BLUG 2011 day 2

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Second day of BLUG 2011 was starting with two “blast” sessions: Admin and Xpages. I kind of wanted to see both of them, but finally I took the Admin one. And it was great and I am sure the Xpages one was great either.
Fabulous @Formulas by Kathy Brown (Running Notes) made me think about how is it possible to work with some product for so long (I started with Notes 3.0) and still stumble on a completely new things.
XPages Data sources: another great presentation by Paul Calhoun. I especially liked his way of using “what’s in the box” instead of “let’s write the code” approach. The day before I was talking to Paul about what can go wrong during demos: my usual line if something goes wrong is “and as you can see, nothing happened”. And during this session he used his “this demo sucks”:-)
Another session by Martin Donnely was about the Extension Library. He showed some parts of it and how to use them in xpages applications. I use Extension Library all the time, so nothing new to me, but I learned something about the background of it. How they are not “reinventing wheel” but just extending existing components to give them some extra functionality.
Next session was a bit dissappointing: debugging and error handling in XPages by Vince Schuurman. Running the whole Notes Client from Eclipse to debug it sounds like something I do not want to do EVER, not talking about the fact, that it has nothing to do with XPages. But he did show, briefly, how to debug XPages, use custom error pages and so. So yes, there was some valuable information there. And another useful info: you can use MacBook Air, the new generation of course not the old one, to run Windows in virtual machine and it works just ok. That in fact did not help me with my decision what to buy as my next notebook, if Air or ThinkPad X201.
Last session was Tim Tripcony’s Themes to the next level. And it was really fantastic, I did not know that themes can be used this way. You have to see the slides, believe me.
Final part was about prizes (and one well done April fools joke). Theo did a fantastic job preparing this event. Everyone I had a chance to talk to was very happy with it. Agenda, food (coffee especially), hotel, everything!
You can find slides from most of the sessions on Sessions & Speakers page od BLUG site.
I’d like to thank people from Lotus Belgium who were so kind to let me charge my notebook on every break, because I forgot the power adapter at home.
I am definitely coming to BLUG next year, in fact I am already looking forward to it!