After travelling for nearly 24 hours, I finally arrived at Las Vegas airport. For the last couple of days I've been trying to get into a more regular day rhythm, but it's pretty hard, when there is an eight hour time difference between Danish time (GMT+01:00) and USA Pacific Time (GMT-08:00).

I'm however looking forward to the MIX workshops that start tomorrow, where I've signed up for the "Harmonizing Designer/Developer Workflow" track. First up is Robby Ingebretsen, who I know has been working alot within this space. He previously worked at Identity Mine, where he worked as an Integrator. The Integrator is, as I understand it (in simplest terms), a mix between a developer -, a designer -, and an architect role. He has also been working as a developer on the WPF team at Microsoft.

Next up are the boys from Cynergy. Cynergy has a lot of experience working within this realm of development, in their work with enterprise software applications implemented using Flash, Air/Flex and Silverlight technologies. By the way, check out the very addictive Line Rider game port to Silverlight

It would be interesting to learn the tips of the trade from both Robby Ingebretsen and Cynergy, and how all this fits into the Creuna UX-Designer-Frontend-Backend workflow.

There is approx. now four hours to registration (at 8.00 a.m.), so I'll probably need some sleep before then.

To be continued...

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I'm currently sitting on a plane to Washington, where I'll be connecting to another plane to Las Vegas. That's right, I'm going to Vegas baby, where I'll be attending the MIX 2009 conference. I've just travelled by flight from Aarhus to Copenhagen airport (Kastrup), a 20 minute flight, where they offer you a cup of coffee that is so hot, You'll have to wait for at least 20 minutes, before you can drink it; So you sit there, the plane has landed, and you need to maneuver around with a hot cup of coffee (very unpractical).

So what to expect from the MIX 2009 conference? There certainly will be a wide range of IE8, ASP.NET 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC sessions, but the bigger announcement will definitely be Silverlight 3.0. I'm eager to know some more details about previously announced features, such as support for 3D graphics and H.264. I'll also be looking forward to the keynote with Bill Buxton and the Gu (hope he'll be wearing the famous red polo).

To be continued...

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Now I am a Mac user; I have a mac mini that I use at home. But after seeing the documentatry MacHEADS, I wouldn't categorize myself as a Machead. I was really disapointed when seeing this documentary. It depicts Mac users as couple of oddballs, that see Apple, the Mac, and Steve Jobs as a somewhat of a cult. Take for example some of the quotes from the movie:

I have never ever knowingly slept with a Windows user, that would never ever happen.

Muslims go to Mecca, we go to Mac-ca.

What about all the people that use Macs for professional work? I missed seeing the photographer or graphical designer that choose the Mac as tool, because it better supports creative thinking. Except from the clips with Guy Kawasaki, this documentary is, in my oppinion, a waste of time.

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"Code Rush" is a documentary about the days before and after Netscape decided to open source their browser engine Mozilla (March 1998 to April 1999). The documentary was released in 2000 just before the beginning of the dot-com collapse; in that perspecive it is interesting to revisit the hype of the Internet, and see how startups like Netscape strugled to survive the beginning of the browser wars, and how it eventually ended up being bought by AOL. Check out the documentary at viddler.com: http://www.viddler.com/explore/coderush/videos/1/ An read the interview with the director of "Code Rush" at waxy.org: http://waxy.org/2008/09/code_rush_interview/

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I found this link which shows how to determine which SharePoint version you got: http://techpunch.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/sharepoint-2007-moss-how-to-determine-service-pack-version/ What is really usefull is the list below, which can be used to determine which updates are needed to e.g. update the production environment to the same version as development. Personally i needed this to make sure that a content deployment enabled environment had the same SharePoint version on both source - and destination server.

SharePoint package	Version
Cumulative Update KB956056 & KB956057	12.0.0.6327
Infrastructure Update KB951695 & KB951297	12.0.0.6318
SP1 + KB948945	12.0.0.6303
SP1 + KB941274	12.0.0.6301
SP1 + KB941422	12.0.0.6300
SP1	12.0.0.6219
October 2007 public update	12.0.0.6039
August 24, 2007 hotfix	12.0.0.6036
RTM	12.0.0.4518
Beta 2	12.0.0.4017
Beta 2TR	12.0.0.4407
Office 12 PDC Pre-beta	12.0.0.311

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Sometimes I need to test SharePoint web applications on Mac OS X (Safari), and for that I need edit the hosts file. And the process of doing so is not as strait forward (for me), as on a Windows PC. In order to edit the hosts file do the following: 1. Open the terminal klient 2. Browse to the hosts file cd \ cd etc 3. run the pico hosts as administrator sudo pico hosts enter the password of the administrator From here it is possible to edit the hosts entry. Exit using the ^X command (Ctrl+x).

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Links to instructions on how to create a Windows Vista Gadget using Silverlight:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/08/sidebar/default.aspx

http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2007/05/vista-sidebar-gadget-using-silverlight.html

http://adamkinney.com/blog/272/default.aspx

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Other ways, than the traditional approach, to communicate that an 404 error occured... http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/17/404-error-pages-reloaded/

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When using the DropDownChoiceField of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, always make sure that the field it references is required = true (see description below). If that is not the case, the dropdown control will not be rendered on the user interface.

<SharePointWebControls:DropDownChoiceField 
   FieldName="NewsCategory"
   runat="server"
   id="DropDownChoiceField1" />

<Field ID="{EEF88D9A-503D-40E4-AAA5-85117608B4B4}" 
   Name="NewsCategory" StaticName="NewsCategory" 
   Type="Choice" 
   Format="Dropdown" 
   Required="TRUE"
   ... />

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