I am back from a very different weekend indeed. I was given the opportunity to take part in a retreat organised by our corps (congregation). That meant that we were 15 people going away to far-off place and were silent for the main part of the weekend.

Yes - I understand that the ones who know me have a very hard time to see me being silent for such a long time, but it all went very well.

Also the power and restfulness in being silent was so great. There are so many experiences that will stay with me for a long, long time; like eating together with 15 people in total silence - very different, or walking together with two close friends, without saying anything - it made me feel powerful.

Finally - when you are left “alone” with such much time on your hands it was very interesting...

Here is a thing that is really annoying, and the solution.

When you’re not allowed administrative rights on your computer with your standard account you often need to run certain programs under another account. This works fine, with a simple right click and choosing Run As… (even for MSI-files).

But for some reason the Explorer.exe cannot be started this way. This is how to make it work:

• Create a .bat-file on your desktop (or where you want it)

• Enter the following line into it: runas /user:[your domain][your account] “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”

• Save the bat-file

• Double-click the bat-file and provide the password for your account when asked

• This will start Internet Explorer. Enter C:\ as the URL

Things has been quite hectic since we are closing in on a sprint demo… Seems to be working now, fingers crossed.

I have done a lot of findings the last days and most of them has to do with Oracle. This has to do with me not having any experience with Oracle.

We are using Enterprise Library 4 to access the Oracle database and it’s stored procedures. It internal is using the ODP.NET client access components.

One problem we have encountered is that the data types used by Enterprise Library is generic (DBCommand, DBTypes etc) and it is mapped to the Oracle equivalents (OracleCommand, OracleTypes). So I needed a chart on my table showing me how to map between them.

But after a while I found a better way. Enterprise Library is exposing a OracleDatabase with the Oracle-flavor of the command types. By using that...

I’ll keep it short - sprint demo coming up…

The result of my modelling efforts in the early summer is now published. It part of the economical presentation of Avega. You can find it here - and find me on page 13.

I just found this great site http://www.connectionstrings.com. Here you’ll find the answer to the age-old questions on how to write the connection string for (almost) every database provider.

Some people has know about this for a long, long time but haven’t told me about it… But I am not like that - here you go.

This is not for the faint hearted, but well worth seeing.

Its a clip from a recording session of the film music to the movie Hellboy. And the sounds these dudes produces are just … well scary.

For any non-brass players I can tell you that to produce one of those “bursts” is hard. Really hard. To do 15 or so in a row is just amazing.

And now for something completely different. The best trombone player (not counting the bass trombone dudes above) in my opinion is Håkan Björkman. Here is a clip of him doing a cadenza of the Leopold Mozart’s Alto-trombone concerto. Very different - but still amazing.

Yeah - this is also something that shouldn’t be possible to accomplish. I have heared it live at the Stockholm Opera once.

Here is a cool little code snippet with done with reflection that actually is quite handy. Especially in a logging situation.

I tweaked the code a bit to be not “WhoCalledMe” but rather “WhoIsTheCallerOfMe” and as such could hide most of the logging in a base class. This is easily done by changing the row StackFrame stackFrame = stackTrace.GetFrame(1);

to StackFrame stackFrame = stackTrace.GetFrame(2);

Of course then you’ll have to check that the frame in question (2) exists.

After reading about some great stuff that other people has published I decided to take the leap and publish my first project. The one I decided on was a small utility that I have had great use of - the Scrum Index Card Creator.

You can read about, and contribute to, the project and the application here http://www.codeplex.com/ScrumIndexCard.

So… this Scrum Index Card Creator is the first official release from Marcusoft. I wonder where is might end…

From the last post I found a new URL for code stuff from MSDN that I never heard about before. But this place is golden, golden I tell you.

Here are two small nuggets that I found in my first try:

• http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/FileTransportChannel>
• http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WCFExtras> - that contain, among other things, an implementation to get WSDL in a single file (that Christian Weyer does here)

Just found these PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008, which looks very promising indeed. They are a collection of nice-to-have-features in Visual Studio, that are missing from the start.

My first two favorites are; Collapse projects in Solution and Copy and Paste Project References. These two commands alone are worth the download time…

It seems like not all of the commands is applicable for all languages, like “Remove and sort using” that doesn’t work in VB.NET (of course ;)), but there are still usable stuff in there. Get one now!