Get your LDC t-shirts here

Well Lotusphere has been over for a week now and people are just about recovering from the post LS flu and getting back into the swing of things. But did you miss out on getting an LDC shirt. Julian, Mark and I were only able to physically carry over a 150 or so shirts this year and we had to apologise to so many people for not having the design or size they wanted.

So we thought we'd try and rectify that by adding all of this year's designs, along with previous t-shirts that we've given out at other conferences and allow you to buy your own. The most important thing to note is that this is not a money making exercise, anything which we make will be donated to the Children's Cancer Association who we have previously donated money raised by the Lotus community to.

The store we use is called Zazzle and the link to the latest shirts is: http://www.zazzle.co.uk/londevcoop/?qs=&dp=0&pg=3#homeProducts 

Please feel to buy as many shirts or other products as you like, hopefully we can raise even more money for the CCA.

Lotusphere 2012 OGS Liveblog

Along with Paul, Gab, Stuart and Bill I will be liveblogging the Lotusphere 2012 OGS, you can see the transcript below...

XPages101 Lotusphere Discount

I'm not sure if it can be a tradition after two years but it's a good deal either way.

If you enter the coupon code "LS12" at checkout at XPages101.net then you will receive a 33% discount on the cost. So if your new years resolution is to learn XPages then this should help you along.

There are currently 68 videos on the site which total up to almost 13 hours of back to back content or well over 3.5gb of video!

Review of 2011

In many ways this year has been much the same as previous years, well on the work front anyway. 

In late January we had the annual trip to Florida for Lotusphere, Tim Clark and I presented a couple of sessions which I always enjoy. The Lotus world is lucky that Tim has stuck around now that he's left IBM, and I am lucky that he agreed to present with me again in a couple of weeks when we head back to Florida for Lotusphere 2012. This year I will also be doing a session with Warren Elsmore, something we've been trying to do for a couple of years but only this year have we managed to get around to putting something together, it should be a fun session.

But this is meant to be a review of 2011, not a sales pitch for my sessions in Florida!

The other events of the year were UKLUG and IamLUG. I had to do slightly fewer LUGs this year due to work pressure elsewhere, on which more later. But the two I did go to were, as ever, well attended, informative and well organised. Despite all of the other things going on with the world economy, or maybe because of that the LUGs seem to be flourishing and long may that last.

The other travel I've done this year has been related to speaking, after a fashion. 2011 seems to be the year that XPages reached the tipping point, lots of new people want to start creating XPages applications so my two offerings of video training at XPages101.net and classroom based training have become increasingly popular over the year. So in the last few months I've flown all over Europe giving classes and meeting some interesting new people along the way.

We had a great summer holiday in Canada exploring Montreal and Newfoundland and were lucky enough to see icebergs and many whales along the Atlantic coast.

My year has been dramatically different for other reasons though. From silly things like finally going to Glastonbury for the first time right through to some of the best things which have ever happened to me. In just 5 weeks I will be getting married with many family and friends attending what we hope will be a wonderful weekend here in London. And then in April, our first child is due to be born. As you can imagine the first half of 2012 promises to be a fairly busy time so I expect to be doing a lot less travelling and a lot less sleeping!

Times are so exciting right now that I can hardly wait for the next year to begin, but I will try and reflect for a while on a great year which is just finishing. 2011 was so amazing I can but hope that 2012 matches it.

</2011><2012>

What does the Upgrade Pack 1 mean for me?

So yesterday we had the release of Upgrade Pack 1 sprung on us by Ed Brill. Overall this "A Good Thing" but there is quite a lot of detail which was missing from the announcement.

This was a problem for Warren and I as we're presenting a session at Lotusphere on the Deployment and Management of XPages, so a swift bit of research and slide rewriting has been in order this morning.

Essentially the Upgrade Pack is a new version of the Extension Library just installed in yet another way. If you're running the Extension Library in 8.5.3 already then you'll need to uninstall it from your Domino Designer and from your server before installing the Upgrade Pack (this may be harder than you imagine, it took me several tries on one machine and simply refused to work on another so I had to delete the Workspace directory!)

I haven't had time to fully test my applications, but from my initial testing it appears that an application written using the November 19th version of Extension Library will work just fine running on an Upgrade Pack 1 server so from the developer's point of view this whole process is relatively painless. You just need to decide in your organisation whether you're going to run with the Extension Library or the Upgrade Pack. I'm sure over the coming weeks and months the pros and cons of either approach will become clear, but for the moment if you want a simple life then Upgrade Pack seems to be the way to go.

What is less clear is how this affects the singnificant admin in your life. I'll let Warren cover this in more detail in our session at Lotusphere, but at the moment it seems as though it's going to be quite difficult to deploy and manage the Upgrade Pack in a large or complex environment so bear that in mind when making decisions.

And for reference the part number on the IBM site is CI5GIEN and the version number (thanks to Warren for this) is 8.5.3.20111208-0717 (i.e. significantly later than the current version of the ExtLib on OpenNTF).