I have been introduced to a new concept called The Pomodoro Technique. It’s a way to work in a very focused and lean way, on the individual level (it can also be used for groups).

From what I’ve learned so far it seems very powerful and is something that I sure will be reading more about, and try to use for myself. I often have trouble to keep my focus on the task at hand and the Pomodoro Technique seems like a great way of handling that.

Here are some resources that I found on the subject:

• Pomodoro Technique in 5 minutes
• Book from the inventor of Pomodoro, Francesco Cirillo
• Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

And finally a great lightning talk by Staffan Nöteberg on the problems that Pomodoro sets out to solve. In Swedish I am afraid…

Here is a longer (50 min)...

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 an 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 set up 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 too 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 boot from a VHD (Virtual Hard...

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 the end of my parental leave. Six months without working! The time has 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 practice (like TDD, ASP.NET MVC, BDD, DDD, etc.)

During my leave, I’ve done some reading. I’m proud of reaching many of the goals I set for myself on the last day of working. Here’s a short review of the books I read:

Clean Code by Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin

Clean Code was both really good and a bit annoying. It’s a classic with loads of great tips on how to identify bad code (“smells,” as Uncle Bob calls them) and what to do about it. There are also some excellent examples.

However, by the end, the tips stack up...

Yes, I know that some people will refer to Seinfeld and the episode where George goes on vacation while 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 from the Sunday morning service. It has been quite a stressful week with loads of meetings, 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 about things that I might miss. It’s a vicious circle. Also, it tends to happen more and more frequently.

But the sermon today spoke almost directly to me; it was about Jesus as our...

BDD (Behavior Driven Development) is the next natural evolution from TDD. Since I am now converted to TDD, I thought I’d look into BDD.

After scanning the net for a while, I finally found an introduction that I could understand. Here it is: Introducing BDD.

From what I understand, some colleagues implemented BDD with NUnit. You can read about it here (in Swedish, I’m afraid), and also get some code that can help you create documentation similar to AgileDox.

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

[UPDATED] I have now read some more about BDD. Dan North, who wrote the article above, is considered 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 and expands on the subject.

I don’t know that much about Azure yet, but I am quite sure it will become more and more important in the future.

From what I understand now, it’s Microsoft’s platform for developing applications that use services “in the cloud.” Behind the buzzwords, you’ll find a range of services accessible over the internet, including storage, logging, and other low-level services, as well as Microsoft Live Services, CRM services, and more.

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

OK – sounds like a 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 Albert’s preparations for the summer.