My corps, the Vasa corps of the Salvation Army, is gifted with many very good musical talents. For example Vasa Gospel, Vasas Granater (youth gospel) and the VasaBand.

Each year we get together and perform a Christmas concert. This year i am in a group that put that concert together. It will be on Nybrokajen 11 and will include the mentioned groups and also some guests, for example [Karl-Magnus Fredriksson](http://www.musiken.nu/).

It will be a magnificent concert and hopefully something to remember for a long time. You can, and should, buy ticket now: http://www1.ticnet.se/PriceTable?eventId=STH18094NYB12071

Go ahead - invite a friend or two. But hurry - it’s only 600 tickets all in all…

Here are some videos on Visual Studio 2008 that shows off some of the new capabilities of our new workplace - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7642674

The voice of the guy doing the presentations is driving me mad (he sounds like the bad guy from Seven) but it works.

By the way - I’ve just downloaded SilverLight (runtime, i think) from Microsoft. And all of a sudden a lot of their pages looks so nice and has some really cool features.

Go ahead and get it now.

A few weeks back the British National Brass Band Championship took place with Grimethorpe as winners for the second year running.

As always there was a short interlude-concert before the results was announced, this year with Black Dyke Band. One of the featured soloist was David Childs and his performance of Hot Canary just blew my mind! That dude really has control - not a slip, not a hint of bad intonation AND having fun. Thank you!

For the next week the performance is on the last weeks Listen to the band.

Here is four short excellent introductions till LINQ (mostly to SQL). They are in Swedish but very informative since the give short tour of the capabilities of LINQ.

• Video 1
• Video 2
• Video 3
• Video 4

Oh - how i long to Visual Studio 2008 - so nice, so good!

Today i have had this blog for a whole year. I never thought that it would evolve to this. Here are some interesting (?) facts and statics.

• First - i was wrong of course - the first posting was actually on 2006-10-24 but i have only have had statics since 2006-10-29.
• Total number of posts: 270. Which average to 0.73 post a day.
• 39 people has commented these posting
• 7404 pages has been served to 1667 different visitors
• Top content is the sketch Mor i skutan with 168 hits
• Best visitor day was 2007-10-15 with 98 different visitors
• I’ve changed the layout for the blog 4 times (if i remember correctly)
• 2007-08-27 was another important date in the history of the blog since the URL and name was changed into the current marcusoft.net So - there you have it - happy birthday marcusoft.net

Ok - i’ll give Resharper another try - thanks to Ilya Ryzhenkov who encouraged me to try again. In all honesty the crasches i experienced were all in a buildscript-file, XML-syntax.

So i’ll have to try it with pure VB.NET-code i expect… Here we go.

It has been a while since i coded web (not longing to much, i can say) and during this time a lot of development has happened of course. One of the great new features in ASP.NET 2.0 is the membership and profile handling which gives you easy access to store and get values that is has to do with the current user - a bit like settings in Windows programing.

A good introduction example can be found here.

However there is a problem in the different project models. When Visual Studio 2005 was released Microsoft did an attempt to solve the “i want to place my files for web projects wherever i want”-problem, and came up with the Web Site-project type. It sucks!

That project type doesn’t contain a project file and has a completely different compilation model, so it no good in most professional development projects. To do...

Oh my god - the worlds most well known and loved refactoring tool Resharper, now contains support for VB.NET.

Hopefully this will solve the limbo that Microsoft has left us VB.NET developers in…

I’ll get back with an “review” shortly…

I’m back - and the answere is NO! I’m sorry but the Add-In has crasched with unhandled exception six times in an hour. As we say in the Swedish military - REDO - DO RIGHT.

I am uninstalling it as we speak. Nice try though - seemed to promise a lot.

OK - it is time to do my predictions for the Swedish Brass Band Championships. I have already brushed on the subject but now its really closing in (three weeks) so I though you might wanna know how it will happen.

There has been some major problems to get bands together for this event (trust me, got phoned by three different band to fill some pretty prestigious seat, that would not have happened if they didn’t ask other people first…:)). Probably the whole event while have a slight yawn over it since some bands that are sure to place good is missing.

Stockholm Brass Band will not show up altogether which has to do with a lot of professional musicians in the band. They will - and often must - prioritize differently and this is a “spare time” thing. I hate to be one of those people that...

The last thing the Gothenburg Brass band did before the stopped playing was go on a tour in England. On the tour the found time to record a CD and take part in the European Championships.

I got the great privilege to write the inlet of the CD, which is called In Perfect Peace after one of the pieces on the CD. That particular piece is written by Kenneth Downie and was very important for the band and Bengt Eklund. So it’s very fitting that the last CD is called that and that the piece is on it.

About a week ago i found the CD in the catalog from World of Brass… Made me very proud. It’ll be the first time i am published in such a way.