Work

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read: An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly ‘System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ or one of its dependencies.

As of December first I’ll be joining the ranks of Valid (www.valid.nl – Dutch website). I’m very excited to start over there and I am convinced we will be able to do great stuff together 🙂 I would also like to take this opportunity to thank BDO (www.bdo.nl) for the past period and wish them all the best with the plans for the future of ‘our’ system. Update 14 Jan 2011

As you probably know I’ve worked for my own company for quite a while (see my post ‘A new challenge’ of October first 2008). Because business was good, I had way too little time to keep this blog up to date. Sorry for that… Since the beginning of this month, that all has changed: I joined BDO) and can now work ’normal’ hours in stead of ‘I-own-my-own-company-and-have-to-make-every-minute-of-every-day-count’ hours. I’ll probably still be pretty busy, but there’s a difference between busy and busy… 😉

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com. Read it over here (Dutch)

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr). What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

Our company has (the first draft of) a new website online. We’re still working on the content, but the design is now online. Check it out @ www.mediagarde.nl (Dutch).

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

As of today, I am no longer working for Avanade. I had a good time over there, but my personal goals changed. I found a new challenge: I started a company with a good friend of mine. We’re still building the website, so the information is not there yet. But it will be soon. So check the websiteevery now and again. We’re very excited and can’t wait to get started!

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this postat The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him.

The last weeks have been filled with holidays and introductional days at my new employer{.}. Because of that, I haven’t had the time to realy dive into Visual Studio 2008, although I have played around with it since the RTM version was available. Since this week I’ve been writing some serious code in VS2008 for my new personal site (more about this later!). I can only agree with what Pieter de Bruinsaid in his post about the new line of developer tools and additions: “If you are building .

Today was the first of two introduction days at Avanade{.}. Maybe you missed it, but I started there today{.}. And that’s why I’m writing this blogpost from a hotel in Almere, using my new Avanade laptop. 😉 I’m sure there will be lots of stuff to blog about, so stay tuned for more…

A [wikipedia:RUP] project consists of 4 different phases. The elaboration phase(the second phase in the RUP project lifecycle) is normally done with a small team. One of the important reasons for this is that you want to define the basic form of your architecture. This means you think about concepts, elaborate on them, develop proof of concepts and select the ones that work best for your specific project. If there is one thing you can not use (early) in an elaboration phase of a project, it’s having too many team members.

As of 01-01-2008, I’m joining Avanade. You might have heard Avanade opened an office in the south of The Netherlandsthe first of November. I’ll be joining the ranks over there (Eindhoven!) and I am exited to get started. I spent the past years at LogicaCMG. I had a lot of fun and, even more important, I learned a lot. I’ll miss the guys (and girls!) I worked with, but I’m sure I will keep in touch with some of them.