I am preparing a talk on SOA. That always scares me since it’s such a big topic. Who among us would want to answer the question “What is SOA?”

OK – in my preparations I found some great resources.

• My new house-god Dan North has made this fun and easy to follow introduction.
• A lot of different stuff on Wikipedia is a good starter. Here are some articles on SOA, Enterprise service bus and SOA Governance that I found useful as introduction.
• Here is a really good discussion on why a common domain model is no good idea.

OK – I have been playing around for a while with my Windows 7 and up to now I love it! It even got my old Dell Precision M70 (4 years old and as many kilos) to look good again.

I am also trying to setup a lab environment for Visual Studio 2010 and TFS Server 2010 and found this great video and introduction on how to do that.

However, since my system is slow and low on memory, it doesn’t play to well with running the whole thing (Windows 2008 Server, SQL Server 2008, TFS Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010) in Virtual PC.

So I was very happy when I found this post from Scott Hanselman. Here is an excellent video that shows you how it’s done.

In short there is now support to...

Sooo - the parental leave is now over. I have spent six months “not-working” and together with my son, Albert. It has been great but when looking back it seem like the time has passed very fast.

OK - so now I am offically back in business. Well, by the way, let’s see if there is anything for me to do first. Otherwise I’ll be “free” for a little while longer. We’ll see.

What I have done so far is just updated my CV. That’s always rewarding since it seems like you have done a lot of important work…

And now I have put way to much time into installing Windows 7. I have had a real hard time to do it from a USB-stick. But here is a great a description on how to install Windows 7 from USB-stick.

From that I’ll try to install Visual...

I am slowly but certainly coming to an end of my parental leave. Six months without working! They have disappeared so quickly… It’s a bit sad.

But I also feel “hungry” for work. Especially to put my newly acquired skills and knowledge into use (TDD, ASP.NET MVC, BDD, DDD etc.)

I have done some reading during my leave, (I am actually proud of reaching a lot of the goals I set up for myself on the last day of working) and I thought that I could give a short review of the books here.

Clean Code by Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin was really good in one sense and quite annoying in another. Don’t get me wrong – this is a classic and a very good read. There are loads and loads of good tips and trick on how...

Yes, I know that some people will refer to Seinfeld and the episode where George go on a vacation when being without a job, but it’s true - my vacation starts tomorrow. What that means is that I am going to Hyppeln on the west coast of Sweden. It will be great and hopefully with some better weather than we have had the last few weeks…

I learned something today that the Sunday morning service. It has been quite a stressful week with loads of meeting in the calendar, big things to ponder and surgery for Albert… And I got quite stressed out. When that happens to me I can’t really focus and so I get more stressed out for things that I might miss. It’s a viscous circle. Also it tend to happen more and more frequently.

But the sermon today spoke almost...

BDD (Behavior Driven Development) is the next natural evolvement from TDD. And since I am now converted to TDD I thought I’d look into BDD.

Well – after scanning the net for a while I finally found a introduction that I could understand. Here it is:http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd

From what I understand some colleagues implemented BDD with NUnit. You can read about it here (in Swedish I am afraid), and also get some code that can help you create some documentation á la agiledox.

OK – the next thing to chew off… BDD looks cool.

**[UPDATED] **I have now read some stuff about BDD and Dan North (who wrote the article above) is, to my understanding, the father of BDD and that article is actually the birth of the subject. Pretty good introduction.

Here is a video that has some nice examples...

I don’t know that much about Azure… yet. But I am quite sure that is will be more and more important in the future.

From what I understand now it’s the Microsoft platform for development of application that uses services “in the cloud”, as you should say these days. Behind the buzzwords you’ll find a bunch of services that can be reached over the internet that you can take advantage of. These includes storage, logging and other low level services but also Microsoft Live Services and CRM services etc.

The whole idea, I guess, is that given these services in place you can much faster get up and running.

OK - sounds like an good idea… Let’s see it in action. Here are some videos.

This service is really great when you get one of those files that you don’t know how or have the program to read. In my case it was a .pub file (Microsoft Publisher).

Now you don’t have to download any readers… And for up to 6 MB it’s free.

It’s been done! It’s solved! I don’t know how but it is…

http://www.en.conv2pdf.com/

Here are a few pictures from Alberts preparations for the summer.

<img src=”file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Marcus%20&%20Elin/Application%20Data/Windows%20Live%20Writer/PostSupportingFiles/d3668121-07d2-4668-a7ba-b0cd50ee4788/DSC_0937_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg” style=”border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px” data-border=”0” data-the=”” data-hood””=”” width=”170” height=”246” alt=”Albert in his summernight outfit. Ready for “ />

Ok – the updates on this blog has been way under par for a while. That’s because I am not working right now.

I’ve noticed that when you have a lot of things to do it’s easy to get the little things done in a jiffy but when you do nothing it’s hard to start to even the small things… Strange but true.

OK – here are some things that I watch and enjoy right now.

Shaun the sheep – on SvtPlay.  Great fun for both me and Albert.

A complete live concert with Black Dyke Band (part 1 and 2). The playing has some minor blemishes but overall it’s great as usual, especially the Immortal-piece at the end!

Anything with Fodens on YouTube. Check out their run through Paganini variations (part 1 and Read More