Blog

The past weeks have been busy for me, but especially in the evenings, with the musical I played in and all that… During the day, I had some spare time every now and again, and I wasted most of that on my Xbox 360. … loving it 😉 … XBox Live is getting more and more functionality. On top of that, more and more people are connecting… I’m curious which bloggers/blog-readers game online with their Xbox 360 and which games are played.

Maybe I mentioned it earlier: I play in a musical in the month December (Veldhovense Revue). We started rehearsing twice a week in March. Now, we’ve played 4 shows already, and we’ve got 10 more to go. We’ve been really busy the last couple of weeks to make it a great show, and I think we succeeded. Anyway, I just wanted to mention the reason for me not blogging so much lately.

We’re working to upgrade our current ASP.NET 1.1 project to an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application project (so that’s not the new Visual Studio 2005 website model). We had some basic minor migration issues, which have all been addressed and are currently solved. The only problem we have right now is with the UIP Application Block. There are several people online stating they’ve got UIPAB working in a .NET 2.0 project. Unfortunately, we haven’t got it working… yet 😉

I tried using Windows Live Writer as soon as it got out, but because of proxy settings at the company I was working publishing posts wasn’t possible. I only now got time to try it at home, because I’ve been at home ill the past days. I’m still not 100% well, but I’ll keep quiet to get well soon. So maybe it’s better if I go and rest now… By the way: nice writing software, Windows Live Writer!

Sadly, I will not be attending the 2006 European developer Tech·Ed. Fortunately, the reason I won’t be there is quite nice: I am currently attending Microsoft’s ‘LEAP for aspiring architects’ program, which enables me to visit Redmond next January! So although I will not be visiting Spain next week, America is whitin reach! I’m looking forward to visiting the Microsoft Campus. I’ll post all the interesting information over here …

I used to think we (people working in software development) were far behind when it came to testing. Due to a few experiences over hte last few weeks this has changed… In waterfall projects, testing is at the end of the process, causing it to be the first thing to go when time gets short. In agile methods, test is evenly divided throughout the process. This combined with the popularity of agile methods make that test is getting more and more mature in software development.

Google added another cool search to their labs: Google Code search. Find code written in almost any language, and under almost any license. Have a look at advanced code searchand see the possibilities. If the codebase that is searched is big enough, this might be a good step into getting developers to use Google if they’re looking for a piece of code (when they’re that not doing that already…).

Because of a new way of working here at the customer I’m located at, two virtual machines will be deployed to each developer’s machine. These VM’s will be run using VMware player. The thing is, the VM’s should be able to access the network and all the ’normal’ resources. Because of this, all the VM’s should have unique (computer)names. But they have to be traceable to the host machine. The wish the customer has at this point is to give the VM’s a computername based on the name of the machine the VM will be run on.

Together with a colleague, I’m giving basic .NET training for colleagues at this moment. Not at THIS moment exactly, because they’re doing exercises right now. But today is the second day of four days of training in total. Currently we already have two weird things popping up. Last week we encountered significant inaccuracy when calculating values using doubles. For instance, when adding 0.1 to a double (instantiated at 0) several times, the value wondered off.

I’m back again. The past four weeks I’ve been entertaining kids on a summer camp (one week) and we’ve moved into our new house! After lots of painting, demolition and other stuff, our new house is ready (enough) to live in. In the near future, our new furniture will arrive and our bathroom will be renewed. So: lots of upcoming milestones! A note on the serious side: bloggingabout.net is being spammed heavily.

The next couple of weeks there will be low activity on my blog. First, I’ll be guiding a total of almost 100 kids through a summercamp for a week (we’re leaving today), next we will start working on our new house! We get the key a week from monday, so that’s two days after we come back from camp. Two days of resting…… I hope 😉 I might get back once in a while, maybe even publishing some pics about the ‘renovation’, but since this is a .

The Visual Studio servicing page is updated: VS 2005 SP1 will ship Q3 of this year. This date seems to have has slipped before, but at least it gives us an estimated time of shipping. Taken from that page: “The types of fixes you can expect to find in this service pack are: The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates (GDRs) released between RTM and the end of the Service Pack customer beta period.