We are a couple of guys at the PDC microblogging with new Sony Ericsson Xperia (X1) in Swedish over here: http://blog.pellesoft.se the content has already started to flow in so don't miss out.

I'll be doing a couple of longer posts here in english as well.

After Kalen's excellent keynote our SQL Server MVP Tibor Karaszi entered the stage to dive into the new Resource Governor, one of the features that are there to strengthen the Maintainability aspect of SQL Server.

The resource governor is added to the Enterprise version of SQL Server 2008 and gives a DBA the ability to slice and limit resources for jobs running in the database server. Tibor did a "simple" demo were he created two logins, one for marketing and one for developers and then he divided the resources based on that login.

That is how the RG does it's magic. By classifying an incoming connection it assigns that connection to a "Workload Group" which in turn is associated with a "Resource Pool". When this association is the resource pools can be configured to allow max or min amount of a CPU's time or of the installed memory.

Sadly only CPU and memory can be managed in this way, there is no support for dividing I/O time but Tibor showed a glimpse of hope where he delivered the Microsoft mantra "next version".

Apparently there is no way to read the resource usage afterwards, thus making it really hard to do things like debit a client for the resources they use. It is possible to extend the RG with "Extended Events" to build your own home-grown debit functionality but that could be a lot of work.

One of the things making it hard to debit is that the RG only really kicks in when the resources are maxed out.

A really interesting session and I can see how this feature will enable more companies to host SQL Server in the cloud for their clients and multi-tenant SQL Server installations will be better managed.

--

Sql Summit 2008 Event site:

http://www.expertzone.se/sql2k8/

More information about the Resource Governor

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/per/Resource_Governor_in_SQL_Server_2008_p1.aspx

A Demo-Webcast of the Resource Governor by Tibor (In Swedish):

http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/Roller/IT-tekniker/SQL-Server/Demo-Tv-SQL-Server/Demo-TV-Resource-Governor-SQL-2008/

Tibor's blog:

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/tibor_karaszi/

SQL Summit has been touring Sweden this week and today we've finally got to the grand finale at "China Teatern" in Stockholm. With 600+ attendees in all four cities the tour has been a blast with a lot of interesting discussions.

This morning I had the good fortune to listen to Kalen Delaney giving us a history lesson on SQL Server from the early Sybase venture that began 1984 to where SQL Server 2008 is today and beyond.

There was a lot of information to grasp, but one of the main points was that every release has been aimed towards improving on of the M.A.R.S aspects. M.A.R.S stands for Maintainability, Availability, Reliability and Scalability.

Kalen argues that every release have worked on all four but focused more on a particular one and for 2008 it has been the Maintainability that got that extra love. With the resource governor and policy based  management SQL Server gets extremely easy to manage.

Here's some pictures from the keynote:

--

Sql Summit 2008 Event site: http://www.expertzone.se/sql2k8/

This Saturday was the first unconference with ALT.NET Swedish chapter. We met in Avega's offices right smack in the middle of Stockholm and facilitated by Joakim Sundén. The event draw 30 or so participants all with one treat in common; we want to make the best of our daily work on the .NET platform. In doing so, looking outside the box (read product catalogue from Microsoft) to find the best solution for every scenario is something we all value.

It's was a great way to spend a Saturday :) I got some pictures up here: https://lowendahl.net/gallery/listImages.aspx?path=Unconference+-08 

There where loads of great discussions and sadly I could only make it to four of them.

The first one I facilitated myself and my thoughts about that is somewhat summarized here: Being Agile about SOA.

The second one I attended was on MVC in the web space which was facilitated by Torkel. I'm not a web developer, but the ideas behind MVC and the openness around the project was very much agreed to be a good move from Microsoft. Most that attended the talk had interest in building applications based on the MVC framework that Microsoft is putting forward, but I got the feeling that nobody wanted to be first :). One of the key pain points raised around the current implementation of the MVC framework is that of third party controls that encapsulate a lot of desired functionality in a single component. All of us are very curious on how that market will look like.

The third talk was about services, DDD and WCF and mostly about whether or not to duplicate the domain model on both the server side and client side. I got a lot of interesting angles and feedback on some ideas I have that I'm trying to put down for an article and will be presenting on Öredev about; http://www.oredev.se/topmenu/program/trackarchitecture/patriklowendahl.4.3efb083311ac562f9fe80007019.html

The fourth talk I attended was on BDD. I'll be making a separate post on that, as well as for the fifth: OO RIP?

I hope to see more unconference's in Stockholm in the future and I hope to see you all there :)

On September the 13th there will be an open space ALT.NET "unconference". This conference is organised by the ALT.NET group in Stockholm, big thanks to Joakim Sundén for starting this group and getting this conference together.

The ALT.NET Stockholm group have already had a couple of coding dojos, which resulted interesting discussions especially around TDD.

If you live in or near Stockholm and want to discuss development methodologies or tools or just meet and talk to other developers then sign up now.

I just registered me and my colleague Fredrik Normén to this years PDC in Los Angeles. The flights aren't booked yet but we'll be staying at Westin Bonaventure a little bit from the conference center but still on walking distance.

And yeah, they got a spiral running track smack in the middle of the hotel. Check it out: http://www.starwoodhotels.com/pub/media/1004/wes1004fc.14807_md.jpg

For any Swedes going there, have you booked hotels? When and where are you leaving from? Send me an email to patrik.lowendahl {at} cornerstone.se so we can try coordinate.

Anyway's, I'll hope to see as many as possible over there :)

4 of the movies from Developer Summit (3 in English) is up on our website.

Have a peek over here:

Comments from David Chapell on the State of SOA and REST vs SOAP
http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/Roller/Systemutvecklare/Systemutveckling/Event-TV/David-Chappell/

Comments from Tom Rafterty on Web X.0
http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/Roller/Systemutvecklare/Systemutveckling/Event-TV/Tom-Raftery/

Comments on languages and learning with Dan North:
http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/Roller/Systemutvecklare/Systemutveckling/Event-TV/Dan-North/

A summary of the event (In Swedish):
http://www.cornerstone.se/sv/Roller/Systemutvecklare/Systemutveckling/Event-TV/mingel/

More are on the way as they get edited!

http://www.hedgate.net/articles/2008/04/14/real-retrospectives-not-just-talking/

Chris Hedgate and Andres Taylor did a talk on Retrospectives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective) with a room packed to the max. The above link is Chris reflections of that talk.

Passion. A word that touches us all. It's easy to tell when someone is passionate about something, they fiercely debate and defend the subject for their passion. Passionate people that's afire for their cause are often the best advocates of the subject at hand. Passion works as fire; fuel, air and heat; which burns any resistance and moves the subject forward.

Passion. Is one of the words I would like to describe this years Developer Summit with. Passionate people that's afire for causes, technology and the whole industry.

There was a lot of interesting session and speakers this year and now when the conference is over I'm filled with energy, reassurance for the future and inspiration. My thanks to all the speakers who shared their passion through their talks. During the coming week(s) I will try to retell most of the stories told in the session and during the discussions that followed in the breaks, at the dinners and over the beers. But until then; here is a couple of links from speakers who have already blogged about their experiences from the week:

Official Developer Summit blog:
http://forum.cornerstone.se/blogs/devsum/

Tess Fernandez
Recap of Developer Summit session ... : http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/archive/2008/04/11/developer-summit-sessions-on-silverlight-mvc-facebook-and-work-ethics-amongst-software-developers.aspx

Julie Lerman
Stockholm's DevSummit got me thinking: http://blogs.devsource.com/devlife/content/random/stockholms_devsummit_got_me_thinking_1.html

Stockholm - Keeping developers healthy: http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/2008/04/09/StockholmKeepingDevelopersHealthy.aspx

Claudio Perrone
Developer Summit 2008 has been a triumph: http://feeds.claudioperrone.com/~r/monologues/~3/269462412/

Magnus Mårtensson
David Chapell on SOAP and REST: http://blog.noop.se/2008/04/11/David+Chappell+On+SOAP+Vs+REST.aspx

Joakim Sundén (In Swedish)
Yrkesetik inom mjukvaruutveckling: Vad utmärker en professionell utvecklare?: http://blogg.joakimsunden.se/2008/04/yrkesetik-inom-mjukvaruutveckling-vad.html

Johan Lindfors (In Swedish)
Den Nakna Kodaren Presenterar: Guitaroids: http://blogs.msdn.com/johanl/archive/2008/04/10/den-nakne-kodaren-presenterar-guitaroids.aspx

Winter is passing into spring and that usually means I crawl out of hibernation and start to wander about conferences and seminars. From march and forward I have a couple of speaking engagements planned:

Monday 3rd of March: KNUG, Karlstad .NET User Group
http://www.compare.se/index.asp?id=6600&typ=&lang

Introduction to ADO.NET Entity Framework
KNUG is a newly started INETA group and I'll be going there for their opening and talk about Entity Framework. If you live in the neighborhood make sure to come by and say hello.

Tuesday 4th of March: Microsoft Platform Launch, VS2008, W2K8, SQL 2008
http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/msdn/lansering/index.html

What's new in Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft is doing their biggest product launch ever and I'll be there presenting on some of the news for the .NET Framework 3.5 platform. Drop in and have a look at LINQ, LINQ to SQL, WCF and Compact Framework. My colleague Fredrik Normen (http://weblogs.asp.net/fredriknormen/)will also present on AJAX, ASP.NET, Silverlight and the WCF Web Extensions news in Visual Studio 2008

April 9th - 11th: Developer Summit -08
Http://www.expertzone.se/dev08

As with green leafs, the spring brings Developer Summit yet again. As usual it's packed with great speakers and interesting topics and a keynote (by David Chapell this year) that will blow your minds. I'll have a very modest role this year and in addition to hosting the data-track I'll just deliver a single session on "ORM, Concepts, technology and practices".

27th May (Stockholm), 20th May (Sundsvall): MSDN Live
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032371552&Culture=sv-SE
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032371557&Culture=sv-SE


What's new in Windows Server 2008 for developers
This years MSDN Live will be hosted by Cornerstone in Stockholm and Sundsvall. I'll be speaking about what the perks for developers are on the new server platform, and there is a lot. IIS7 alone could fill a day. I've done some ISV training for Microsoft on the W2K8 platform the past year and deployed a couple of live servers, and now I'll be able to bring that to an open audience, I'm really excited to be able to show some of the features I like best :) Fredrik will be there as well ofcourse and share some of his insight around Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

A very interesting spring and I hope to have a lot of discussions during these events since the Microsoft map of software is starting to be redrawn.

This year Developer summit is organized differently then earlier year. Instead of technology based tracks, we've divided the conference into several focus areas. I'm the track chair for the focus area "Data management" which ranges from databases to programming api's to access and process data.

I am glad to announce that the data management track for developer summit now completed with sessions and speakers.

You can read more here: http://forum.cornerstone.se/blogs/devsum/archive/2008/01/16/data-track-complete.aspx

and here:

http://www.expertzone.se/dev08/data.aspx

I am really excited for this years Developer Summit, with the complete line up of really smart and interesting speakers and deep dive topics, I'll have a blast. I hope you will come and share that blast with me :)

Today I had my first on stage experience at TechEd. I was invited by Tom Mertens to a panel together with Clemens Vaster, Patrick Tisseghem, Tom Raftery,  where we discussed blogging as a phenomena in the web sphere, we talked about aggregation, corporate blogging and how to blog. It was great fun!

Since blogging has evolved from it's initial purpose, being a kind of CMS for diaries, to a platform for pushing information out. According to Clemens the change is about RSS and feed aggregation which has made the flow of the information very active while you as a reader can be passive.

This is reflected in the services being created today like technorati. Technorati and similar services takes the aggregation one step further, what it does is letting you create your own RSS feed that aggregates post from the RSS cloud. The way they do that is by letting you supply a number of keywords that your RSS feed should aggregate. It then pulls those posts out of peoples RSS feeds and you got a feed with only the content you want.

Clemens shared that his team, the Oslo team, uses this kind of keyword aggregation to be able to pickup posts people do about their products.

Now RSS enabling blogs was the first step in this revolution of the diary I really think that this keyword (or Search as Tom calls them) will be what moves blogging out of it's current state to something new. Finding the unique content that you're really interested in is hard in the noise today but services like this will help a lot.

We also spent some time on talking about corporate blogging, a bit offline as well, and talked about the positives and negatives of that kind of blog. Clemens had a point that he right now can't blog since what he does is secret and the risk of slipping is to great and I agree this is a great risk. I've seen examples in Swedish corporate blogs where bloggers kind of not telling all the details about product pushes but just enough and to early which gave competitors time to quickly react and put something out on the market to beat them to the punch.

But it also a great power. If there is stuff that you want to play around with and need feedback, the blog is a perfect place to put that.

We also talked about corporate trash blogs, blogs where the sole purpose is to trash competitors or put out smoke and mirrors around the market to hide facts. Clemens clear and concise solution was this: sue them. If you as a corporate or corporate representative put stuff out on the web, you'll be bound under the same marketing laws in your countries as all other marketing material does. Shortly, if someone lies in and ad they got punished and the same laws  will apply to corporate blogging. That's kind of interesting and I have yet to see the Swedish laws be tested around this, but I'm eager to see the result in such a sue.

We finished of by talking on what to think about when you blog and there is a couple of really important point here.  First of all, studies show that only about 20% that read a title actually reads the content and of them about 40% read more then the first paragraph. So get a lot of readers the title and the first paragraph needs to be very interesting. The title is also important since that is indexed by the search engines with higher points then your actual text.

Overall very interesting discussions and loads of pointers and ideas for people that wants to use blogs, and now I got the sweet tooth for the TechEd stage :)

Entering the Auditorium; graffiti artists spraying their art live,  deep bass from techno music are pumping from the speakers, loads of geeks in anticipation of what to come. 

A really cool opening for a developer key note....

They keynote for TechEd Developers -07 is delivered by S. Somaseger (http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/contact.aspx),  Corporate Vice President for the Developer Division at Microsoft and the rumors on what he might have to say has been flowing around the conference venue all morning.

This is my live report from the keynote:

Announcements made:

Announcement: Visual Studio 2008 will be available as RTM download from MSDN before the end of November. See my earlier post for a picture.

Announcement: Microsoft Sync Framwork Community Technical Preview. The sync framework is built to easily support occasionally connected clients and have local cached data that can be synced to a central data store. I'll be blogging more about that.

Announcement: Popfly Explorer to build Popfly reusable and sharable silverlight controls to share functionality across applications. Available in public beta today.

Announcement: Software + Services Blueprints from Patterns and Practices ready to use building blocks and plug-in for visual studio will be available from MSDN shortly to start building S+S applications. First blue print will be to build an Outlook add-in to work in S+S scenarios.

Tool advancement, One of the key messages from Somaseger was that the code for Visual Studio 2008 was to 96% compiled by the new MSBuild engine and Microsoft has been "dog fooding" VS and team system for the last 9 months building the new Tools and Frameworks.

He also talked about Visual Studio Shell and the open licensing for Visual Studio IDE and how that is really important in supporting partners building their own products and supporting their own languages in the Visual Studio environment. The demo was really cool and  showed how to use Visual Studio Shell to build addons for World Of Warcraft, generating LUA and the XML needed with intellisense and other VS features fully supported. Check this out:

This has to be the first time Microsoft openly shows WoW on a conferance.

The Visual Studio LUA editor will be available as open source from CodePlex. I really need to start play again :)

Community interaction, Somaseger also talked about their vision with MSDN forums, where he says that if I as a developer bet my profession on the Microsoft stack, I will get a rapid response on any questions I have. Today 80% of the questions in MSDN forums (http://forums.microsoft.com/)  are answered but the goal is 99%. Somaseger will commit to making the MSDN forums the number one resource for getting your questions answered. That's really interesting and even though it's a jungle there today, looking forward I can see how MSDN forums will be a very important player. Not only for getting questions answered, but also if Somaseger throws his PM and TL into the forums, there will be great opportunities to influence the developer stack from Microsoft.

Microsoft wants MSDN to be a community platform for developers can contribute as well as being a resource where to find information. They will be doing that with MSDN Code gallery, MSDN Wiki where developers can add to the documentation and a translation wiki where developers can translate the documentation to local languages

Plattform advances, in the orcas timeframe Microsoft is betting on a new DataStack with LINQ, on the user experience with Silverligt and WPF and the communication/enterprise grade applications with WCF and WF.

Microsoft is betting hard on three things going foward with their platform, first of all the .NET 3.0 stack with Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation (and Cardspaces) will be upgraded with .NET Framework 3.5.  The second bet is LINQ and all LINQ To X and making data a first class citizen in the framework and the languages. I'll have reasons to get back on LINQ several times this week. The third is user experience with SilverLight and AJAX. The tool stack with Visual Studio 2008's new features are almost all targeted at supporting these three technologies. There are some changes like Visual Studio Tools For Office being integrated into the Professional version of Visual Studio and not as a separate install.

After doing some research the last couple of weeks one could really see that, looking at 3.5 all the big advances is in the W*F space, Silverlight Support and in LINQ. The same goes for Visual Studio 2008. I get the feeling that VS2008 is a minor upgrade where most news are to support W*F and also extending the Application Lifecycle Management initiative which was started by the first version of Team System. 

Product usage, According to numbers from Microsoft over 1 miljon developers are today using Visual Studio 2005 with at least 25% of them using Team System for Application Life Cycle Management, adding the 17 million downloads of Visual Studio Express versions, this is quite a impressive number but looking historically there where over 6 million VB6 developers and a lot of C++ developers, where are they? In VS2003 space? Still in VB6?.

And so we're here. I'm writing this from Barcelona where our 4-man strong team from Cornerstone will be kicking it this week. I'm joined here by our ASP.NET instructor Fredrik Normen (http://fredrik.nsquared2.com/), our Microsoft product manager Josefin Andersson and Michael Herkommer one of our closest contractors. This is my third or so teched, I usually find the time to go here every second year or so and this fall I really needed to get away for a bit so Barcelona here I am :)

Me, Fredrik and Michael will be working at "Ask-The-Experts" where a lot of other interesting people from across Europe will be joining us. I'm really looking forward to discussing various topics with friends I haven't seen for a while (well not IRL anyway).

Looking at the agenda S + S, Orchestration and Data is the main focus this year, there is a lot of interesting topics on patterns on various level of a system, discussions (they have several interactive sessions every day) on the future of data management and such.

All four of us will be blogging on and off about our experiences, both on our own blogs and on http://forum.expertzone.se. we'll also try to do some web casts from down here (if I can learn how pinnacle studio works, there is no C# interface and no code window in that application, how is anyone supposed to do anything with it then !?!?).

If you are here give us a visit at the ATE booths. Fredrik will be at the asp.net booth, I'll be at the Visual Studio 2008 booth from morning to lunch all days except Wednesday and Michael will be at the ALM booth. If you rather talk to the woman in the team I'm sure she'll be all over the place.

Have a great TechEd week everyone, let's rock this joint... 

And so another round of MSDN Live seminars has ended. Thanks to the team around the event for making it a success and thanks to Johan Lindfors and Robert Folkesson from Microsoft for inviting me to speak about something I'm so passionate about. It was fun as always...

During four days I had the opportunity to explain where the domain model movement has sprung from, what challenges that DataSets and plain ADO.NET is suffering from and how utilizing OO and an ORM, like Entíty Framework, helps solving those challenges. If you speak Swedish Johan will put up recordings of the sessions on the Swedish MSDN web for everyone to enjoy. If you don't, keep an eye out I will post a summary here.

Next week me and Johan will be presenting a deep dive into LINQ, LINQ2SQL and the Entity Framework at MSDN Update. So if you want to get a deeper understanding about the next gen data access technology, principles and patterns, you should be there.

Also next week is our "Pimp My Code" event which is fully booked.  That's going to be a blast. 125 souls that wont know what hit them after we pimp their way of writing code.

We've officially launched Developer Summit 2008 now. It will take place in Stockholm 9-11 of April. I'm officially the track chair for our data track and this is mainly a call for papers for that track, but I will relay any suggestions I get to the right track chairs if it doesn't suite mine.

So, for the data track I'm interested in papers about data storage and data access. Preferably with a developer focus. It could be anything from new cool features in a SQL engine to neat tips on effective data handling in your business layer or ideas about presenting data effectively.

If you want to come to Stockholm and present on topics that fits that picture drop me an email (email is under contact on the blog) with a presentation of you as a speaker (who you are, who you work for, your presentation experience, experience in the field you want to present in, etc) and a descriptive abstract of the session / sessions you want to be considered.

And if you don't want to talk, come and visit us anyway. We always have a blast on Developer Summit.

Prepare the roadies, tell the groupies and bring your entourage. Cornerstone has just released the tickets for this years most awesome event: "Pimp My Code".

This event is all about code, it's about writing beautiful code, testable code, re-usable code and readable code. If you're in the business of writing code you should be there.

We will be hitting Gothenburg(24th Oct) and Stockholm(23rd Oct) to begin with.

The agenda:

Patterns For Mere Code Mortals - Patrik Löwendahl, Cornerstone
Common patterns and principles explained in C# without those dull UML boxes.

Pimp your project with Enterprise Library - Magnus Mårtensson, Dotway
Enterprise Library deep dive with focus on the pimping your objects with the Policy Injection block.

From Model View Controller to Microsoft Web Client Factory - Tobias Fjälling, Dotway
ASP.NET UI patterns.

Learning From Legacy - Andreas Brink, Factor 10
Making legacy code less legacy with simple enough techniques.

Developers are from mars and operations is from Venus - Mikaell Durell, Microsoft
Make the CIO love your applications.

Pimp My Code - Fredrik Normen, Cornerstone
Do's and don'ts when writing code and how to refactor from and to them.

To read more and get your ticket before they run out, visit: http://www.cornerstone.se/expertzone/pmc/ 

I will see you there!

MSDN Live is hitting the road again!

This time I will be presenting on different options for data access and where Entity Framework fits into the picture. I will try to draw a map of the different mentalities behind data sets and other object models like the domain model. I will also try to explain the difference between the standard data access classes in ado.net (aka DataAdapter) and the Data Mapper pattern (aka O/R mapping). When the map is drawn with this information we will put the entity framework onto there and to see what direction Microsoft is heading going forward and making ADO a modern data access API.

My colleague Fredrik Normen (http://fredrik.nsquared2.com/) will also be joining us and he will share some of the tips and tricks on Ajax that he has picked up during his years with the technology.

We will be hitting four cities, Umeå, Gothenburg, Malmoe and Stockholm. This is my fourth MSDN Live and I really think that this will be the most exciting one.

To read a complete agenda and get the links for booking, head over to Johan Lindfors blog and he will instruct you further (in Swedish):

http://blogs.msdn.com/johanl/archive/2007/09/10/msdn-live-rullar-snart-ut-igen.aspx

SweNug Architect Summit 2007 will take place between the 5th to 6th October this year. It will start on Friday at 06:00 PM with an introduction, and will end somewhere around 05:00 PM on Saturday. We will use Open spaces, so there are no speakers. The idea is that the attendance will set the agenda and talk about interesting things regarding architecture. Because we use Open Spaces we only have spots for about 30-40 people and you should have a burning interest in the architecture topic and also willing to share your thoughts and ideas.

The SweNug Architect Summit will be in Cornerstone's facility in Stockholm (Sweden). You can find a map and an address at the following link: http://www.cornerstone.se/aboutCornerstone/showRoadDiscription.aspx?cityID=2

This will be an opportunity for all of you to meet experience people in the field and have a live conversation with each other. The registration process is easy, just send your name and contact info to:

or

Tomorrow developer summit kicks off. I'm really excited for the line up this year, alot of new and old frieands made it, not only as speakers but alos in the ranks of the participants (well over 300 this year).

Check out the conferance site here: http://www.cornerstone.se/expertzone/dev07/

and the official conferance blog over here: http://forum.cornerstone.se/blogs/devsum/default.aspx

Make sure to tune in for the latest technical buzz and gossip from the premises. If you didn't make it this year, no worries it will always be next year.

Just a month away now, Developer Summit 2007.

For the third consecutive year our Conference is growing in sessions, speakers and participants. Every year we try to have a theme and this year it is "Working Software" with a touch of color and design from the MIX conference in Las Vegas.

 I'm really looking forward to this year, there is loads of cool sessions but also a lot of really interesting and smart people at the premises. Not only as speakers but also as participants. I'm really sure that the discussions and interaction will be off the chart.

I'm aiming at having a deep discussion about SOA and it's imperative Waterfall principle with Beat Schwegler, tap into Christian Weyer's brain and leverage some of his experience around WCF and put Tess Fernandez on the hot seat about debugging and performance measurement. I'll spice that up with just hanging around Jimmy Nilsson, Erik Dörnenburg and Dan North (Dan North is THE guy when it comes to the people perspective in agile).

What's that saying... "Like a child at Christmas" ...

 I hope to see you there to get your input and insight in topics that interest you.

Oh, and make sure to get the latest news and summaries for all the sessions after the conferance at the conferance blog over here: http://forum.cornerstone.se/blogs/devsum/default.aspx 

One week has passed. A week filled with laughter, deep technical discussions and fun, fun, fun. The past week I have been on the road with Microsoft's DPE team presenting at the MSDN Live roadshow. We have hit Malmoe, Gothenburg, Örebro, Stockholm and Linköping, although not don yet (we have Umeå left) I think we have already met 1500 passionate developers all around Sweden. This is my third roadshow I've done with/for Microsoft and it is always hilarious.

As always it is great to hang out with Johan Lindfors and was awesome to get to know the other DPE's Robert Folkesson, Micke Andeberg and Maria Lundahl that I've only met briefly before.

The seminars where going from very low and deep with a demonstration of the garbage collector to high and shallow with color and design while demonstrating WPF/E and AJAX. While Johan and I focused on the low end stuff like type safety and LINQ, Robert and my colleague Marcus Olsson showed off full screen HD video in WPF/E.

Now don't be sad if you missed out, the presentations is downloadable from Johan's(http://blogs.msdn.com/johanl/archive/2007/03/22/microsoft-live-2007-presentationerna.aspx) and Robert's (http://blogs.msdn.com/robf/archive/2007/03/23/presentationer-fr-n-ms-live.aspx) blogs also the presentations and demos was recorded and will be published on the Swedish MSDN web.

My favorite quotes from the week:

* While Johan shows great concern about the low interest in programming among teens, he gently showed me how much he appreciated my most recent demo; "Well it might not help when the result of our C# MVP coolest demo is 10 times Hello World"

* Marcus Olssons killing comment to Johan when showing off his skills in Expression Blend: Johan:"Wow, that is a lot of properties, how is could you possibly find what you want?". Marcus: "Ehm, Johan, four days into the roadshow and you still don't get the filter function?"

Fun, Fun, Fun...

Another cool thing this week was the Robotics stuff Johan talked about. Browsing around a bit I found the tools and sdk over here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/default.aspx and now I just need to get one of thees: http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=B8527 (ehm, Johan, my girlfriend has a comment on how much she loved that you showed me this and would like to show her application, make sure to bring it up next time you guys meet ;) If anyone have played around with thees things, please give me a howl. I would like to set up some kind of user group / mailing list / community.

All and all a great week. I would like to send a "thank you" to the MS DPE team for the great fun, and also to the Momentum (http://www.momentumww.se/) and DPS (http://www.dps.se/) crews that made everything just happen.

You guys rock!

PS! I Love my Job!!

I've just arrived to Arosa in Switzerland and the Software Architecture Workshop. The workshop is an initative from Jimmy Nilsson (www.jnsk.se) where complete software-geeks meet and discuss what their heart desire. It's facilitated as a self-cost open spaces event and will run over this coming week. The first two years was hosted by Jimmy himself, but the last two the hosting has been passed around and this year it fell on Beat Schwegler (http://blogs.msdn.com/beatsch/) to organize the meeting.

Although it's by invitation only, this year the event have a stunning 40 participants. Imagine that, 39 brilliant minds (well at least I think every one else is very brilliant) all locked into the same hotel for a couple of days. That will vouch for some really interesting discussions and with names like Jimmy Nilsson, Mats Helander, Frans Bouma, Dan North, Ingo Rammer, Udi Dahan and Erik Doernenburg; there will for certain be many points of views and heated debates :)

Speaking about point of views, here's the view from our "top of the roof"-hotel room:

I'm certain that the nature around us and the geeks in the group will inspire loads of blogposts during this week.

Last years conferance "Nordev" was a huge success and 2006 we'll follow it up with another conferenace. Due to some minor inconvenience with the name we've decided to rename it this year to "Developer Summit".

Some of the speakers from last year will be present, like Jimmy Nilsson, Eric Dörnenburg, Richard Öberg, Jonas Bonner, Johan Lindfors and there will also be some new ones. One of the more promenent names for this conferance is Edward Jezierski, an architect from Microsofts Pattern and Architecture Group.

Have a look at http://www.cornerstone.se/expertzone/dev/ for updates about speakers, topics and stuff. I'll try to get you guys a RSS feed from the site ASAP.

If you have a topic or speaker you would like to recomend, now is the time to email me. We're nailing the schedule at the end of january.

And how cool was it :)

The start of the day couldn't have been better. Thomas Cardell Teleca AU-System kicked off by delivering a procative session that basically said: "We'll all this stuff you gonna hear is cool in dead, but think twice if you really need them". What a perfect start, set the bar for the rest of the presenters ... 

Except other extra ordinary speakers two really stood out today, Jimmy Nilsson (JNSK) and Erik Dörnenburg (ThoughtWorks), really handled the criticism given in the first talk against TDD. Their TDD talk was really upfront, direct and practically focused.

For me this was the talk of the day.

As always, a lot of good discussions where in the breaks. I had some really good ones with Eric, who was a later entry in the speaker list. Eric and ThoughtWorks has been in many successful projects executed with TDD, Agile and XP. Really interesting to hear.

Tomorrow is platform day, that means we'll dig into topics on the java and .net plattform.

This weekend the Swedish .net user group architectural summit took place in Gothenburg. There where around 30 or so architecture enthusiasts including people from Microsoft, KnowIT, Callista, JNSK, Synaptic and Consignit to mention a few.

It was really interesting to note that although the event was an open one with no fee associated to it, all the participant where sharp minds with ton of experience in their backpack.

The summit was in the form "open spaces" where no set sessions and no actual rules are used. I think this is one of the best forms I've come across.

For me the first evening was all about Software factories / DSL and a SOA topic that actually covered a lot more then it intended to.

In the Software factories session we talked a lot about DSL's (Domain Specific Languages) and different framework implementations supporting it.

DSL is exiting actually. Although I usually tend to be a bit suspicious towards "silver bullets" that abstracts implementation details to far away from the developer, I do think that used properly DSL might be a big boost in development cycles.

I wouldn't want to see a development of things where we abstracted away most of the software development to a "drag and drop" environment though. Maybe it's me being all nerdy and stuff wanting to write my own code, but still. Helping in capturing the domains specific requirements is a great tool. But just a tool, the 80/20 rule still applies and we need to be careful not loosing flexibility over easability (is that a word ;).

My conclusion from this first discussion is that abstraction and reuse of components and frameworks is a good thing, but as a complement to your standard software development process not as a substitute.

The SOA talk was interesting too, I got a lot of perspectives on SOA and delivered a couple of shots towards the SOA advocates that they actually agreed with. I'll be doing some blogging about my SOA experience from the summit.

The first day ended with some of us grabbing a beer and a couple of us grabbing a lot of beers!! It was fun, and something strange happened. The line "I'm a computer programmer" actually worked as a pickup line, "TWICE!!!" I don't think we'll see that one again soon.