My questions in an earlier post was promptly answered by Mark A Williams in a great way. So what he say pretty much confirms what I thought. Although associative arrays are great way to “bulk in” data to the database but when it comes to returning data the array-way might not always be right. Since you have to allocate memory for the array and size of each element in the array the associative arrays are best suited for situations when you know the size of the data that is being returned. Not that often in my experience. In other cases you’ll better off with a plain old DataReader. So now I know - thanks goes to Mark A Williams.

The Swedish guru of Scrum Henrik Kniberg, has produced some great stuff… yet again. Here you are: Video and slides for “10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP”. Got the merge-slide thrown in my face of a co-worker since I have great reluctantancy against branches… But I sure want to be able to manage them in a nice way - haven’t seen one yet though… Scrum checklist - here is a truly great one page document to get all your stuff in the right shape before starting doing Scrum. And of course Scrum from the trenches. Everybody must read this! Even, or maybe especially, if you hate Scrum.

I have written about this before but I’ll make a short recap since it has to do with some quite interesting stuff in Oracle. With ODP.NET you can harness the full power of Oracles features such as for example using Associative Arrays to bulk stuff into the database. We are using this feature in my current application, since it will handle big loads. OK - so far so good. I cannot understand two things and we have now involved the full brainpower of the team and still are scratching our heads. It actually boils down to two properties on the OracleParameter-class; Size and ArrayBindSize. The Size-property should be (in the case of using associative arrays) set to the number of elements in the array. The strange thing though is that the value of the property must be set for output-parameters. I mean - how do you know how much that...

Here is a cool site with MSBuild Recipes. I might post to it from now on. Sharing is knowing.

For some time now people has been turning to me at my customer for answerers regarding TFS Build. I have learned a great deal from that but sometimes I feel like I haven’t made sure that I understood the underlying thought from Microsoft. One of those areas is that the TFSBuild.proj-file is not your ordinary MSBuild-file. Or rather; it’s is but is run by Team Foundation Server and you get to configure it and it’s properties. This is what I though and I was actually right. Phew! There are some properties and targets that you can override in order to customize the build process. You can think of these targets like events being fired, and you can hook into them and customize their actions. And this is quite easy once you know how. But then I often get the question; “Ok - what can I configure”. I haven’t had a...

OK - this might be the coolest “useless” application I’ve seen… but it alone made me want an IPhone. Badly. And here: The cool thing is that Apple has create such a great mobile computing plattform. Telephony is just an application among others. Such as the flute. I am still waiting for the euphonium of course...

The Swedish brass band movement has a new champion… The king is dead - long live the king! Stockholm Brass Band is the new Swedish Brass band champions. And that’s a real chocker for most of us. WindCorp Brass Band has been leagues before Stockholm when I’ve heard them but somehow the managed to nick the title from WindCorp. Don’t get me wrong - Stockholm is a great band with some truly amazing players (like Håkan Björkman for example). But WindCorp has loads of experience from many, many brass band competitions - something that there is not an abundance of in Stockholm. My congratulations to Stockholm! Well deserved! And very impressive since the preparations has been surrounded with a lot sickness and problems to get a full band to rehearsals.

OK - it’s so late for this. They have probably started soon. But here is my predictions for the Swedish Brass Band championships: The winner is almost obvious - Windcorp Brass band is the best band in Sweden now and for a long time ahead. They play so well and have loads of experience to go with it. They will win. Probably with a big margin as well. Number two should be Stockholm Brass Band. They have the best line-up, but it consists of mostly professionals. And rehearsing for two weeks straight without pay is not the highest priority. Also it has been some sickness disturbing the preparations. Solna Brass will most likely take the third place. But they are a dark horse to nick Stockholm at the first one. They meet every week and rehears very serious. They could do it. So here is the probable order: First: Windcorp...

The other thing that really has impressed me this week was the use of policy injection and aspect oriented programming in our code. I mean - you write aspects (or policies) for things like logging, performance counters, caching and error handling and move all that stuff into configurable policies. What is left in your code? Pure and beautiful business code (or at least problem domain code). It’s so nice - we’re cleaning up code every day in our project and I just love to remove logging and error handling from my code and see my business code emerge from the muddy waters of “cross cutting concerns”. This video opened my eyes for aspects. It’s for PostSharp which is another framework for doing aspects, but the concepts are shown clearly.

This week I have made two discoveries that really has made me happy. They are not news by any means but I has been like they have clicked into place in my brain. The first one is surrounding the subject of testing in agile projects, which a lot of people seems to have opinions about - but I haven’t heard anyone go: “Do like this!”. I suspect that it has to do with current testing process are rigid on many companies and there is a reluctantancy towards changing the quality assurance process. Also the amount of regression testing increases for each sprint. We have had some trouble to get testing to work smoothly in our projects, but we are closing in on a solution. I do not claim to have the answerer or not even know much about the theories behind this big subject - but this works fine for...