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 thing surrounding the concert was, as always, good.

My own part in the whole thing went well, even though I had missed the fact that the concert didn’t had a intermission. Quite embarrassing when I told the audience that a break was coming up, just to then call them back in 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...

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 aims to be extensible and possible to tweek 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…

Found this nugget today when comparing numerous of 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…

A few days back we had a mail-wise discussion on the subject; why should we care about an ubiquitous language?

For me the question falls into two parts; for the whole company/business or for the application.

• An ubiquitous language or common domain model for a complete business have never felt right with me. I know, I know; I have been defending it, striving for it and even forced it on some customers – but I don’t like it! It will never work! The same entity, (customer) for example, can have very different meanings in different context. A better and much more detailed discussion can be found here:
  • http://devlicio.us/blogs/casey/archive/2009/05/14/commercial-suicide-integration-at-the-database-level.aspx
  • And in Dan North’s excellent SOA for the rest of us
• An ubiquitous language for an application is a completely different thing and is something that I think should be strived...

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 a single point in time when your life took a certain path.

Yesterday wasn’t one of those event. 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: He is the divider-wall (sorry but the non-techie English). Me (thinking): I never heard about no 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 have TWINS!...

I had already forgot about this one… The Oracle-way of doing things is different and feels quite old to me.

Here is a short recap, it’s just for me later on – you could probably skip the next paragraph…

Normally you configure your Oracle client (ODP.NET for example) to use a datasource. This is datasource is then searched for in a file called tnsnames.ora. In tnsnames.ora you’ll find the server, port etc. that is needed to connect to the database. However – this means that you’ll need to make sure that tnsnames.ora is present and correctly configured on all the servers you plan to deploy your app on.

So – glad to be back with you – instead of this ugly tnsnames.ora thing you can put all of that information into your connectionstring:

<connectionstrings> <add name="ConnectionName" connectionstring="Data Source=(DESCRIPTION =(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL...
      

Read More