I attended the second Limited WIP Society (Sweden) gathering. It’s a bunch of people that have taken a liking to Kanban practices.

This evening David J Andersson joined us and gave a very interesting presentation on how Kanban teams can reach CMMI level 5, i.e. ranked as very mature. This is, apparently, not repeated by teams doing other agile methods.

OK – during the second half, me and Joakim Sundén presented the Red Bead Experiment. Well, “played it out” I think would be a more appropriate way to describe it. It’s a game that aims to drive home the point Dr. W. Edwards Deming made – “a bad system will beat a good person every time”.

If you haven’t seen it before, there is an excellent recording with Benjamin Mitchell and David Joyce.

On the SkillsMatter site there are so many good things to read and see that I would have to spend a month just streaming video.

Just take a look at the categories:

• Agile testing & BDD
• Architecture & DDD
• Open source .NET
• Agile PM & Scrum
• Cloud & RIA

OK – the minute I have a few weeks to spare… yeah right!

I am on my way home after presenting at two concerts with Windcorp Brass Band. Exhausted but very happy.

It all went down quite well. The band was in excellent form and played well throughout the evening and their rendition of The Cossack will stay in my mind forever. Also, the things surrounding the concert were, as always, good.

My own part in the whole thing went well, even though I had missed the fact that the concert didn’t have an intermission. Quite embarrassing when I told the audience that a break was coming up, just to then call them back to their seats. Well, well – it became a joke and was quickly forgotten.

I love doing this! If there was a way to make a living presenting concerts I would take it immediately.

Thank you Windcorp Brass Band, Alex, Swedbank, and all my friends in...

Got a tip from Daniel about this video, that shows an easy way to learn and understand JQuery:

With this and Selenium I cannot stand back anymore – I need to install FireFox for the first time.

I’ve been attending a full day of presentations by Scott Guthrie, who seems to be involved in most things interesting at Microsoft. The output from this guy is just amazing; blogging, products, teams, and thoughts… A lot.

I really looked forward to hearing him live and specifically what he had to say about ASP.NET MVC 2.

It was all good – even though the tempo in the presentation was breakneck speed. Many of the new technologies from Microsoft nowadays aim to be extensible and possible to tweak to your preferences.

From ASP.NET MVC 2 I especially like:

• The xxxFor HTML-helper methods
• The EditorFor helper methods
• Areas (which I understood for the first time during this presentation, thank you Scott).

I’m now enjoying his presentation on Silverlight 4, which will be my introduction to Silverlight…

This was a great day that taught...

Found this nugget today when comparing numerous very long SQL-strings. Yeah, yeah – I know; data access is a solved problem – but this app still got them. In spades!

And I also agree with the developer of the tool:

“Now, although pretty much every IDE (and various stand-alone products) have sophisticated diff utilities built in (like Eclipse), my favourite, I got very tired of having to create two files just to paste in fragments of code or other bits of texts just in order to perform a diff and see the differences highlighted.”

Except for the Eclipse-part maybe. The diff tool worked great and helped me a lot yesterday. And probably today… and the day after that, and the day…

The concept of a ubiquitous language—a common domain model—can be interpreted differently depending on the context. Here’s how I see it:

For the Entire Business

An all-encompassing ubiquitous language for an entire business often seems impractical. Different contexts and departments may define the same entities (e.g., “customer”) differently. For a deeper discussion on this, check out:

• Casey’s blog on integration at the database level
• Dan North’s SOA insights

For an Application

On the other hand, having a ubiquitous language within an application is highly beneficial. This means that all team members—customers, analysts, developers, testers—use the same terms consistently. This practice enhances communication speed and accuracy within the team.

For more insights on the value of a ubiquitous language, consider these resources:

• Eric Evans’s book: Domain Driven Design. Read the relevant chapter on Google Books.
• James Shore’s take
• Kent Beck’s...

Often, you can’t see them until afterwards… the events that really changed the course of your life. But in retrospect, you can almost always point to a single moment when your life took a certain path.

Yesterday was one of those events. I know exactly when it happened: 15:12, 2009-11-25.

We are going to have a second child. So we went to the ultrasound examination to see that everything was in order. And it was.

The nurse: Here is the divider wall (sorry for the non-technical term in English). Me (thinking): I never heard about any divider wall when Albert was in there. Nurse: And here is the first fetus. Me: Ok… the first one. Nice… What? First one?

After that, the nurse had to leave us. Two takes longer than one. So I told Elin, “That just now, that was a life-changing event.”

So, we’re going to...

Here’s a useful tip for managing Oracle connections: Instead of relying on the tnsnames.ora file, which can be cumbersome to configure and distribute, you can include the connection details directly in your connection string. This way, all necessary information is contained within your application’s configuration file.

Here’s an example connection string:

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="ConnectionName" 
         connectionString="Data Source=(DESCRIPTION =(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = hostname.host.se)(PORT = 1521))(CONNECT_DATA =(SERVER = DEDICATED)(SERVICE_NAME = servicename)));User Id=[your user];Password=[your pwd];" 
         providerName="Oracle.DataAccess.Client" />
</connectionStrings>

This approach simplifies deployment by consolidating configuration into a single place. I find this method quite convenient!

As a jQuery newbie, I was curious about how to move items between listboxes. A quick search led me to this helpful guide: How to Add/Remove ListItems from One ListBox to Another Using jQuery.

It answered my question in seconds. The internet is a fantastic resource, and Google is indispensable for a contractor like me.