I went to "The Gathering" this Easter, as I have done the last 5 years. "The Gathering" is one of the world's largest computer parties with around 5000 attendees, held in the Olympic arena "The Vikingship" in Hamar, Norway every Easter. There are a lot of things going on there these 5 days from Wednesday to Sunday; scene shows, lectures, gaming competitions and other cool things.

This year things seem to have gone quite smoothly for the organizers. There were almost no queue to get in when we got there, and the network worked perfectly. In fact the Tech:Net-crew stated that they were bored and that we weren't even close to max out the internal network capacity. The internet line, though, was easily maxed out, with it's 1,5 GBit.

I have attached some pictures so you can see how big this party really is...

By the way, those of you who thinks that all big Microsoft projects are written i C/C++, check out Jonas' line count trivia.

We are doing a development project in C# in school now, and in we are (of course ) using a build server with CruiseControl .NET for continuous integration of the project. While we (the developers) and the build server are located on the university network, the test server is located in a local company's intranet. To make the build process really nifty, I decided to make it deploy the finished build right onto the test server. To do that I had to set up a VPN connection from the build server and into the company network. And this is were the fun starts.

So I went straight for it to test it - created a new VPN connection, typed in the user name and password and clicked connect. Without clearing out the "Use default gateway on remote network" checkbox. Through remote desktop. Guess what happened? Yup, the server disappeared from the internet and my RDP-connection froze. Did I mention that the server is located in a locked room, to which I don't have the key?

Then the fun started - trying to get hold of the key. After about an hour I got hold of the key and disconnected the VPN-connection.

Please clear this box before connecting to VPN from a remote server.

Later I configured the VPN connection using Routing and Remote Access (RRAS), which is a much better way of doing it...

Yesterday seven students from high school were competing in the NIO finals. The competition got a little bit delayed because of technical problems with the online judging system, but anyway the competition was a success. You can view the results here.

Congratulations to all contestants and to Jørgen Vold Rennemo for the highest score in NIO's history!

The Norwegian Informatics Olympiad (NIO) finals are being held this weekend. 7 contestants from high school will be competing for a trip to the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), held in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico this year.

The contestants will be solving four algorithmic tasks in five hours. I'm a co-organizer, and I'm looking forward to seeing the contestants and the results.

Hi, I'm Hans Olav Norheim, I'm 20 years old, and I'm studying Informatics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

I'm interested in technology in general, and especially in computer science and software development using Microsoft Technologies. I'm a MCSD, and I've done a bit of .NET development using both C# and Visual Basic.

Now I thought it was about time to start blogging to share some my experiences. Expect to find blog posts about:

• .NET development
• Unit testing
• Continuous Integration
• Cool projects
• Misc. technical stuff

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