While I am on the subject i might as well reveal how the Swedish Brass Band Championships will go down.

This year it will be tighter, there is a two new band in Sweden - both will very impressive line up and good potential.

Windcorp - was around last year and did very well indeed. An impressive second place after only a few months of playing together. Very impressive.

Stockholm BrassBand - this is the newest band and also one with the most respectful line-up. The band is made up mostly of professionals in the Stockholm orchestras.

But, i am sorry, they will never have a chance to beat the current champions, Gothenburg . I have played with them for a year and a half an know what they are made of. They mean serious business, also they have signed Nicholas Childs to do rehearsals for a...

The Nationals (British Nationals that is) of this year has been battled out this weekend. And since the test piece was “easier” than usually a surprising result were to be expected.

However this did not happen, but it was good to see Grimethorpe (for all you non-brass-people, that is the band that starred in Brassed Off) take a big title. They have only won entertainment stuff for a while and is such a great band so they deserved it.

Black Dyke missed out on a double (Open + Nationals) but still is always up there. Impressive.

When will Buy as You View Cory (third) ever win something? They haven’t done that in a while, to my knowledge. Maybe time to turn away from the old style playing that they are into (with fast, uncontrolled vibrato as one of the main feature).

More to read on this can be found Read More

Saw a movie yesterday that i must recommend; Lucky Number Slevin (http://www.slevin-movie.com/).

It’s in the same spirit as The usual suspects and i really enjoyed it. Great performances by some great actors also. Lucy Lui was awsome and the guy (Josh Hartnett) playing the lead character did a great job too.

So if You havn’t seen it … Do it now! It is well worth the time and money.

Returned to Stockholm from a small tour… exhausted of course.

Funny how playing and spending so much time together bonds you and makes new friends. I really had a great time with the band.

The playing from the band also took of, and became better and better. For me too, even though a major split spoiled the very last note of the encore. Really embarrassing, but hey - that’s life.

Gave (swedish expression) blood on my tooth though. More. More practice!

Found a “splitter” (the technical term i presume) that i liked, with the very descriptive name Slice Audio File Splitter.

Seems to be free also, which means that i like it more ;-)

Played a concert last night….

The sound of applause is so nice. The term rewarding has never been more appropriate.

And yet the act in itself is very basic, almost childish. I wonder when that was invented. Or if it’s still different from different parts of the world. I’ve heard that deaf people don’t clap their hands but wiggle them instead, that might be used in other parts of the world also.

I recorded the concert on my IRiver (love it) and today I will try to get hold of a program that splits Mp3’s.

The test were not done by the end of yesterday, which leads to that my trusted mobile still is safe.

From now on i will be more careful on what to bet on. Maybe smaller, easier to swallow things.

My good friend Fredrik “Fran” Anfelter found the solution of a very irritating problem.

If Visual Studio 2005 is set to Treat all warnings as error, with warning level 4 (which both are good practices) you will get a LOT of error for any CSS-properties that is defined by you. This has to do with that no XML-schema exists to validate those properties for the .css-file.

However there is a setting in Visual Studio 2005 that will help you to get rid of those errors. Under Tools->Options->Text Editor->CSS->CSS Specific the dialog to the right can be found.

Simply uncheck the “Detect unknown properties” and the errors a but a memory from the past.

The “formally correct” solution would have been to include a XML-schema that validates the properties used in the css-file. Two problems though:

...

In my current project we are using a some asynchronous webservice method calls. The actual call are in turn encapsulated in a layer that is used by the GUI, the “ClientCommand”-layer.

However when writing tests for these method we ran into trouble…. First the NUnit-framework is not very good at handling events at all, but by using this excellent article by Peter Provost i got a nice, compact way of doing the tests.

Then it was the whole asynchronous thing, which really was hard to get by. The solution given above worked out fine as long as not any assertions went threw exceptions - but what is the use of that?

So the simple solution to the problem was to simply wait for the event to fire and be handled. This was solved by setting a bool variable (bEventHandled) and not continue with the assertions until that bool was...

Today i might have to eat my mobile (QTek 8100) and an indian Nan-bread….

I have bet the IT-department at my customer that I would do that if the test-team has finnished their testing in one day (which is the set time).

Although they never has done that before i am still a bit nervous. It looks really big and hard to … “handle”. I’ll try to find a loophole to get me out of it… maybe if i made a replica of marispan and ate it really fast they wouldn’t know the difference.

To the right is a picture of my phonemodel… Gulp