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 crashes 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.

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 programming.

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 answer is NO! I’m sorry but the Add-In has crashed 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.