I try to keep this blog more or less focused on software development, but every now and then I think it’s good to throw in some personal updates as well… Last week Hege and I went up to Cairns for a dive expedition with TAKA Dive to the Northern Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea. Before the trip we did some research, checking out YouTube video and Flickr photos from the area, but the trip turned out even better than what we dared hop fore. Already after the first dives on Ribbon Reef #10 a group of 6-7 Dwarf Minkie Whales came up to the boat. We got to snorkel with the animals, and it was just unreal having a 6 meter animal swimming just couple of meter underneath me. Another highlight of the trip was the diving at Osprey reef - heaps of sharks, big fishes and amazing visibility (30-40 meters). We also did a shark feed at North Horn, which attracted schools of white tip reef shark, gray whaler sharks, and some oceanic white tip sharks. On one of Hege’s photos we could count more than 30 sharks in one shot. So I don’t know the total number, but they were plentiful. We did a total of 14 dives over a 5 day/4 night trip, and got to sea sharks, whales, turtles, big schools of fish, amazing healthy coral reefs and more.

We were about 30 people on the boat, but it never felt crowded. It had plenty of space, good cabins, modern mid-deck with plasma TV’s and computers where we watched the video of the days diving every night. The food was top notch, including dishes like lamb roast, roast beef and homemade lasagna. The crew did an awesome job, and I can’t do anything but highly recommend TAKA for anyone wanting a great dive expedition to the Great Barrier Reef.

I’m going to keep this post short, and Hege have also posted a more lengthy story on her blog, as well as heaps of photos on Flickr. I’m including some of the best once here, but I strongly recommend checking out her Flickr feed.

 

 

November have been super busy with TechED Barcelona, user group meetings and off course the big Web 2.0 event in Oslo. This weekend we (Hege and I) moved out from the apartment we've been renting in Trondheim for the last four year, and man was that tiresome! We spend the entire weekend packing, moving, throwing away old stuff, trying to give away usable stuff we cant keep etc. So as of this Monday I'm staying on the couch at Espen (my good friend from the GreIT days). I haven't booked a ticket back home for Christmas yet, but I'm trying to get home Friday 21. December. Really looking forward to that!

Before I can take a (well deserved) Christmas Holliday I have a bunch of stuff going on. This Thursday I'm giving a short 15min introduction on REST web services in WCF 3.5 as part of a "Best of TechEd 2007" presentation at NNUG Trondheim. On Friday I'm presenting LINQ and C# 3.0 at the Microsoft Student Community at NTNU. I'm also working on a series of webcasts for those of you who couldn't make it to the event in Oslo last week… More on that later.

After 6 amazing weeks of summer holiday it feels good to be back at the keyboard. I’m half way through with my first week at Capgemini in Trondheim, and so far it’s been great. The first week haven’t been to stressful. I’ve spent the week learning how things work around Capgemini, and about the various internal systems I have to use on an everyday basis. As for technical work my first task has been to look into a client certificate/forms authentication combination for a web application.

Everyone at Cap is running standard disk images on their computers and Vista won’t be available until sometime in 2008 (at least that’s what I’ve heard so far). So, at the moment I’m not running Vista on any of my development machines (work or personal laptop). After running Vista fulltime since November 2006 it’s a bit dull to go back to XP. So I guess I’ll have to install one of dose hard drive bays you can put into the CD-ROM to run Vista off it.

I assume most of you guys have downloaded the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 release? I’m currently playing with it preparing for my VS2008 and LINQ presentations at MSDN Live later this month. I feel really lucky with the topics I get a chance to talk about on this round of MSDN Live. Playing with VS2008 and LINQ is plain fun, and there is tons of great content available. Creating content for the presentations shouldn’t bee to hard.

I forgot the charger for my HP laptop back home in Lakselv, but as soon as I get it back I’ll finish my post on using protocol handlers as a way to do light weight integration between applications. The sample application is more or less done, but I need to add some word explaining why this might be a cool thing to do.

I try to keep the content of this blog as technical relevant as possible, but I figured it was time for some quick personal updates. This week I had my last day at Abeo, the company I've been working for the last two years. My two years at Abeo have been amazing so I feel a little sad for leaving Abeo. The main reason for my decision to work for Capgemini is that in 2008 Hege and I are spending a year in Melbourne Austraila where I'll be working for Cap's Melbourne office. I'm really looking forward to new challenges in Capgemini, and the people I've meet so far seams both talented and fun to be around.

In other news I've graduated with a Bachelors degree in informatics from the Norwegian University of Technology and Science. I haven't been the average student since I've spent so much time working during my studies, but I've meet some truly amazing people I hope to keep in touch with in the years to come.

Tomorrow Hege and I are leaving for a two week holiday in Sharm El Sheik (Egypt). I'm not bringing my laptop, so I'll be offline for the next two and a half week. After the trip to Egypt we're spending a couple of day in Oslo. We have tickets for the sold out Metallica concerts, so that is going to be a blast. We'll be back home in Lakselv Wednesday 11.july where I'll be spending the next three weeks fishing and spending time with old friends and family. I'll probably do some writing during my weeks in Lakselv, and already have several posts lined up. I expect to be back in Trondheim Sunday 05 august.

I'm ending this post by wishing all my reads a really good summer, and just keep an eye on your RSS subscription, I'll be posting again in 2-3 weeks!

One of the new things Rune Grothaug is doing with the Norwegian MSDN website is a new section called "Guru of the month". In this section he wants to put some of the most talented developers in Norway in the spotlight. First one out was Sondre who is the April MSDN guru. This month it's my turn! The "guru page" is a profile with some information about me, and what projects I've been involved with. The idea is that the developer community should nominate other persons who deserve this kind of attention. So do you know an awesome developer who deserves a few minutes in the spot light? Drop Rune an e-mail with your suggestion.

My "MSDN Guru" profile is available in both Norwegian and English.

… when it comes to gadgets! Hege has been wanting a portable video device for some time. And being a gadget freak I have two (PSP and iPod video). So, I made her a deal. She'll get me a new DS Lite with New Super Mario, and she can have my PSP with all accessories and games.

So now the household have the best of both worlds. Amazing graphics and cool media features in the PSP, and some truly innovative and fun games in the DS. The "blow the mic" game play mechanics in one of the mini games blew away (literally…).

I'll promise my next post will be about code!

 

Time flies and all the sudden it's 2007. I've been more or less offline this Christmas, spending the holydays with friends and family back home in Lakselv. It's been great to take some time off to relax, play Xbox 360, eat good food and watch movies to late at night.

2006 have been a really exciting year, with some of the following highlights:

• Became an Microsoft Regional Director in February
• Attended the Microsoft Connect event in France in March
• Spoke at the MSDN Live event in Trondheim, Oslo, Bergen and Stavanger in April
• Won the Imagine Cup Nordic finals in Oslo in May
• Had a great summer holiday, with a trip to the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, and some nice weeks of fishing in Lakselv.
• Placed third in the Imagine Cup World Finals in India in August!
• Invited to TechEd Developers in Barcelona in November to talk about our Imagine Cup Experience.

I'm really looking forward to 2007. I think it's going to be a really exciting year, starting with two weeks in Reading attending the Microsoft Accelerator Program. Microsoft also got several interesting product releases coming up, and among them IIS 7.0 that I will be talking about on MSDN Live in February.

 

In February it's time for a new round of MSDN Live in four major cities in Norway. The theme for this round of MSDN Live is web development, and in particular security, AJAX, IIS 7.0 and productivity tips and tricks in Visual Studio 2005.

I'll be giving one presentation this round on "IIS 7.0 for web developers". The focus of my talk will be on how you as a web developer can leverage IIS 7.0 by developing managed modules, or by using IIS 7.0 as a host for your Windows Communication Foundation services. The talk will be a nice introduction to the next version of Microsoft's web server.

The dates are as following:

• Oslo - 5. February
• Trondheim - 8. February
• Bergen - 13. February
• Stavanger - 15. February

Click the links for complete agenda and list of all the speakers who will be presenting this round. 25 % of the available seats in Oslo is already taken, so sign up now!

As usual this is a free event and a excellent opportunity to get up to speed on the latest in web development.

Looking forward to see you at MSDN Live in February!

 

Just a quick birthday post… Today I turned 23, and it's been a great birthday! I started the day with the final exam in the "algorithms and data structures" course, which Håvard blogged about earlier this week. Out of 114 students who took the course last year only 14 passed… But, thankfully this years final examn wasn't that bad, and I expect to get a decent grade.

To night I've had some of my buddies over for chocolate cake, candy, snacks and some Wii gaming. Petter pre-ordered the Wii, so he got his copy today (on the Norwegian launch day). We've been playing all the Wii sports games, which is a ton of fun. Pictures and video says more than word, so check out these Flickr! pictures and Youtube videos!

 

During this weekend I've upgraded two of my computers to Windows Vista. I started last night with my Windows Media Center computer. All my media content is either stored on a separate partition, or on a network share, so I didn't have to back up anything.

The installation procedure took exactly the same amount of time as I used to fry some minced meet, chop some salad and make me some taco for dinner. Once I was back to the computer it was ready to walk me trough the Windows Media Center wizard, and 5 min after I had my TV up and running. Xbox 360 integration with Windows Vista was on problem neither, and the UI looks amazing both on the PC and trough the 360 extender.

I was surprised how well Vista ran on my old HTPC. The computer is from December 2003 and wasn't even a top notch computer back then. The computer is built using a Shuttle SN41G2B Barebone, with a AMD Athlon XP2600 CPU (1.9ghz), 1280mb or ram, on board video and sound, and with a Hauppage 350PVR tv-tuner.

I didn't get the "glass" UI, but the Media Center UI runs like a charm.

The Windows Experience Index turned out like this:

• Processor: 2.3
• Memory: 2.5
• Graphics: 1.9
• Gaming graphics: 1.0
• Primary hard disk: 5.3

This gave me a base score of 1.0 determined by the lowest score, gaming graphics. This was no bummer, since I don't use my HTCP for gaming. I have a 360 for that!

Today I updated my primary computer, an IBM T43p. The computer has two physical hard drives. One internal, and one in the cd-rom bay. I have a really sweet Windows XP with Office 2007 setup going on my primary internal hard drive where I have all my work stuff, so I installed Vista on the drive inside the cd-rom bay. Since I have two physical drives I didn't have to care about dual boot. I simply hit F12 when the computer boots up to select which drive to boot from.

The IBM T43p is quite beefy and is running a 2.13ghz Intel Pentum M processor, 2046MB or RAM, 145GB of hard drive space and a Mobility Fire GL V3200 graphics adapter with 128MB of video ram.

The Windows Experience Index for the IBM turned out like this:

• Procesor: 3.9
• RAM: 4.4
• Graphics: 4.0
• Gaming Graphics: 3.7
• Primary hard disk: 5.0

This game me a base score of 3.7, which is decent. I get the glass UI and everything is running super smooth!

Tomorrow I'm going to celebrate my new Vista install by cocking together a sidebar gadget or two.

What a week! Both Office 2007 RTM and Windows Vista RTM is now available on MSDN. I downloaded and installed Office 2007 Monday. The download was only 450MB or something like that, so it actually took longer time to install it than to download it. The upgrade from Office 2003 was painless, all my settings, files and content was unchanged, as expected.

Fellow RD Scott Hanselman made a post about one of his new favorite features: The new insert menu in Outlook messages, and in particular the insert calendar function. Check out his post if you're curious what it's all about.

I figured I had to write a quick post my self about my favorite features after a week of Office 2007 usage:

1. The Outlook To-Do Bar: How did we get stuff done with out this guy? This seams to be "everyone's" favorite. Basically you get a bar on the right side of Outlook displaying the three next upcoming appointments, all tasks and all items that you want to follow up on.

2. RSS in Outlook: I know there are third party solutions out there for 2003, but it's something different when it comes "out of the box", tightly integrated with the platform. If I subscribe to a feed in IE, it automatically shows up in Outlook. When I hit "send and receive" the feeds get updated.

And guess what: You can tag and add follow up flags to any item in Outlook, including RSS items. So, for instance if there is a cool blog post I want to comment on I tag it as "interesting post, need comment", and mark it for follow up this week. This will off course make the RSS item show up in the To-Do bar as an item. If I double click the item in the To-Do bar I get directly to the post.

3. Smart art: Remember how "cool" WordArt was back in 1997? Well, 10 years have passed and we have a new kid on the block: Smart art. This thing is basically about adding graphical "stuff" to your document/presentation/mail. The "stuff" can be a simple chart, a cool looking table, a "flow chart" thingy etc.

The cool thing about Smart art is the ability to add "styles" on top of Smart art making it look ultra sweet. I don't think you can make Smart art look  bad even if you try. Well, perhaps you could, but you get my point.

4. The overall user experience: Office 2007 just looks amazing. Period. To many changes to mention them all

5. OneNote 2007 with Smartphone integration: OneNote 2007 have several new features. One of the cooler is the new OneNote Mobile version. You hade some Smartphone/Pocket PC integration in 2003, but it was limited to synchronizing audio recordings into OneNote. In 2007 you have a separate mobile client which allows you to take notes, capture pictures and add voice recordings to a new OneNote note. When you connect your mobile phone all the notes, including pictures and voice, get's imported into a notebook in OneNote.

For instance, if you take a photo of a poster or business card, the text becomes searchable trough text recognition. If you use your phone to record memos the audio becomes searchable trough voice recognition.

One of the main things I use the camera on my Qtek 8310 for is taking photos of posters to concerts/events I want to remember. When I walk the hallways at the university I come across interestin stuff daily that I take a snapshot off. The problem is remembering to get these pictures onto my computer before they become outdated. Using OneNote I get all my poster pictures directly on my computer.

You can off course synchronize from your computer to your cell phone. So for instance if you're going on a holiday you could include a map as an image file, the address to the hotel, your flight reservation number etc. in a single OneNote note, and have it synchronized to your mobile phone.

Read more on what you can do with OneNote Mobile at Chris Pratley’s blog.

It's Monday night and I'm safely back home in Trondheim. I've spent the weekend recovering from a really exiting but still tiresome TechEd week in Barcelona.

Wednesday was all about interviews and demos. Early Wednesday Simon Brown and Arfa (that 11 year old Pakistan girl from the key note) dropped by our stand and asked for an Imagine Cup demo. Arfa was really interested in the project, but most of all she wanted to compete in the Imagine Cup her self, even tough she have to wait four more years till she turns 16…

During the day we gave three video interviews, one with Virtual TechEd, one with my mate Dave McMahon and finally a Channel9 interview. I'll post links as soon as the interviews are available online. Just after the Channel9 interview Anders Hejlsberg dropped by the Imagine Cup stand to check out our and the Italian project. Me and Hans Olav got a chance to give him the demo, and talk to him about technologies used to implement the project, Anders sessions at TechEd and LINQ. It was great to get a chance to meet Anders and chat with him.

Wednesday evening was all about the infamous, annual Norwegian TechEd party at the Hard Rock Cafe. More than 200 Norwegian delegates where attending TechEd this year, and the Norwegian party is know for being the best TechEd party, so quite a few speakers dropped by as well. As you can imagine, the place was quite crowded and the atmosphere was great!

Thursday was the "Microsoft Student Partner Program" day. 120 students from around the EMEA region was invited to attend TechEd during the day. Henrik, the Danish academic evangelist, was also in Barcelona, so it was fun seeing him again. Thursday after noon Caroline Phillips officially announced the Microsoft Student Partner Program at the first EMEA MSP meeting. During the meeting we gave a 25 minute presentation talking about our Imagine Cup project and most importantly the experience in India during the world finals.

After the meeting all 120 MSP, all the ADE's and a couple of other Microsoft people went over to "Lasermon" which has Barcelona's largest laser gun arena. We played laser death match, had all kinds of Spanish food and plenty of drinks. It was great to meet students from around the EMEA region and talk about how they run their local student community user groups.

During the party I also got a chance to catch up with Rob Burke from Microsoft Ireland. He's a really great guy, and has a really god blog up at http://blogs.msdn.com/robburke, and is allso a frequent Flickr poster.

Our flight back to Norway left Friday after noon, so we didn't have time to attend TechEd Friday. It was nice to get home Friday afternoon and have the weekend to recover  after TechEd.

As you can imagine after reading the posts TechEd this year was really busy for us. I didn't get a chance to attend as many sessions as I wanted, but then again we will be receiving the TechEd post conference DVD with all the sessions. You can cream all the great content into one DVD, but you cant capture the true atmosphere and all the people you meet at TechEd into one DVD. You'll have to be there your self.

Finally, a big shout out to everyone I meet during the TechEd week, and special thanks to Caroline for inviting us.

Oh, by the way, Hege and Caroline have uploaded a bunch of pictures on their Flickr sites. Be sure to check them out.

PS. I installed Office 2007 RTM today. Worked like a charm! Some really cool new features in OneNote 2007 I'll blog about later.

PPS: I have lots of great ideas after TechEd, just need time to put them in motion. One of the things I'm currently playing with involves IQueriable<T>… More to come on this one…

I'm currently attending the Microsoft TechEd Developers in Barcelona. Me and Hege arrived Friday at noon, so we speed the weekend as tourists Barcelona with Gøran and Astrid, who arrived Thursday noon. During the weekend we've visited some of Gaudis famous buildings, such as Sagrada Familia and Casa Milà. We spend Saturday trawling the shops down town in the Larabla street. Lots of fun for the girls, horrible for my feet…

We spent Sunday checking out the Zoo, which was tons of fun, even though the famous albino gorilla Snowflake passed away a few years ago. We saw all kinds of crazy animals and Hege took a ton of pictures that probably will be available on Flickr once we get back to Trondheim. On the evening we visited the Aquarium where they had a 70m under water tunnel with sharks and all kinds of other big fishes.

Monday was the first day of TechEd. Well, actually Monday it's the pre-conference day. I attended the first two parts of the architecture track held by Ron Jacobs and Scott Hanselman. I had to leave before they got really deep into the material, but Ron gave some interesting "stories" about the different role of an architect. As an explorer, designer and advocate. Scott gave some concrete tips on how to measure and plan for security, scalability, performance and availability. Interesting in deed.

I had to leave after the two first parts of the pre-conference track for the RD meeting. Great to finally meat many of my fellow RDs in person. During the meeting the winners of the photo contest where announced. And guess what; I won! Big thanks to the photographer Hege. The first price was an Xbox 360 and a Zune Player (once available). So that was tons of fun. After the meeting we had an RD party down town Barcelona. The food was excellent, and I had squid fish for the first time!

Today, Tuesday, was the real opening day of TechEd. During the morning key note the Norwegian team and our project was mentioned, in front of approx 3500 developers. Awesome! The key note was pretty much what you can expect from an key note like this. Some cool end to end scenarios on how to use .NET 3.0, Windows Vista and Office 2007 to build new business solutions. Anders Hejlsberg did his LINQ magic, which continues to blow me away by it's power and elegance. This is definitely something I'll explore further and blog more about.

We've also been busy at the Imagine Cup stand, where we've been demoing MediWatch for press, developers and other interested people. I also took part in a "press round table" discussing "young developers of the future". The theme for the discussion was some of the challenges for young developers, which part universities should play in providing the students with the skill set needed in the "real world", and how universities and companies could encourage more young students to learn information technology and go on to become entrepreneurs them self.

All in all the first half of my Barcelona stay has been a blast, and there is so much more to come. Lots of great sessions to attend, and fun parties to be at. Tomorrow is the Norwegian party at Hard rock cafe, and Thursday is the student partner evening.

I'll be back with more. This is Jonas, reporting live from TechEd ;)

 

 

It's been quite some time since my last post… And it's the same old classic reason: I've been too darn busy to prioritize bogging. The fact that I haven't blogged in a while doesn't mean I haven't been playing with cool technology. This autumn I'm taking 6(!) courses at the university, in addition to working at Abeo.

The coolest course I'm taking is called "IT2105 Functional Programming", and it's just plain fun! The course is really small. I think we're about 25 (?) students in the class at the moment. The course is all about functional programming. To be more precise MIT Scheme programming, which is a LISP dialect. If you haven't seen LISP code, it's that old language with all those parentheses in it. This link will give you a quick Scheme search on Google Code Search.

The cool thing about the functional programming course is not the fact that I'm going to use Scheme for everything, but that trough the course I learn a new way of thinking that I can apply in my everyday work as a programmer. In C# 3.0 we'll be getting the infamous "lambda" expression allowing you to create new functions on the fly, and pass them as arguments to other functions. This is one of the key aspects of functional programming, and is also a key aspect in LINQ and C# 3.0.

Trough the course "IT1105 - Algorithms and data structures" I've gotten a good reason to get into Python, a language I'm liking more and more the more I program in it. With the 1.0 release of IronPython you can actually start to take advantage of the dynamic features of Python in your .NET applications. I actually have a personal project going on where I explore IronPython and adding scripting capabilities to your .NET application. I'll post more on this as the project proceeds.

Oh, and now over to those hands-on labs I mentioned in the title… A couple of weeks ago we (The Microsoft Student Community NTNU) did a three night introduction course on .NET and C#. The first part of the course was about C# and the .NET Framework in general, the second part was about Windows Forms and the third part was about ASP.NET. As a part of the course material I wrote three "hands-on labs":

• A simple Notepad application (Windows Forms)
• A simple RSS reader (Windows Forms)
• Expose and consume RSS (ASP.NET)

I've included both the PDF and the Word version of the hands-on labs in this download, so feel free to modify them if you want to use them for a user group meeting, a introduction course etc.

And to finish up this post I've included on of the funniest parodies I've seen in a LONG while. The master of music parodies, Wierd Al, have come up whit his own version of Chamilionares "Ridin Dirty"; White n Nerdy!

This week I'll be attending the Imagine Cup world finals in India. We flew from Oslo early Friday morning, and arrived in Dehli late Friday night. After a short stop for some food and refreshments in Dehli we jumped in the buss and drew for four hours to Agra. The drive was _really_ interesting. Even tough we where driving in the middle of the night there were people walking along the road everywhere. People sleeping on the roof of their truck or buss. Crowds of cows walking in the middle of the street. A gang of monkeys looking at us from the rooftops of buildings that looked like the where going to collapse any moment. Jan Kristian took lots of pictures which he will upload to his Flickr site soon.

We arrived at the Jaypee Palace hotel early Saturday morning. After almost 24 hours of travelling. We've spent the first day in India relaxing in the sun, bathing, talking to the hotel monkey, and doing some preparations for the contest.

Later tonight we're going to check out the Hotell Spa and perhaps get a massage or something.

Had my final exam this term last Friday. The operating system exam wasn't all that hard, lots of questions, but non of them where that detailed.

Now I have a super exciting summer ahead of me. In mid of June we're spending a long weekend in Bygdstad where our family has a summer house. The first weekend of July we're going to the Roskilde festival in Denmark. That will definitely be a blast. Lots of great bands this year. Looking bands I'm looking forward to the most is "The Streets", "Tool" and "Sigur Rós".

Around 14-15 July I'm going home to Lakselv for a couple of weeks. Haven't been home since Christmas so really looking forward to that. I'll spend most of the time home relaxing and fly fishing for salmon.

On August 04. me and my team mates (and Frode from Microsoft Norway) is heading for India and the world finals of Imagine Cup. We're staying there to August 13., so that's going to be awesome!

Between the various vacations I've planned out I'll be in Trondheim working on some software at the St. Olav hospital. I also have a few summer projects planned out, like a blog update. I'll be posting more about that later on.

Wish everyone a great summer, and for those of you who haven't finished all the exams yet: good luck!

The Norwegian online edition of the Norwegian magazine “Teknisk Ukeblad” has published an article about the Nordic Imagine Cup finals. The printed version of the magazine comes out 40 issues a week, with a print of 90.000 copies. You can check out the article over at http://www.tu.no/nyheter/ikt/article53247.ece.

The last couple of days have been super busy. After the Microsoft days in Stavanger I went straight to Oslo to compete with Team NTNU in the Nordic finals of Imagine Cup. After a nice dinner at Aker Brygge we went straight to the hotel room to finish the prototype. We had some issues, and weren’t finished with the scenarios we wanted to implement until 07 in the morning!

Guess what, we actually won the finals! We competed against a Finish and a Danish team, who both had nice projects to show off. The first price was a brand new Qtek Smartphone and a trip to the world finals in India in beginning of August!

 

For those of you waiting for the slides from Bergen and Stavanger, I’ll have them ready after Microsoft days in Trondheim Monday.

Have to run, barely time for a quick shower before heading out on town for some celebrating!

In the mean time, check out Jan Kristians “live” coverage of the Nordic finals on his Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/j-k/sets/72057594125728297/

 

Last week I got confirmation from Kevin Schuler that I’ve been nominated to become a member of the Microsoft Regional Director program for a two year period. I received the Regional Director agreement and the NDA agreement yesterday, so I figured it was about time I wrote a blog post about this.

It’s a great honor to become a Microsoft Regional Director. At the moment there are 4 RDs in Norway, and only about 160 world wide (dont know the exact number).

The other Norwegian RDs are

• Sondre Bjellås (also a new RD for the 2006/2007 period. Congratulations!)
• Trond Brande
• Morten Abrahamsen

It feels a bit strange to become a member of such a highly qualified and experienced group of people. Many of the RDs have written several books and are well recognized people in the software industry. Even tough I’m not as experienced as many of the other RDs I really think I can do a good job at promoting, evangelizing and educating people on Microsoft technology, and in special .NET development. I’m really looking forward to become an even more active member of the developer community.

Thanks a lot to Petter Schatvet and the other guys in the Norwegian MSDN team for nominating me!

I finally found time to finish my new blog theme. I designed it during Christmas holiday, but haven’t had time to convert it to HTML until now. It still needs some work like navigation links and a couple more gadgets to the sidebar.

The design consists of various graphical elements from things that interest me. If you look closely you can find:

• Marv and Nacny from Sin City (one of the best movies ever)
• Master Chief from Halo 2 (greatest online console game ever made)
• Windows Vista logo
• Terje Haakonsen, best snowboarder trough all time
• Visual Studio logo, use it every day
• Tony Hawk
• DC Shoe Company
• Joana Dark from Perfect Dark Zero. Crappy game, cool character
• Jake Gyllenhaal from Donnie Darko
• My girl friend, Hege
• The Donnie Darko poster
• The .NET Framework logo
• An eagle (no idea why I put it in there)
• The Xbox360 logo
• The Burton Snowboard Company logo
• And a snowboarder from Amped 3

I would appreciate any comments on my new design!

Just want to write a short blog post at the end of the year wishing everyone a happy new year. I’m currently in Alta visiting my girlfriend’s family. I still have a couple of days left of my Christmas holiday, and will be heading back home to Trondheim Wednesday. I’ll try to get my article on how to write a .NET Messenger client using DotMSN done by then.

It’s been a great Christmas holiday so far. Didn’t get as much programming done as I hoped, but it’s been nice taking some time off and relax. I’ve played Xbox 360 quite a lot, mostly Kameo and Need for Speed.

I’ll probably write a new post in a couple of days when the Messenger article is done. Until then, Happy New Year!

Christmas sure came early this year. Yesterday i got my 60gb black iPod video, and today the long await Xbox 360 finally arrived! The two first games i bought where Perfect Dark and Kameo. Perfect Dark was okey, haven't tried multi player yet. Kameo was really impressive!

I barely had time to play with my iPod, but I’ve subscribed to a couple of video podcasts, and the quality of the screen is excellent!