This weekend was one of the hectic I’ve been through in a long time. But in retrospective also one of the most exciting and rewarding.

Going backwards;

Yesterday night we played a musical service at the Templein Stockholm. Quite a good turnout with people - and many of the performances were the best during the complete rehearsal period.

Before that - photo session with the Vasa Band for our CD - Priority. That was very fun and I hope and think that the pictures will be nice

During the afternoon we went to Abbes, first children birthday party. Viola turned 1 year!

The Sunday started with our prayer group being in charge of the Sunday morning meeting. Abbes has got a small cold so I wasn’t present for the whole meeting but it felt alright until I left.

The Saturday was entirely devoted for the Stockholm Marathon. As Read More

This is probably old news for many of you but today I had great use of the Process Explorer tool.

With it you can get detailed information of all the processes running on the computer and the DLL’s they are using. Also you can go the other way around; from a DLL find all processes that is using it.

We used it today to solve the age-old problem; “The file cannot be deleted because it being used by another process” - WHICH PROCESS?!!

Now you can solve that problem.

Oh yes - that’s right; thank you Fredrik for this great tip!

This weekend one of the biggest sports events in Sweden will take place in Stockholm - the Stockholm Marathon.

This year the only organisation that is allowed, offically, around the course is the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army in Sweden has decided to make an effort to raise money for water tanks for schools in Kenya.

The Vasa band, the band of my corps, will be playing at Odenplan during the day. Also the Source Of Joy gospel choir will be there.  

I have promised to speak during the day - and keep the day going. It will be great fun -but quite challenging also - we will go on for almost 8 hourse straight!

Well, I’ll get back to you with some information on how it went.

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!

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...

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...

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.