The presentations on Monday went well. The SOA-part of the presentation was even better than I first hoped. My partner and I didn’t have that much time to prepare or at least try it out. But I thought that we got the message across. For the euphonium part it was a shaky trip from bad to good. The theme and the first variation was just awful - I counted six or seven errors. Then I played the triplets and they went well … better. Before that night I’ve never nailed the last variation - it’s so hard. But all of a sudden it just flowed. I was very satisfied with that! OK - now for the next thing. On Saturday I will be a presenter for the Salvation Army during a big event for Stockholm Marathon. That will be fun!

Phee-ew! Just now the Intellisense stopped working in Visual Studio 2008. Scared me a lot - since I thought that it would make me re-install the complete Visual Studio 2008. That took me at least 3 hours to install. But Richard Fennell had the solution and that helped me to evade that situation. Here is the solution: http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/archive/2007/12/01/intellisense-not-working-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx [UPDATED] As it turns out this was only part of the solution. The real problem was the integration with ReSharper - here is how to solve it.

Today is kind of a special day at work. After the normal work day we have invited my customer to Avega for an evening of some, hopefully interesting and fun presentation. Why I am hoping this is because I am doing the presentations, and the “fun” part. The first part is a SOA-presentation together with a colleague - Robert Södergren. Here we will try to answer the not-so-easy-answered-question “What is SOA?”. For the fun is something even more nerve-wrecking; I often take the opportunity to play my euphonium and tell people little about the Salvation Army. Nothing special there. But this time I have chosen to end the session by playing the infamous Carnival of Venice, by Arban. I know - it’s my own choice and all that - but it was a bit harder than I expected to get it up to “wow”-factor. I am not quite sure I...

Anyone who has worked with me know that I love shortcuts (that is keyboard shortcuts - i wouldn’t dream of taking shortcuts in real life…). I love them in general but specifically in Visual Studio - they often involve at least three keys and at least two hands to be fully executed. Here is a list of some of them - i haven’t seen some them before and other ones are loved friends of mine: http://www.dev102.com/2008/05/06/11-more-visual-studio-shortcuts-you-should-know/ [UPDATED] That short-cut site contained some other really useful stuff also: http://www.dev102.com/2008/05/09/6-useful-visual-studio-tweaks-you-need-to-know/ http://www.dev102.com/2008/04/17/10-visual-studio-shortcuts-you-must-know/

Here is a short list of good practices that caused quite a stir in the designer community at Avega. http://binstock.blogspot.com/2008/04/perfecting-oos-small-classes-and-short.html My thoughts on the subject are that these are some excellent quidelines and a vision of a code quality that you might never reach. Also as the blogger suggests, it might be a good way to force people to move away from procedural coding - as for example when upgrading from VB6 to VB.NET. I have not followed all of these in my current project (it would lead to a loo-ot of classes and assemblies) but having them nailed to the wall has given my an oppurtunity to learn and use some of the guidelines. And lo, and behold - my design was better and my code more readable. He might be onto something here, the good Brikenstock…

OK, it’s that time of the sprint, as we say… This sprint has been a bit special since we not have hade access to all team members during the whole sprint. It has been a lot of vacations and holes in the schedule. Despite this we have delivered the things we set out to do and can go to the sprint demo with our head held high. I am again blown away by how SCRUM is able to engage team members and get the most out of each person, even with a very limited time slot. Also it’s so easy to learn. We have three members who never have used SCRUM before this project and they are now, since 2 sprints back, in charge of the Scrum board (we look in via web camera). OK - I am not that nervous for the demo itself but a bit nervous for...

This is a video that made me happy today… The, now world famous, painting elephant. It’s truly amazing to see an animal have such good feeling and self-knowledge. I am humbled before it.

Another night on the shelter for the Salvation Army. Today it has been quite warm outside but for the men visiting the shelter that only means that they will arrive a bit later. Just think for yourself, when you walk home late a summer night, even if it is warm - would you trade that for a bed? I know i wouldn’t… I am always filled with some sort of sorrow when I see the guest here at the shelter. They are, many of them, younger than me. And already they are on the bottom of our society… Others have been there for years and years. We are so privileged in our daily lives and so seldom stop and appreciate it. Most of us have families, friends and co-workers that cares about how we are doing. We have stuff to do (work for example) - that’s another thing to ponder....

This is the most creative, flipped out, and maybe scary thing I’ve ever read on a technical subject - http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ It’s a online book about Ruby. But the guy who has written it seems a little…. odd to say the least. He has really taken the concept of learning to a whole new level. Bad or good - judge for yourselves.

The last couple of days (well actually for my parts it’s more like months or years) we have been discussion the management of dynamic controls in ASP.NET pages. In my experience this is a very common scenario and i haven’t still found a great way to handling it. To explain better I’ll just a very simple fictive scenario; imagine that a page has a button “Create new control”. Next to the button is a textbox in which you can type the typename of the control to create (CheckBox, TextBox etc.). When you click the button the control, of the right type, is created. Now for the “hard” part. Below the created control is another button “What was entered?”. When that button is clicked the code should, of course, read the content of the dynamically created control and print the value that was entered. Pretty simple, eh? Well it’s not so...