And thus the silence is broken.

The last year has been very stormy for me. It has been sharp turns and bright changes. I no longer hold a positions as an instructor at the training company Cornerstone but have moved my daily work to Sogeti (a Cap Gemini company) where I now worke as an architect consultant.

This is a very positive change and I'm very happy.

With this change I'm also moving my blog to another platform (this I built myself when I learned NHibernate 4-5 years or so ago). So anyone interested in my new entries, move your feeds subscriptions to  and your browser favorite to http://blog.lowendahl.net

This is where I will put up my new posts. I have yet to decide what to do with my old posts, they will survive in some form.

Well head over, I'm going there now adding a post, see you there.

During the PDC the following statement came out of the data programmability team:

"We're making significant investments in the Entity Framework such that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios.  We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well."

Apparently a lot of people in the community interpreted this as the obituary of LINQ to SQL and there has been a lot of harsh words, some comments even suggested that the team ha deceived it's users.

I would like to put in a comment in this debate. First of all, LINQ to SQL wasn't a product of the data programmability team, it was actually put out by another team and gradually incorporated into the data team. At the time the data programmability team was building it's own technology so they didn't really ask for this dual products thing.

Secondly, the comment above does not tell me that they are discontinuing support for LINQ to SQL any time soon, what they are saying is that the efforts will be in the Entity Framework, which is their product from the start, LINQ to SQL isn't.

Third, after attending the EF futures talk at PDC and had a little chat with Daniel Simmons in the expo I interpret the above statement very different than the loud mouths that do what they can to discredit the whole team, my interpretation is that it's the teams intention to continue support L2S but since EF is the preferred product we'll more likely see a merge where the lightweight of L2S will be available in EF than a complete discontinue.

So in conclusion, chill, I'm certain that the team wouldn't do the mistake of killing a product that so many are using any time soon.  And seriously to you who betted large on L2S: From day on the announcement of EF it has always been said that L2S is target at RAD applications and that EF will be the preferred enterprise solution. So why are you even surprised?

--

The post: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/29/update-on-linq-to-sql-and-linq-to-entities-roadmap.aspx

Response from the team to the critics: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/31/clarifying-the-message-on-l2s-futures.aspx

Princeton's word dictionary defines a magic spell as being:

"S: (n) spell, magic spell, magical spell, charm (a verbal formula believed to have magical force)" [1]

In many movies and fairy tales these spells have been a central piece of getting things done or moving bad fortune into good fortune, wouldn't it be great if we had those spells to move bad projects into good ones?

Yesterday I attended a talk hosted by Agical [2] a company specializing in helping teams and companies becoming more Agile. They have invited two of the most prominent speakers on Agile retrospectives, Diana Larsen and Esther Derby, to give an hour long talk on their views of the technique.

Listening to the two lady's, reflecting over the many hours of talk with Dan North [3] about teams, and the basic rules of improvisation theater (which I've started to learn recently); I realized what extreme power simple words really can hold. Using the right set of words in the right order will get things done, change the scene and even change the outcome of a discussion.

Consider the difference between saying "you broke the build! why?" and "what was the circumstances around the build breaking?".

The first one will immediately alienate the recipient of the accusation and question, possibly putting the person in defense mode and will be very hard to collaborate with to find a solution. While the second will open for a dialog and are much more friendly.

All this because change of wording, basically the same question but a different outcome.

So to be an effective team member I think we need to learn the modern day spells, we need to invest more time in learning our language and what power a certain word really holds, especially in conjunction with other words. Much like the old ages magical spells.

Putting the words together in the wrong order, the prince will become a frog, but putting them in the right order the kingdom will be filled of wealth and prosperity.

--
References:
[1] http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=magic%20spell
[2] http://www.agical.com
[3] http://dannorth.net/

More about retrospectives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective
http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/articles/iteration-and-release-retrospectives:-the-natural-rhythm-for-agile-measurement.html

Esther and Diana's book:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/dlret

... and there was three things that really striked me as odd.

1) The first 12 (of 43) questions or so was security configuration. Not about what's good or bad security for different scenarios but just "if you want user name over messages how do you configure the services"-type of questions (that's not one of the questions I got though)

2) Immense focus on configuration, at least half my questions was on different configuration scenarios. Where is the solution scenarios one wonders?

3) One question on hosting, this has to be a more important topic then 1/43.

I'm aware that different testers get different questions, but come on. This is silly. If I'm to be called a certified technology specialist on WCF I would expect more questions on choosing the right approach for the right scenarios.

I've been building a base virtual environment in VM-Ware for the courses I deliver and ran into a little quirk. I set the initial size to small. Looking around in the management console I couldn't find any reference to expanding disks so I had to revert to commandline, *sigh* ;)

It turned out to be quite easy. There is a tool in the VM-Ware folder called vmware-vdiskmanager which has a -X option that expands disks. Like:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 30GB f:\vmware\labbenvironment.vdmk

Now there is a second step to this. The partion in the virtual machine is still the old size so I needed to extend it. The MMC snapin for doing that didn't allow me since it was a bootdisk. Silly. So next command line magic that needed to be done was to use the Diskpart tool. Never heard of it before, but it manages storage and partitions. Really neat. Sequence to force an expansion was quite simple:

diskpart

list volume

select volume

extend

Everybody probably know that already, but now I've at least documented it for my own reference :)

Using Internal (Friend) as the access modifier usually means that the member isn't accessible outside of the assembly where the member or type is defined. This is one of the challenges when setting up unit tests covering that code. Yesterday I stumbled across an assembly level attribute that I hadn't seen before:

[assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("TestProject, PublicKey=E99E67D022384DE1")]

This turns out to make internal members visible the assembly specified. Now that's really handy.

Heres the MSDN docs on it:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.compilerservices.internalsvisibletoattribute.aspx

An healthy idol poster to have on your wall:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e5f902a8-5bb5-4cc6-907e-472809749973&displaylang=en&tm      

At TechEd Roy Osherove expressed a managers feelings when introducing agile through a live song performance. It's on youtube now so prepare for being famous Roy:

I've made some changes to my blog engine the last couple of days. This time I thought to myself, "what the, heck it's a simple change let's just do it". A couple of hours into the work I found myself being really uncertain of the state of my code. I also didn't like the design. Now why was that? After some thought I realized that I'm missing my tests and it's like only half my work is done.

So now I'm sitting here really hesitating to deploy the new version of the engine because of uncertainty, I'm tipping more towards a complete re-write of the last changes, TDD-style.

I'll be offline in all ways possible, cell, msn, blog, mail, msdn forums, etc, etc for a couple of days. I'm moving house. Knowing the Swedish ISPs I will probably only be available from 9 to 5 for a couple of weeks after that.

See you later...

If all goes well :)

I've spent a couple of hours adding MetaWeblog API's to my blog engine. Using XML-RPC.NET (http://www.xml-rpc.net/), Fiddler (http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/) and various posts on the internet I think I've finally got it...

Since the MetaWeblog API documentation is more or less non existing, the biggest challange was to define the contracts. With XML-RPC.NET and the domain model already built for the blog, the rest was quick.

I will do some small changes to the implementation and upload it to my code area, probably sometime early next week.

Finally back at work :)

After a couple of weeks in Tunisia in North Africa I'm back at my desk. I was really longing for my desk while riding camels in the Sahara dessert outside the Douz Oasis ;)

If you haven't been to North Africa, Tunisia is a really nice country that has most of what North Africa has to offer. Nice beaches, desert, party, culture, very interesting history (Carthage, the raise and fall of the roman empire around it, the Arabic invasion, WWII etc, etc), loads of sites where famous films have been made ( like Matmata and the salt desserts where scenes from the Dessert Planet in Star Wars has been shot). I really recommend a visit.

On the technical side there seem to be no real news, MS finally made beta 2 of VS2008 publicly available and there are some aftermaths from the partner summit regarding silverlight and surface but mostly targeted at business opportunities. Technically they showed nothing new there.

For SWENUG we'll be welcoming Aleks Seovic (one SPRING.NET guys) to the Swedish INETA groups in the end of August. He will be speaking in Malmoe, Gothenburg and Stockholm. More information coming shortly.

Personally this fall I'm looking forward to (in no particular order) our company kick-off in Lisbon, Portugal, Öredev (www.oredev.se)  (Where I'll probably will be speaking again), Teched (In what form I'll be attending is not yet clear, but in one form or another).

Well my week has started with a bang, so better get back to that and I'll see you around, maybe in a conference or two :)

Just got the email,

I'm a MVP for another year.

For a couple of years now Cornerstone has had a sub brand for our conferances and seminars called "ExpertZone" (www.expertzone.se). It's under this brand where our successful conferance Developer Summit (http://www.cornerstone.se/expertzone/dev07/) has been running. 

Today we took another step. By inviting all our experts into a community we will have centrilized expert knowledge in our online Community. With aggregated blogs, stand alone blogs and forums, you as a visitor will be able to have direct access to all thoose experts.

As all communities we start small with a team blog for our developer experts, a blog for developer summit and a forum for Windows Server 2008 but we will soon be adding with more content and more areas.

Most of the content is in Swedish today and we will probably start that way, but for developers all the presentations from Developer Summit has been posted on the Developer Summit blog which is in English. Have a look over at  http://forum.cornerstone.se/ and I'll see you there.

After numerous hours of debugging in my latest project, involving Jimmy and emails to Ayende, debugging down deep into NHibernates code base even, I've just discovered and solved a really embarrasing bug.

Since my most ORM work has been with NPerstist and it was a while ago I did anything with NH, I had totally forgotten that NH does it's accessing throgh the property setters and not directly to the backing fields as NP does. I also wasn't aware that NH did re-setting of the properties in the session.Save method either.

This gave some odd results where calling session.Save duplicated some items in a list due to a bug in the setter. Not totally obvious, but if I had tested the setter with logic, it would have been caught.

So note to self, test all logic simple or not.

I just realized that I failed to link to ayendes post in my last rambling about abstraction layers.

Here it is http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/06/06/Acropolis-Yet-Another-Executable-XML.aspx

Some time ago I blogged about Cornerstone looking for new instructors, now we got one to present.  

We've just finished up with all the details for our new ASP.NET instructor, please welcome my friend and now college Fredrik Normen (http://fredrik.nsquared2.com/) as the latest addition

Fredrik is a ASP.NET MVP and passionate about software development in general and will deliver our .NET courses as well as work as a mentor / coach for our bigger customers.

This is going to be so awesome :) He will start June 4Th and after that we will rock!

Make sure to look out for cool courses/seminars and events from us in the near future.

PS! We still look for more instructors if you want to join Cornerstone and me and Fredrik.

Mats Helander got me in the tag game so now I have to tell you 5 things about me that you problably didn't know already.

1) For three years I worked for a non-profit organization called The Guardian Angels (www.guardianangels.org) coordinating their chapters in sweden and across Europe. Most of the time I spent on the street working in teams with crime preventation and interventation and some on leading and organizing the european groups. Very far away from being a geek.

2) At youg years I used to compete in sprint, a track and field disciplin. I was not to bad, but not really a star either

3) I'm originally from Gothenburg but moved between Gothenburg, Malmoe and Stockholm so many times I lost count. Stayed in Stockholm for a while now though.

4) As a very young boy I had an imaganiary friend called Peter. He was appearently responsible for a lot of mishaps at home.

5) I'm a single malt whiskey fanatic and have 15 or so bottles of different single malts at home. Reecntly I joined a whiskey club as well so it'll be more of that in the future :)

Since I'm late in the game only 3 ppl I know who blogs get some tags: Roger Johansson, Dag König, Johan Normen

.. welcome 2007 and Orcas :)

Happy New Year all fellow Geeks!

Done some updates to the blog. Added a HIP challenge to the comment function and created a proper comment moderation function. Hopefully that will take care of most of the spam.

Just a ping to the world, I'm not dead but my laptop is.

I never realized how deaf and blind I am without my laptop. Seriously!

Anyhow I'm getting som .NET love today while delivering a VS2005 lab in our facilities check it out (http://www.cornerstone.se/course/showcourse.aspx?CNO=COUR2005101411131308131787).

Next week I'm doing some Team System in the same format (http://www.cornerstone.se/course/showcourse.aspx?CNO=COUR2005101411102003198270) and I'll do a WinFX / LINQ talk at the .NET academy (http://www.netakademien.se/) christmas party, all alot of fun.

The interesting challenge though, how to prepare without my workhorse???

I took the courage to install VS 2005 Release Candidate 1 the other day, my god that was hard work.

Unfortunately I'd installed earlier CTP versions on my machine and had to follow these instructions to remove it. Do you think it helped? Off course not!

Although every trace seemed to been wiped out from my machine, the installer insisted that I removed previous versions of Visual Studio 2005.

Frustrated? Gah!

After loads of tricks and tricks I found what failed me, in the registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products 

There was an entry telling windows installer that visual studio 2005 still was installed. I removed that and voila VS 2005 got uninstalled.

Do you think the problems ended there? Nah!

When I fired up VS the keyboard mappings got screwed up, telling me that it couldn't save the vssettings file nor reset it.

Found a blog entry with a tip to run "devenv /resetuserdata" from the run prompt and it actually worked.

So after blood sweat and tears, I actually got VS2005 RC1 running.....

It's an end of an era, end of a great learning experience and end of a great idea.

cshrp.net was intended to be a large C# development portal and at some point it was. Today Magnus Lindberg and I have started to tear it down. The domain will be pointed to this site and all the content will be put up here.

Just give it a week or two and my site will have loads of changes to accomedate this.

But still, it sorrows my hearth to see this go down....

Microsoft is doing it again. Gunning for other markets wher they today have a very small or no share at all.

At the key note day two they presented "The Microsoft Expression family" a set of tools targeted towards designers of applications. The family consist of three applications and at least two of them is new ground for Microsoft.

Acrylic

With this application Microsoft will compete with companies like Adobe for the market of 2-d and 3-d graphics creation and manipulation. The features they showed case at the key note made it look really simple to do intermediate tasks which you would struggle a bit with to do in other similar applications.

Acrylic works with both Vetor and Bitmap based graphics and has the ability to save and export to numerous of formats where XAML is the coolest one. Draw it and then send it to your Avalon (or Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF) appliacation; voila!

Sparkle

This has been refered to as the "flash killer". It is an graphics animation engine which easily can plugin to your web- and windows applications. It's, offcourse, web service enabled and uses XAML to describe the animation and layout it uses.

When they build, they build as interactive controls usable in any .net presentation project and actually integrates directly with Visual Studio projects which make the control easy to share.

The engine works with a time line based animation framework and has data binding capabilities through simple templates.

Quartz

Frontpage, rewritten, redesigned and put on stereoids. 'nuff said

The million dollar question now is, will Microsoft be able to break into this markets?

In March I'll be showing my face in a couple of Swedish cities together with Johan Lindfors (Microsoft), Andre Hendriksson (Microsoft) and Dag Köning (KnowIT) while we're speaking at MSDN Live.

We'll be presenting on cool stuff in whidbey like C# 2.0, VB.NET 2.0, C++, news in Base class library, smart clients and so on.

So if you're near Örebro, Umeå, Stockholm, Göteborg or Malmö. Come by and say hi!

Hope to se you there!

Event information: http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/msdn/live/2005/