Monthly Archives: November 2010

Most Notes/Domino developers have probably been in this situation: you are creating an agent that is running both on the server as a scheduled agent, and manually launched on the client. On the server you want to displaysome information on the console, using the Print statement.Butsincemost regular users do not look at the status bar and read the output of print statements, youwant to display the informationto the user usinga message box. This way,when the agent is launched manually, the userhave time to read it.

Here is my solution. Nothing fancy, but it works for me. I simply create a small function that check if the code is running on the server or not, and execute slightly different code. I also use Getthreadinfo() to get the name of the calling procedure to display in the title.

Sub PrintMsg(text As String)
Dim session as New NotesSession
If session.IsOnServer() Then
Print text
Else
Msgbox text,,Getthreadinfo( LSI_THREAD_CALLPROC )
End If
End Sub

Note: You need to include LSCONST.LSS for the constant LSI_THREAD_CALLPROC to be available.

The other day I was talking to a friend, and wondered what we did before we had access to Internet. She pointed out that we watched the news on TV and went to the library to look things up. Of course, that all works, but think about how more convenient it is today.

With the Internet, we have the information at our fingertips. Back in 1990, Bill Gates gave the keynote address at Comdex. He talked about some new exciting software, including Lotus Notes. But his main subject was what he called "information at your fingerips":

Someone can sit down at their PC and see the information that’s important for them. If they want more detail, they ought to just point and click and that detail should come up on the screen for them.

 

Sounds to me like a good description of the Internet as it looks today. Of course, he did not mention the Internet, the first web browser was still being worked on at this time. But I still think he was extremely accurate, even if it took much longer for his vision to become a reality.

Here are just some of the things I used the Internet for this morning:

Tracking my sisters transatlantic flight from LHR to DFW, including getting updates on arrival time

Checking my monthly electricity consumption for the last year.

Looked up the directions to my ex-wife’s new place and what the traffic looks like, for later when I go there to get my son.

Looking up the the latin name for bobcat, and reading more about them, after a friend mentioned them in a conversation.

I would never have been able to do those things that quickly and efficient without the Internet. And the most amazing is that I can do all this from my mobile phone as well!
One wonder where the next 10-15 years will take us.

A couple of days ago John Roling (Grayhaw68) posted Shit I Use Every Day about Dropbox, a service that I also use. I think to post tips about useful tools is a great idea. I want to push for a few tools I use on a daily basis.

The first tool is the Notes tool i have been using the longest, NoteMan from Martin Scott. The NoteMan Suite consists of several programs, and they can be purchased separate or together. But for $395, it is a no brainer to buy all of them. Here are the programs which are part of the NoteMan Suite:

NoteMan.Editor

This tool can easiest be describe as “Infobox on stereoids”. You get a great overview of the fields in a document, and you can add, delete and edit fields, and even change the data type. It’s easy to see the UNID of a document, you can make a document a child/response to another one from within this tool, and much more. I use this tool pretty much every day, often multiple times.
The MultiEdit tool is great to update a collection of documents, and you can even perform the search from within the tool.

NoteMan.DocDelta

This tool compare two documents, or a document and a replication conflict. For replication conflicts, they can be resolved in different ways, either by switching the two documents, making the replication conflict the main document and vice versa, or by copying the values of individual fields from the conflict to the main document.

NoteMan.Design

I don’t use this tool that much, but it let me look at the design, see what elements inherit design from other templates, have “Prohibit design refresh” set, etc.

NoteMan.ACL

A very convenient tool, that I only use on occasion. But when I use it, I save a ton of time. It lets me export the ACL of a database as XML, then I can import it and apply it to another database.

Conclusion: NoteMan is a suite of inexpensive but very powerful tools that every Notes developer (and admin!) should have in their toolbox. Martin Scott usually have a pedistal at Lotusphere, go there and take a look.

Disclaimer: This is a tool my employer purchased. I initially got NoteMan.Editor for free at Lotusphere a number of years ago, and we purchased the rest of the tools within a few months.

I just noticed on twitter that something called Geek Girl Meetup (#ggm10) took place in Sweden this weekend. From the tweets (in Swedish), it sounds like a very interesting conference, with some seminars, people meeting up, etc. And of course in the Notes community we have our own Nerd Girls.

I think it is great that women now can show their techology interest, or other "nerdy" interests. When I grew up as a teenager, as a computer and RPG playing nerd, I was not very interesting to girls. Then, when the Internet starting to take off in the mid 90´s in Sweden, I noticed an increased interest/acceptance for nerds and geeks. As long as they were male. It was still kind of taboo for a girl to be a geek.

I think that in the last 5-6 years, the acceptance of female geeks have been increasing dramatically. Non-technical people see that girls can have a good career and enjoy a technical job. Personally I find intelligence (and geekdom) in a girl very attractive. So I hope this trend will continue. I also hope that the issues I know some (many?) girls experience in a male dominated area, like technology, will soon go away, and that everyone get judged on their merits and knowledge, not their gender.

However, I think that some participants in events like the above mentioned Geek Girl Meetup and SXSW Interactive are not "true geeks", but marketing people who want to hop on the bandwagon, because the fact that geek is the new chic/cool. I am sure not everyone with titles like "entrepreneur", "venture angel" and "founder" have the real geek/nerd mindset. That is ok. But don´t try to pretend you are something you are not.

However, if you code (creating web pages with Frontpage does NOT count as "coding", though!), administer servers, build/repair electronic hardware and love gadgets, you are a geek. :-) And if you like me started writing code on a computer with 16 kB memory (like the ABC 80 pictured here), you are absolutely a geek. :-)

There are of course many other kinds of geeks. Comic book geeks, Harry Potter geeks, Manga geeks, just to mention a few.

Image of Role Playing dices by Sabbut , licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. I resized the original picture and made the background transparent.
 

I may not use MyDefrag every day, but almost daily, so I place it in the category "Stuff I Use Every Day". I use it at work, at home and I also install this small and free program on every computer I build/rebuild for my friends.

As the name indicate, it is a harddisk defragmentation program. It is, like most other free and commercial defragmentation programs, using the Windows defragmentation API, so it should be quite safe.

The program is simple to you. It comes with a number of scripts that are sufficient for most users, but the advanced user can write his/her own scripts.The user interface is minimalistic as well. You select the kind of defragmentation you want and then select one or more drives to process:

The screen displaying the progress of the defragmentation is simple. You can hover over files and see their names and what part of the harddisk they occupy. You can also zoom in and out, making it easier to see the files.

In short, a very capable and easy to use free program.

The other day I went to my local Fry’s store (a chain similar to Best Buy, but with much fewer locations and many more products/components in stock), and I saw the case I want for my new server at home. Not only is it quiet (according to the reviews), but it also looks good:

 
It also is sale for $39.95 right now!

I have been thinking a while about building a new server at home, to host my personal Domino server and possibly a few other servers (Sametime? BES Express?), just so I can play around with new technology. The network admin here at work suggested that I use the free XenServer. So I might just do that. It is always fun to learn new things.

I have been writing Notes applications since late 1996/early 1997, and been a full time Notes developer since December 1997. But I still find out new things.
I have been using lists for several years now, and as you may know, the easiest way to loop though a list is to use the ForAll statement:

Dim mylist List As String 
mylist("1st") = "First list item" 

mylist("2nd") = "Second list item" 

ForAll

m In mylist 

Print ListTag(m) & " is " & m 

End ForAll 

Sometimes I have to loop through an array of unknown size, and in the past I would have done something like this:

Dim

myarray(1) As String 

Dim

i As integer 

myarray(0

) = "First array item"

myarray(1

) = "Second array item" 

For i = LBound(myarray) To UBound(myarray) 

Print i & " is " & myarray(i) 

Next 

But just a couple of weeks ago, I was wondering if perhaps I could use ForAll statement to koop through an array as well. I looked in the online help, and sure think, the help indicated that it was indeed possible:

Dim

myarray(1) As String 

myarray(0

) = "First array item" 

myarray(1

) = "Second array item" 

ForAll

m In myarray 

Print m 

End ForAll 

Shorter and you save a variable and a couple of function calls. I doubt it does much for actual code execution, but the code is cleaner and easier to read.

Hope this little tip can help someone!

Recently I blogged about using N2PDF to create PDF documents in the background from Notes documents. I mentioned that Softvision does not have a developer license, forcing me to either pay 5,200 ($7,000) for another server license (which my employer will not do), or to download the demo version every 30 days and register with a new email account (which costs me time and aggravation).
It would have been so easy to create a special non-expiring version, but which still display the water mark that prevent you from using it in production. Or why could the water mark not display "N2PDF Developer License" and the company name instead of just "N2PDF Demo Version"? I think my company would even been willing to pay $500 for a developer license like that.

The second example of a bad license is from NotesMedic from Cassetica. It’s a good tool (if somewhat bloated in the latest version), and it is free for home users. If I would use it at work, I need a Enterprise license. There are no single license for corporate customers, I have to pay the full $15,999 (yes, almost 16 thousand dollar!) to be allowed to put it on my work computer. If we would install it for every single user at my work, that’s about $50/user, which is not too bad. But we only need it on a handful computers. Why not have an inexpensive license for corporate single users, without support, that can be purchased using a credit card or PayPal?

In both cases, the customer get hurt (can’t get the functionality needed) as well as the manufacturer (who is missing out on a sale). I just don’t get it.

On several blogs there have been postings and discussions about Notes development and if someone not embracing Xpages is "Amish". I know there are some people in the Lotus community who work with several different technologies, and even some who have switched to other platforms for different reasons.

Personally I echo what Eric Mack said. Lotus Notes is just a tool. It is what you make of it. But from what I have seen, Notes is an extremely powerful tool in comparison with other development tools. The other evening I sat down with a good friend of mine. She is a web and graphics designer (working with Flash, PHP, MySQL, etc), and she have developed her fair share of websites. I pulled up Domino Designer and created a very quick and simple application. Just one form with a few fields, then three views, categorized on different fields in the documents. I added Save and Close buttons to the form, a New button in the view, and then created a couple of sample documents. I then showed her how I could modify the design of the form, and all existing documents now had that change. Fin ally I opened a web browser, navigated to the database and showed her how it worked in two different clients with no additional changes. Things that we Notes developers take for granted and use every day.

She was very impressed. It took me about 6-7 minutes to do everything above (I did it slow and explained all the steps to her, and answered some questions along the way). I then challenged her to do the same simple application using any tools of her choice in less than 60 minutes (ten times what I needed in Notes). She will make an attempt later this week, she said.

So Notes makes me very efficient as a developer. It is truly a RAD tool. Both as in "Rapid Application Development" and as in the slang expression.

But as Volker writes: "It’s all about the people, not the software". This is very true. Over the years I have met a large number of great people from the Lotus community, mostly at Lotusphere, but also at IamLUG. I consider many of them my friends, even if we just meet once a year in Orlando. During the year I keep up with them by reading their blogs, following them on twitter and Facebook and occasionally message them on Sametime if I have some question. Lotus Notes and Domino would simply not be the same thing without the community.

I am the only Notes developer in my organization, and it is hard. I don’t really have any peers to talk to, something I think is true for many Notes developers in small or medium size companies. Because we are so efficient at building applications using Domino Designer, there is not a need for huge staffs of Notes developers. So Lotusphere is the time of year I can talk shop with people who know the product, and where I can absorb ideas and new ways to approach development. Every year I come back to work with my head full of new ideas, things I can improve or add to existing applications and even brand new applications that would help our users. All thanks to the Lotus community. So I consider the community something that makes Notes an even more powerful tool.

Now to the bad news. I may not be able to go to Orlando in January. It is still up in the air, but I heard rumors that the $3,600 it would cost (conference fee, airfare and hotel) is considered too much by some people at my work. I guess we will see what happens.