This weekend the Black Dyke Band broadcasted one of their concerts. And what a concert it seems to be.

Here are the links to them:

• First half
• Second half

Enjoy - i know i will!

In my current project we are accessing a legacy system using Microsoft Transaction Integrator. Luckily for us we don’t have to write any of that stuff, that is done by another team who exposes the objects and methods in the legacy system as web services.

However - they have chosen to encapsulate each object.method as one web service. Since we will have about 50 methods to call it we be … 50 web service references for us to keep track on.

That is not a problem if it wasn’t for the namespacing. There are a lot of wsGetBusinessCodes and wsUpdateInsurance namespaces running around in our code.

Yesterday we found a “solution” to how to organize the web service references on our, the client, side - and still let the server side publish the web service how they like. The solution is quite simple;

as it turns out you can...

Wow - here is a whole concert with the two great bands, in top form as it sounds. And with the extra treat of hearing Philip Smith playing Victorious (is it a bit sloppy for the worlds greatest trumpeter…?). There are also some other great items from other occations

Click on “Band profile” for the complete concert…

Here is the same thing in full screen-mode

Yesterday i got a question from a collegue who had run into trouble using the TransactionScope-construct in .NET.

The case was as follows; the are programming against a database whose stored procedures they cannot change. Some of these stored procedures are using calling each other and doing so under stored procedures. When the .NET-code is calling those stored procedures and doing so under TransactionScope they run into problems. The TransactionScope is not Complete-ing and the reader they are using in the TransactionScope simply returns empty (Nothing).

OK -first and foremost; don’t mix! It’s no good idea to have two guys deciding on when you are done. So use either the excellent Transaction support given in .NET 2.0 or use transactions in stored procedures. However…

To my colleague’s defense it must be said that they cannot change the stored procedures they are using, so they are stuck. This is how you...

When we deployed our latest WCF-service we ran into this error message: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Enterprise.ASPNetHelper’.

Apparently this has to do with Visual Studio inserting stuff into the web.config (or app.config) when you ran a test under code coverage. From my goggling I find that other actions in Visual Studio might insert this also.

Here is a short posting describing the problem.

Be sure to “clean” the web.config-file that is promoted to your testing and production environments.

I’ve been doing some reading up on design patterns, mostly actually since i was curious on the book - Head First Design Patterns.

It is great - i can honestly say that it is the best IT-related book I’ve ever read. It is the first time (embarrassing enough) I understand some of these patterns. It covers a lot of different aspects and do just enough of deep exploration. And (not least) it is FUN - i actually laugh when i read it. When did you do that reading for example this book (which also is good, but not fun…).

However - a colleague tipped me on a great resource for pattern explanations on line: http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx

Thanks Calle for the tip, and for borrowing the book

This game, Patapon, looks so nice / fun / refreshing that i might buy a PSP just to get it The site for the game is also really cool.

OK - for the first time I am running Vista. I am really impressed so far. Looks nice and work great - that’s how we want to have it, isn’t it? That all Mac users probably goes bananas over all the Mac-OS-rip-offs is nothing to care to much about.

Also this is my first posting using Windows Live Writer, which is Microsoft’s blog-writer program. It also seems to work great.

Let’s post and see

[UPDATE… five seconds later]

Oh yeah - it works ;)

We’ve got the “the Service attribute value in the ServiceHost directive could not be found” error message when we renamed (and moved) and .svc-file. There are not a very good support for that in Visual Studio 2008.

The error message we’ve got had to do with us forgetting to rename the class that implemented our interface for the service (the one with the operation-contract on it).

Here are the places you’ll need to search and replace when you do a rename:

• The .svc-file itself
• The markup-file of the .svc-file
• The web.config of the service
• The class that implements your service-contract interface

Then you’ll have some trouble to update the reference that the clients are using. Better remove it and then add it again.

Hmmm - not very pretty this..

OK - the weekend has now come to an end. We are all very tired - but also happy. We made it - and most of it sounded very good also.

I think the CD will be very nice to listen to and with a strong message built into it. We have prayed for the message to be clear and for any listener to be blessed by the tone from God.

The highlight of the weekend was probably the recording of the title track Priority which came of very good. An excellent piece by Anders Beijer based on the hymn tune “Slane”. It is associated with the lyrics “Be thou my vision”.

On a personal note the last day of the recording sessions were nerve-wrecking. The only piece left to record was the euphonium solo, Journey into Peace. Things got under way very late (about 2 hours) and we...