Liam is now two !

This post contains no SharePoint.   This isn’t the MSDN article you were looking for.  

You can go about your business.  Move along, move along….

[ Family nostalgia warning….    For my future nostalgia to be more precise…. ]

With all the recent craziness, I hadn’t taken time out to write up a HAPPY BIRTHDAY to our lovely Liam – also known as Lee’s, Flea-man or Lee-Lee.

We’d arranged to have a birthday party on the day (Oct 25th – also our wedding anniversary) – and had the family over for a BBQ & games.

Liam was excitedly opening his presents – with an “Oh Wow !” with every one, and getting MORE amazed with each opening.   Ohhh WOOOWW !!   

One of the games we played was musical statues – dancing to the Wiggles, and then everyone stops when the music stops.  I asked Liam if he wanted a different song (expecting Hi-5, or similar) – and he says “Swash !   Jungle !” 

Yep – he was asking for Slash, and “Welcome To The Jungle”.  I put it on, and he squealed in delight, and began moshing around with Cameron doing air guitar !   (very proud Dad here)

He’s such an amazing little boy – he is always laughing, and has some amazing facial expressions.  So hard to remember all the stuff he’s doing every day :

* He does this funny little “ooohh !” noise, with an in-breath sound (can’t describe in typing) – even when looking at picture books, and turning a page.

* Does a little karate chop move saying “Eee, haaw” – it doubles as a Cowboy “yerr-harr” – and whatever else

* Loves his brother Charlie, always giving him kisses on the forehead

* Words are more and more forthcoming – he was saying “Thank” until recently – only just realised the word is ‘plural’. 

* HIs favourite bed time toy is Baxter – a Myer Christmas bear.  Cameron also has the one from his first Christmas (Henry) – we’ll get one for Charlie this year too.  Baxter is doing fairly well – lots of squeeze & hugs – Liam calls him “Bagger”

* He knows all of our families names, Femron for Cameron, and Charwee for Charlie – and Chrowee for Chloe.  He even lists all his Aunties & Uncles, and cousins – and has 99% nailed counting to ten !

* He just loooves Buzz Lightyear, pointing at every page in the Toy Story book – and saying “ooohhh ! Buzz !”  He carries around a little action figure toy – holding him up and saying “BUZZ !!” 

* If he’s wanting to play a game, he’s known to say “Dad, Dad !” and snap his fingers to get my attention – and then “C’m here” (beckoning me to him)

* He got a little plastic bowling pin set for his birthday – which he loves to play.  It took a while to realise that “Muup” was actually “Set ‘Em Up” – ha ha.

* He’s a ‘routine’ kid – he needs to have his placemat to be square – even putting down his fork to move the placemat to be straight

* When doing teeth, the step stools in the bathroom have to be in the right place – one for each lad, blue & white.  He’ll swap them if they’re wrong.

* Even when putting him in the bath once – he was kicking and yelling “No, Nudie”, and I realised he wanted to do the standard nudie run – before happily getting in the bath.

* Says “Do It !” when he wants to do something, like feeding or playing (meaning “I want to do it”)

* Bounces lots on the trampoline with his brother Cameron – actually, he pretty much follows him everywhere – partners in crime, that’s for sure.

* Liam has to have the worst ever bed hair – just a hilarious birds nest most mornings.

* Has a cheeky grin and laugh, and loves doing a deep sounding “hoo hoo” laugh for fun, accompanied with an “arrr” like a pirate – complete with another type of karate chop.

* He’s still wearing his boots to bed, it has never troubled him – he puts them on without a fuss every time – truly.  Of course, there is often is a giggle game where I put one foot in, and he pulls is out again and laughs.  He’ll continue to wear the boots until he’s four – currently a day sleep, and overnight.

—————-

Liam is  two already – can’t believe he’s growing up so fast.  Thankfully, we haven’t seen any sign of impending “terrible two’s” (yet ?)   

I’m sure there will be – but the fun & games – and conversations – will only get better too.

Happy Birthday little dude, thanks for a fun two years !  

Love Dad.  x

Charlie’s trip to hospital – all OK now

Our little boy Charlie is 4 months now, and has been having lots of bad eczema & skin rashes.  We’ve been giving him antibotics to get it under control, and some glycerine cream on his skin. 

But, wasn’t really helping – and he was looking a bit red in the eyes at dinner time on Saturday (6pm).

Then he had an episode late Saturday night with an allergic reaction of some kind.

His face had all puffed up, could barely see out of his eyes – red and closed – and was rubbing his face lots – he looked like his face was sunburnt.

He started to have trouble breathing – sounding congested, and we were terrified that his throat was constricted – and THEN he did a big vomit. 

So – we called the ambulance, and explained what was happening.

Donna was freaking out; I was ‘stunned’ & frantically organised a bag to take.  

Paramedics arrived and checked him out – by then he’d started crying (good !), and was breathing better – his heart rate was OK, and temperature too. 

Even though he’d stabilised, they suggested taking him to hospital for some checks & observation (which we were only too keen to do – we wanted him to be OK !)

I stayed home, was close to 1am, and the other two boys were asleep.  Had a few SMS’es to Donna, and the news was that he was doing alright – and had even fed OK.

Was nearly 3 am by then, so I went to get some sleep, with the ‘morning shift’ only a few hours away.  

Cameron, Liam and I had brekky, and then down to the hospital, and was there with Donna when speaking to the paediatrician. 

They had the suspicion that it was the cream we’d been given that was causing the reaction – and wanted to put a small amount on his skin, and keep him there to observe.

So, the lads and I left to get lunch, and home for Liam to have a day sleep.  I needed some zzz’s too, so Cameron and I sat down to watch some old Top Gear, and I watched & snored.

Back to the hospital about 3pm, to pick up Donna and Charlie – they were discharged, and were waiting by the front entrance.

He was looking sooo much better – barely any red at all – and happy & smiling.  

*phew*

We have a referral to an allergist, which Donna was thinking about doing even before this all occurred.

Time kinda stood still overnight – one of the scariest moments of my adult life – thank goodness all is OK.

..and I hope that we actually find out what caused it – and that it doesn’t happen again.

Thanks to all the well-wishes via FaceBook & Twitter – and a few phone calls too. 

SharePoint Custom List template missing

Working on a project recently, we’re provisioning about 15 list templates as part of our SharePoint publishing solution.  There had been a mix-up with the “Type” Id used for the ListTemplates within the XML definition – can you spot a mistake ?

<List xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" BaseType="0" DefaultItemOpen="0" Direction="none" DisableAttachments="False" DraftVersionVisibility="0" EnableContentTypes="True" FolderCreation="True" Name="Comments" OrderedList="False" QuickLaunchUrl="False" Title="Comments" Type="113" VersioningEnabled="False" Url="Lists/Comments" Id="e3183ba9-0b61-42dd-8ff8-f12eb3bc2d62">

We had inadvertently ‘overwritten’ some of the OOTB SharePoint list templates.  Not actually written over the files on disk, but hi-jacking the Types – from 100, 101, 102 – up to 115 – and we had a multitude of problems.

One of the worst culprits had a symptom of the “Add Web Part page” being empty – none of our custom webparts were listed. 

And it turned out we had a List Template with the same TypeId as the “Web Part Gallery” – yikes.

This post details all the SharePoint base List Type Id’s – and made us realise what we needed to fix – the lesson is “avoid these numbers”.

We’d eradicated most of our problems by changing the TypeId’s in the feature.xml – starting at 1000, and deleting / re-activating, etc – but one problem remained.

Within the ‘Create List’ page, there is no “CUSTOM LIST” shown.   This is kinda bad don’t you think !?  

Has document libraries, etc – just not the normal “title only” custom list.   Dammit.

We found a way to ‘bring it back’ – from a look at another dev machine, which HAS the Custom List.

When hovering over the list template :

Have a look at the URL :

The FeatureId corresponds to the list template that can be found in the following directory :

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\CustomList\Feature.xml

And – if we look at the Element Manifest :

You can see – there’s the Type=100 list, and whoops – we’d overwritten it.

So – because it’s actually just a feature, we just thought “I wonder if we could just re-activate it ??!”

Here’s the command we tried :

stsadm -o activatefeature -id 00BFEA71-DE22-43B2-A848-C05709900100  -url http://servername –force

And yep – the custom list is back !    *phew*

Hopefully that’s a useful tip for some folk. 

Of course, the best option is NOT to have ListTemplate’s with overlapping Type’s (with SharePoint OOTB ones).

I was using a codeplex tool (SPSource) to generate the feature/s – this was acknowledged as a bug, and is to be fixed in the next release (soon)

Optus Twitter Response Team

For my home internet, I have an Optus cable modem that I’ve had since I moved into this house in July 2000 (home broadband for nearly 10 years !)

We’ve also got an Optus home phone – and I have an Optus mobile phone also – so yes, I’m an “Optus customer”.

Have been having some billing problems later – about direct-debiting vs. bill sent in the mail.  I’d asked to have this stopped via a phone call (to India !) – BUT – it was direct debited again the following month !   *aarrgghh*

In frustration and a bit cranky, I tweet’ed (aka – twitter update) saying “damn u Optus, why did you muck it up ?!?  FFS !”.  Not verbatim, but something like that.

A little later I had a Twitter response from @Optus, who asked for my mobile phone number to discuss the problem.   Wow – cool service !  

I just DM’ed my phone number – and they rang me a little later, and they were able to fix up the direct debit billing thingo – the dude actually rang me a second time a little later, after some more info to report – nice one. 

So (hopefully) it’s sorted out for next month.

In essence – a shout-out complaint resulted in Optus being able to appease a Grumpy Wookie, and sort out the problem too – without me having to ring, or email or anything. 

They rang ME !   Very cool.

Another thought recently has been to switch my mobile phone (yes – thinking about iPhone’ing – just need to pay out the contract).

I’d previously spoken to people in an Optus mobile store (a few months ago) – but haven’t had time to do so again lately – always crazy busy at lunch time (in the city) – and Saturday’s with the kids in tow is just as tricky.

Same with ringing up – there’s that damn annoying voice recognition software : 

Please say the product you’re ringing about…?    IN-TER-NET !!   

And, if there’s kids making noise & ruckus in the background, it gets heard by the software – and I ended up more and more frustrated. 

PLUS – they’re only only until 8 pm (!) and that’s usual crazy put-the-kids-to-bed time.

*aarrgghhh*

Enter Twitter.

From my work laptop, just a quick DM to @Optus asking about the payout cost for my phone, and back to work.

The phone rang about 20 mins later, and I got “Hi, it’s Rhys from the Optus Twitter Response Team – I’ve got the figures about your payout.”  Cool, eh ?

Great service from a ‘communications’ company – who are monitoring all forms of communication – push vs pull responses, etc.  

You could even say it’s an ‘asynchronous support request’…   he he…

It’s a service industry these days for commodity products like phone, internet, and even the electricity and gas companies – and insurance companies, health funds, superannuation companies – and BANKS !  

Listening to customers via social networks is the next level of “service” in my opinion. 

Maybe the ‘new wave’ – certainly the teens of today are heavy users of social media, and they’re the next folk to be getting mobile phones, renting apartments & needing gas, electricity, etc.

Being able to respond to “Gen-Z” customers in this way is a smart business strategy, a key ‘service’ differentiator – and likely to attract and retain more happy customers – like me !!

So – listen up all you service mobs – like Telstra, National Australia Bank, AGL, AAMI and all the rest – wake up – and catch up. 

Unless you’re not on the social networking band wagon already of course…

I reckon Optus have a pretty good customer service model – well, that’s just my opinion…   or maybe just a few too many Bourbon & Cokes on a Friday evening.

Either way – kudos to Optus – thanks lads !

And “Viva la Twitter” !!

People Search Data Fields (XSLT –> XML)

Within SharePoint 2007, the output of a “standard” search results webpart – and/or people search webpart – can be controlled using XSLT.

Most folk know it’s fairly tricky to deal with XSLT – not just the format of the markup, but also determining what values are in the data source.

Found a great tip from Novotronix, with a small piece of XSLT that shows ALL data elements. 

(1) Click the “XSL Editor” button.

(2) Replace the XSLT with the chunk from here.

(3) Click Save

The output shown will now look just like a plain chunk of XML.

Here’s the XML chunk you need (as detailed in the referenced blog post)

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

SharePoint Conference 2009 Keynote

For those people unable to attend the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, the next best thing is to watch the KeyNote Address “On Demand”.

But – the trouble is often that you have to watch “online” – as mentioned by @Nilcraban (on Twitter).

NB.  The video at the moment is just “available soon” – but you can try out the following technique in the meantime.

UPDATE :  Keynote is available at Microsoft PressPass.  And – here’s the WMV.

I’ve had some luck in the past with saving down the SharePoint “Sneak Peak” videos, so that I could watch while on the train – using my Toshiba GigaBeat (it’s a Zune, before Zune was around).

Here’s how to do it – using a few FREE and LEGAL tools :

(1) Check the page load using Fiddler2.  This monitors your HTTP traffic – and basically anything/everything that gets into your browser will be logged.

(2) Grab the URL of the file – just right-click, and select “Copy > Just Url”

eg. http://msstudios.wmod.llnwd.net/a2294/o21/events/sharepoint/750_ms_sharepoint_postshow_091019.wmv

(3) Grab a streaming-saver tool to download it to a file.   (do it over night perhaps)

I’ve used the Streaming Download Project (SDP) application before :

Think of it like a video recorder for “Windows streaming”, recording live shows, music concerts, radio shows, movies and free trailers for new release etc…

This is a free utility developed by some “MMS” developers – not the multi-media messaging stuff like SMS, but Microsoft Media Streaming technologies.

(4) Within SDP, click Open, and paste in the URL to the WMV file :

(5) Click Go – and you’ll be prompted with a “Save As” dialog.

(6) Choose a file location, and click OK.

(7) Then, just sit back and wait – go for lunch, coffee – or off to bed…

That’s all there is to it.   Not exactly an elegant solution – and might take a few go’s.  But, you should then be able to watch offline on your laptop, or Zune, etc.

***  The other cool feature with SDP is the ability to have a “Batch” download – just a text file with each WMV listed in a TXT file (I just used Notepad).

Site Feature – Include Custom Icon (GIF)

When creating custom SharePoint webparts using features, the ICON to show within the Site Collection Feature page is often forgotten, or developers just don’t bother with it – and leave it as the default one.

The following shows some “Out Of The Box” icons – and the Telerik icon – with the little green pencil on the right-hand side.

If you want to include a custom icon – here’s how to do it – very simple !

(1) Create an image to use

• The image that will be included is best to be 31 x 21 in size.
• Here’s some example ones, that you can take & use if you want – or simply create your own.

 

(2) Include the image in the solution

• Within your Visual Studio project (using WSPBuilder, of course !), you will need to create an IMAGES folder
• This is then copied into the 12 hive, when the feature is deployed.

(3) Add to FEATURE.XML file

• Just need to add the “ImageUrl” property in the FEATURE.XML

(4) Build & deploy the WSP

That’s all that’s needed !!

You should now have a custom logo/icon when you view the features within “Site Features” – or “Site Collection Features” (as shown below)

 

Easy, eh ?   A quick way to differentiate your features from the OOTB ones – or to identify your company within the big list of features.

Visual Studio 2008 using 600 MB of RAM !

Have been developing SharePoint components lately, within a Virtual Machine environment – and it’s been getting slower and slower – still fairly slow after re-booting.

The VM has (only) 2 GB of RAM allocated, which has been “OK” for SharePoint, SQL Server, Visual Studio and so forth.

But – the memory use – and processor – have been spiking off the chart in the last day or so – with Visual Studio using 500-600 MB of RAM. 

Have tried re-booting, and the memory – and processor – jumps up almost immediately after opening my Visual Studio solution.

BUT – the other developers in my team don’t have the same memory problems (within Visual Studio) – and when I open a NEW project in Visual Studio, all appears OK.

Just on a whim, I checked the files in the solution folder – and noticed something a little odd :

It looks like the “SUO” file – Visual Studio Solution User Options – is nearly 60 MB in size !!    WTF ?

Quick check on the other’ developer’s VM’s – and it’s about 130 KB – less than 1% of the size !

I don’t exactly know what’s in that file, it’s all in binary –  must be corrupted somehow ?   And Visual Studio is churned through it, checked, loading, saving, whatever.

So – I just deleted the file – and re-opened my Visual Studio solution.

A new SUO file was immediately created – and voila !   Visual Studio is ticking away MUCH happier at about 130 MB of RAM.

And – the new SUO file is about 115 KB in size – much better than 60 MB !

So – if you find Visual Studio is running sloooow – or using a truckload of RAM – check and see if there’s a bloated & unnecessarily large SUO file.

Now, what exactly *IS* an SUO file ?!?   “User Options” – not source code – don’t know much more than that, sorry.  But, enough for me to know that I can DELETE it.

Will be Christmas before you know it !

Has been a hectic crazy year – into October already – daylight savings has started, and warmer weather is on the way (hopefully !) 

Just wanted to blog a few recent happenings and what’s news in my world :

* Have had a new oven installed in our kitchen

* Health kick been going well – have been eating better, and walking every day from Richmond train station to Flinders St.   Been taking photos along the way : Blue Sky + BubbleDome + Fed Square

* New outdoor table & chairs, and been digging in preparation for gas & electricity lines to get the spa going – plan to be ready by Christmas

* Trying to get out for bike rides – having to take a break for a week or two, following a recent operation (not going to give too much information – if you know me, you know what I mean)

* Lots and lots of fun with family – the whole “party of five” :

* Charlie is 3 months already, and has begun rolling from his back to tummy – already ?  

* Cameron – more and more Lego, and playing Wii games

* Liam – he’s nearly TWO !  Will do a full post soon about what he’s been up to

* Donna – she’s been amazing lately – juggling tricky kids (Cameron lately !) – and some nights with lots of wake-ups for feeding/crying.

Other stuff :

* Going to see SLAYER + MEGADETH on Friday night !   w00t !   Haven’t been to a gig/show for a long time – probably since Nine Inch Nails back in February 2009

* Speaking of NIN – they had their last ever show, with a 3 hour set – and lots of speculation about what’s next (?)   One thing that’s expected for early 2010 is a re-release of The Fragile album – wait and see !

* Reading – just finished Marilyn Manson’s “The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell” – a few years old, but still some interesting tales & his life story.   Next up – hoping to read another rock-n-roll biography “I Am Ozzy”

* Mountain Biking – been watching some awesome doco videos & movies – especially the “Seasons” video from The Collective.

* Speaking of Mountain Biking – Sam Hill (AUS) won the final round of the UCI Mountain Biking World Cup in Schladming, Austria – and thus won the season overall (for the first time) !   

* Next year’s MTB Calendar (2010) has been released – click here to see.

* Lastly on the MTB front, there’s an MTBA event happening in Avoca in Northern Victoria in April – just happens to be up-the-road from my parents holiday country house, and is actually *ON* my birthday !   I’m thinking of registering and participating in the 33 km event – doesn’t matter if I come last, would be fun to be part of it. 

* SharePoint – lots of new information coming with the SharePoint Conference happening in Las Vegas.  Check out Twitter Search #SPC09 for the announcements and latest info – as it happens !

* Also, SharePoint Saturday is happening in Melbourne in November.  I’m hoping to put together a session along with a buddy from MOSSIG – will update more as it happens – ie. we still have worked out all the details !   More info here from Brian Farnhill, one of the organisors of the [very successful] SharePoint Saturday.

——

That’s about all from me – key an eye on Twitter for bits & pieces from me – more regular than the blog updates of late !    @grumpywookie

Formatting Dates (C#)

When coding within C#, I’m always off to BING or GOOGLE to check on the specific syntax for different date formats – day, month, year, hour, minute, etc.

Just wanted to let you know about a GREAT link that helped me out – and wanted to blog it for future reference :

www.csharp-examples.net

As an example of what I was wanting to achieve – I was needing to display a date/time range – but only show the “EndDate” if not on the same day – something like this :

24 Sep 2009, 8:00am – 10:00am

24 Sep 2009, 8:00am – 26 Sep 2009 5:00pm

So – here’s the code I used.

============================

[ for the same “day” – just show the time – need “am” and “pm” in lower case]

** NB.  dateStart and dateEnd are both “DateTime” types

String.Format("{0:dd MMMM yyyy}", dateStart)

+ ", " + String.Format("{0:h:mmtt}", dateStart).ToLower()

+ " – " + String.Format("{0:h:mmtt}", dateEnd).ToLower();

[ for “multi day” event – include the date-to and time ]

String.Format("{0:dd MMMM yyyy}", dateStart)

+ ", " + String.Format("{0:h:mmtt}", dateStart).ToLower()

+ " – " + String.Format("{0:dd MMMM yyyy}", dateEnd)

+ ", " + String.Format("{0:h:mmtt}", dateEnd).ToLower();

============================

Here’s the link to the article I used – thanks !!

String Format for DateTime [C#]

This example shows how to format DateTime using String.Format method. All formatting can be done also using DateTime.ToString method.