring and summer - and actually won over it. So in late august I spoke to him and there were no signs of the cancer. A real miracle if you ask me, because he wasn’t given any good chances.

But all of a sudden, a week ago, the cancer came back - this time in the brain and in a place where nothing can be done.

Cancer really is a terrible decease - it seems to be able to hunt you down even after you think that you have beaten it. In a way it becomes more than a decease, it’s almost as something with a mind of it’s own. I didn’t think I could feel hatred for a decease but I do. I am angry...

Today, and most of all yesterday, was the first snowstorm of the winter in the Stockholm area.

Every year, I’m saying every year, we miss this. First, the trains are stopped by falling leaves, and then, what do you know, snow? Here in Sweden? How can it happen?

People couldn’t get home, all buses in the Stockholm area stopped, etc. But then again, we knew about this storm for about two weeks.

Maybe if the buses had winter tires on, or all other vehicles for that matter, it wouldn’t be such an issue.

Anyway, this catches us each year, and I am not expecting any co-workers until 10 o’clock today.