The blogging has been down to a minimum for the last couple of weeks. This has to do with the current project being rushed to say the least.

But I am still alive and kicking! I’ll try to do some work related updates during the day. In my private life I can say that things are really interesting:

• Yesterday was release-party for the Priority-CD of the Vasa Band. Very rewarding to finally see the great looking CD.
• Tomorrow we’ll be going on tour to the eastern part of Sweden
• I (and Elin) took the leap and disassembled my IRiver to change battery. That was as scary as I feared but now it’s done.

I’ll try to post some finding on MSBuild, PIAB and more as the day goes along

When my battery to my H320 arrives I of course must replace the old one. I am dreading this moment!

Yes I know - you all are saying; come on, how hard can it be? Well I’ll tell you how hard:

I own a, now, quite old MP3 player called IRiver H320. And even though I am often heckled by IPod-owners I still love it. It has some features that no-one have included in another product. For example:

• The possibility to directly connect it to another device and move stuff between them.
• You can download a separate operating system and install that on the device if you like.

That second point is quite cool and I’ve just downloaded the latest version of RockBox - a free open source operating system for MP3-players. Quite cool as I wrote a long time ago… Their installer was also something quite extra. Best I’ve seen in a long, long time - it literally was one or two clicks.

The only thing that remains to be solved is that my battery is very short-lived now. I’ve been using the IRiver...

Yesterday I went to an lecture at Avega by Gael Fraiteur. who has built the Aspect Oriented framework PostSharp.

This was right up my ally and quite frankly the AOP way of doing things is something I have strived for but never knew how.

However the frameworks on the market all comes with an cost or buy-in. Either you’ll have to use some sort of factory or context (Spring.NET, Castle or PIAB) to create your objects or (as in the PostSharp case) it will hurt your build time.

But Gael also tipped us on a way of combining PostSharp with Enterprise Library (PostSharp4EntLib) to get “the best of both worlds”. This seems reasonable to us since we’re currently using Enterprise Library for other stuff.

I am longing to get rid of the exception handling, tracing and logging code once and for all…

My situation right now is quite strange for me. The project I am involved in at work is really running full speed ahead - with my largest Scrum-team so far, 9 people - and at the same time I have some days a week off.

This has to do with a great Swedish invention called parenthood leave (my translation). When you think about it, it’s actually quite amazing - I get a lot of days from the government to be with my child. Sweden is fantastic.

The hard part for me is to switch on and off since I am not a work a day a week (or so) I still have my mind on ODP.NET, WCF and Aspects. But hey - I might learn.

Today me and Abbe have been on a really long walk around some beautiful archipelago right in the middle of Stockholm. That was great!...

The band I am playing in - the Vasa band - is right now in a great form, great spirit and on full speed ahead;

• Last Sunday we did a concert in Sundbyberg - first for the season. It went very well and was good received.
• Our website - www.vasaband.se (or www.vasaband.com) - is soon to be launched. It looks great I think. Great work Samuel!
• We are in the last preparations for our new CD - Priority
• On Wednesday the 8 October 19.30 there will be a release party on Centrumkåren, [Drottningatan 66](http://www.hitta.se/LargeMap.aspx?var=Drottningatan+66+stockholm)
• Two days later we will be heading out on a tour to promote the CD. The tour will take us to Lidköping, Göteborg and Jönköping.
• The season will end with a Christmas concert.

Lot’s of stuff but I love every minute of it. I...

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the layout of the blog - but now it’s been done!  

The theme is a bit more autumn than the previous one - may not kling to this one for as long.

Aha - my tag cloud have disappeared - I’ll get it back for you , sorry me.

[UPDATED]

Tag Cloud is back - thanks again for an excellent description. Have also added my analytics tags which always disappear when you do an update…

Tonight a new TV-shop is introduced in Sweden, Hål i Väggen. It’s a total rip-off from a really wacky Japanese TV-show.

Just to set the record straight - I discovered it first! Here is the proof - written Wednesday, July 11, 2007.

So TV6 - send the money to me. I accept checks. ;)

**[UPDATED] **Hehe - spoke to soon! The program wasn’t aired until today, Sunday. Sorry about that - I was still first though…

The LINQ project is one of those techniques that first makes you cheer, then think about how you’ll ever will use it in real life and then not think about it.

Also it seems to be a lot of confusion about what LINQ really is. LINQ is a number of constructs in the .NET framework to do queries over database, XML or object. This post may clarify things a bit.

I ran into a situation where my function received a parameter, lista, that was Generic list of MyObject. Since I was planning on sending associative arrays to Oracle I needed each property in MyObject in an own array.

LINQ to the fore! A LINQ-query could actually help us to produce the arrays we need. Here is my code: public sub CallStoredProc(byval lista as List(Of MyObject)) Dim ids = From obj in lista Select obj.ID

“How to pass and receive associative arrays with ODP.NET” - that question is sure to have to annoyed a lot of programmers. We have really pulled our hair over this problem and when you search for it on the net there is not very much helpful to be found.

We are using a feature of the ODP.NET that allows you to send arrays of parameters to and from stored procedures in Oracle. This is called associative arrays and is described in great detail in this article.

BUT… of course there is a but. This article doesn’t describe how to receive arrays back from a stored procedure. This is described here.

The trick (and confusing part) is that the size of the output array needs to be specified a priori (on beforehand) even for output parameters. A bit strange but it works.