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.

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!

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>

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).

This year Tim Clark and I will be on stage together again to present XPages Blast:

Tim and Matt will take you on a roller-coaster ride through the best of the best ideas and time saving techniques for creating world class XPages applications. 30 all new top tips in just 60 minutes is going to be fast paced and packed with loads of information you will refer to time and time again. Everything from introductory tips for get started with XPages, all the way through to complex tips such as making use of Java. Please fasten your seat belts and keep your hands in the car at all times.

We presented this last year and had a great time so expect a similar format, but all new content.

A new session and presenting partner for my second abstract. Warren Elsmore and I will be talking about Deploying and Managing XPages Applications

If you're a developer wanting to release your XPages application and you need to think about the "real world" of servers and admins. Or if you're an admin and you have developers chasing you to get their shiny new XPages applications released then this session is for you. We'll take you through the things to think about from both sides of the fence. We'll share tips and tricks, issues which may catch you out and the best practice for releasing your applications.

We plan to talk about putting XPages applications live from the view of the developer (me) and the admin (Warren) and all of the tips and tricks we've learned over the last couple of years.

As ever the deadline for slide decks is insanely early so expect a bit of radio silence from me and other speakers while we feverishly prepare for Florida next month.

What it shows is some of the new features which the debugger in the Flash development environment, which is built onto Eclipse, will offer.

The headlines are being able to step backwards as well as forwards through code and also to right click on a variable to see why it is set the way it is (ie a live stack trace) and how we got to the current line of code.

In contract with SSJS in XPages we get to use print statements. I'm sure this is being looked at to improve, but Adobe has certainly set the benchmark in the IDE space.

In a classic Domino web application which I work on, we have a complex form which was working just fine when we developed and tested it. But then users started reporting their Internet Explorer clients were hanging intermittently. We finally got a test case where we could reproduce the problem.

When the user selected an option from a combo box, a new row is added to a table and displayed for them to fill in some data which is required. Nothing too odd there. And again this worked fine for us, until we opened the form inside an iFrame. Our application is part of a much larger application and the end user doesn't know that when they click a certain link they are suddenly running on a Domino server inside the iFrame.

So cue me spending a whole day assuming this was a JavaScript problem, it only seemed to happen when the onChange event of the combo box fired, if I disabled the JavaScript then it worked fine, but the hang was after the JavaScript had finished executing (at least the debugger said so). 

Then on a hunch I removed all of the CSS from the form. And it suddenly started working. It didn't look very good of course, but at least I now just had to track down the offending line of CSS. 

In the end it turned out to be a div which wrapped around the whole page which had a class assigned that set float: left. As soon as I removed that one line of CSS the page worked absolutely fine. I still don't really understand *why* that single change fixes the problem, but maybe it will help someone else.

So, just to recap, the symptoms we're looking at are IE (8 in this case) hanging after an onChange event fires which causes some new HTML to be rendered into a page which is running inside an iFrame. And the solution is to examine, very closely, your CSS.

Once again I'll say it. The quicker the world is rid of IE then the happier I will be.

I thought I'd post some of the stats for the site so far.

• First video posted: February 11th 2010
• Total length of videos uploaded: 11 hours 15 minutes
• Total size of videos uploaded: 3.17gb
• Shortest video: 2 minutes 7 seconds - how to run a local HTTP console window
• Longest video: 25 minutes 12 seconds - Dojo Mobile Controls in 8.5.3

In the last couple of months I've had the 250th subscriber sign up for the site, and more are joining weekly. Since the site was re-designed earlier this year it's also easier to submit your own lesson ideas if there's something which I've not covered yet and each of the lessons has a comments section to clarify points or add you're own thoughts on the lesson.

And finally, to celebrate the 60th lesson being uploaded, here's an offer for you. If you use the coupon code "60notout" at checkout, you'll get a £60 discount on your purchase. Just head on over to xpages101.net to get started.

If you come along to the course then I promise a couple of things. By the time you go home you'll have a solid understanding of XPages. And your head will hurt as we're going to cover a lot of ground!

If you'd like to come along, the sign up for the course can be found here.