Well, it’s Thursday night here in Joburg, South Africa. This must have been the longest week I’ve experienced in quite a while. Over and above my normal working week of meetings, clients, functions and Projects, I found myself juggling a Knowledge Base in our Quickr environment, Teaching XPages to my Dev Team, participating in a Sametime Course that’s taking place in the United States, and learning the Basics of C# Development in Visual Studio.

At first I got a little worried I took on too much, and as I type this I have 2 match sticks keeping my eye lids open……but looking back at what was achieved this week……Not bad, not bad at all.

Let’s begin with XPages:

Last week I decided it was time my Development Team got a decent taste of XPages. I scheduled a 4 day Workshop that impressively took 3 days….ending last night around 9:30pm. I take my hat off to the guys. They proved themselves worthy and I can’t wait to see what they come up with in the near future. I also mentioned that there was an XPages Contest currently running which only added fuel to the fire.

The Quickr-verse:

This year I’m on a mission to document everything that I experience in my working day. Everything that matters and that the Ukuvuma Team can benefit from. I tend to favor tutorials and best practices in the form of Videos, as you’ve no doubt seen in my previous Posts, but I must admit I’ve found a place for Wikis. Quickr really helps me achieve this. I decided to have the best of all worlds, so I’m using Quickr, Wikis and Video together.

At the Same-Time:

This was a challenge. I registered to run this Course at my own pace, not being in a position to take 3 days off to sit in a classroom. What I didn’t realise was that this course was running in the United States, so attending this would’ve proved somewhat difficult. I did enjoyed it quite a lot, although it was a little annoying remote connecting to a box in the States. One really needs to understand Java and Eclipse to be comfortable with this course. Sadly i do all my Dev in DDE, so the environment was a little new, and I’m not yet the Java Expert I soon hope to be. But still, it was fun to modify Sametime Windows and build Add-Ons.

C# Tuning:

Here was my biggest surprise this week. I decided to take a bit of time, and have one of my Microsoft Developers show me the way of the C# Ninja. At first it was a little weird getting to understand Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, and creating ASP.NET Projects, but once that was out of the way, creating ASP.NET Pages was pretty much the same as creating XPages. I was really impressed at how similar the development environments are.

I don’t yet know enough of both environments to understand all the tools that are available, but I will say that the Visual Studio editor and debugger is impressive. Very informative and very powerful. I love how I could add break statements to my code, run the Web Page in debug mode, and have it stop in certain sections of my code. I am not used to this when it comes to Web Development, and I am not sure if XPages has something similar, but if so……I will make sure the world knows about it, because that will make such a difference in my life.

Let me repeat this: I am looking for a LotusScript Debugger for XPages. Anyone?

Well, one more awesome working day left this week and then it’s some resting time. I look forward to chilling this weekend, watching some World Cup Rugby and maybe giving God Of War a go.

As always you can find me on Twitter @John_Ukuvuma for all IT-related chats. I wish everyone an awesome weekend, and until my next Post….cheers