As I predicted the Swedish Brass band championships this year was mostly a formal matter when it comes the first places.

Windcorp of course took the top honors. They weren’t treated really when Stockholms Brass band didn’t show up. That Solna was second was not too surprising either.

After that it was quite open and I congratulate Malmö Brass band with the third place. And that Torsby was fourth was a real feat - well done Torsby and Berit Palmquist!

BK was a bit of a disappointment since they usually play very well. I had them as third in my prediction.

So there you have it - lets hope that Stockholm Brass band hangs in there for another year so that the competition will get exciting again. Windcorp right now is miles ahead of the rest of the field and that cannot be good...

I’ve just returned from a tour with my Salvation Army Band - the Vasa Band. What a great group of people.

We have had an amazing weekend with lots of fun, great fellowship and some really nice music making. The band makes me so proud - there are only we, we’re nothing special but together we make it special.

To see two twelve year olds playing their hearts out on the last bar of a big piece, or to hear great and insightful presentations from a lot of members, ranging from 16 to sixty years, or to take part in the prayers before and after the festivals - that makes me so proud!

What a band - thank you guys for a great weekend - lets make many more…

During the last days I have run into more and more of the “How-do-I”-videos from Microsoft. They are really a great resource for getting fast introduction on a subject from everything to Silverlight to LINQ.

Here is the overview link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/bb629407.aspx.

Below it you’ll find several different areas of interest. Here are my highlights:

• Asp.NET with AJAX
• Windows Forms
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

For the first time in my life I am driving a new car. The picture below shows the trip-meter when I got the car…

It still feel like I have a rental but I think I’ll get used to the thought. Other than that this week will contain some (a lot) of preparations for the tour with the band starting Thursday. That will be great!

My corps, the Vasa corps of the Salvation Army, is gifted with many very good musical talents. For example Vasa Gospel, Vasa’s 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.

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 build script-file, XML-syntax.

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