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De-session making processes
by
David
DeJean |
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It happens at pretty much the same time every year. You make it through the JumpStarts on Sunday and the General Session and the first rush of breakout sessions on Monday, but just about noon on Tuesday, you realize that you're not going to make it to every session you've checked off on your Lotusphere schedule. In fact, you're not going to make it to half of them.
There is just too much good stuff going on. For every "Best Practices in LotusScript" you congratulate yourself on getting to, you kick yourself when you hear from somebody that you really shouldn't have missed "Sametime 3.0—How It Works." You just hope the presenter's Freelance presentation is posted on the Lotusphere site, begin searching the schedule for repeats of sessions, and wish you could be in two places—or more—at once. (In the case of the aforementioned Sametime session, presenter Wes Morgan did indeed get his presentation for Session ID504 up on the conference site, bless him, and they're worth looking for.)
About all an overcommitted blogger can do is hit some highlights.
Best practices in LotusScript
Presenter Scott Good is a familiar face at Lotusphere, and this year his LotusScript session delivered (along with some very good advice for improving your LotusScript code writing) some very clear, convincing support for his claims about what kind of code performs best. His presentation included examples that timed alternate ways of writing the same functions. He used side-by-side comparisons of the performance of two pieces of code to dispel some myths about LotusScript, including two that have become uber myths:
Myth: Using Evaluate to give LotusScript access to @functions is slower than LotusScript written to perform the same task. In fact, he demonstrated, @functions are particularly good for handling lists, and Evaluate in Notes/Domino 6 is a much better performer than previous versions.
Myth: Get Nth Document is much slower than Get Next Document. It is, he concluded, but only for operations on NotesDocumentCollection objects. When run against NotesView or NotesViewCollection, both methods perform about the same.
Good offered two Best Practices that materially speed up document processing—the AutoUpdate property for NotesView and the NotesUIDocumentAutoReload property. Setting
view.AutoUpdate=False
keeps a view from resorting itself immediately after you touch a document, and setting
uidoc.AutoReload=False
while you process a document, then turning it back on when you're done, saves a great deal of time and processing devoted to pointless refresh.
Good's presentation graphics included a corollary to Murphy's Law that deserves to be scribbled on a Post-It and stuck to every developer's monitor: "It's hard to make anything foolproof because fools are such ingenious fellows."
Look for session BP101 when you can get access to the presentation files.
Formula language tips and techniques
Another session, AD201, sounds almost like a counterpart for the @formula language. Presenter Rocky Oliver reviewed changes to @functions in Notes/Domino 6, and his presentation is already on the conference site. There's no repeat of his session, more's the pity, but the presentation file makes it look too good to miss (which I did anyway, so I rushed to look up his presentation). He points out that not only are there 48 new documented @functions in the new version, but the @formula engine was entirely rewritten and runs four to five times faster. Check out the LDD Today article "Enhancements to the formula language in Domino 6" for more information.
"All your base are belong to Turtle"
A session I did get to was CS103, "Inside Gonzo Lotusphere," presented by Scott Wenzel, better known as Turtle. Wenzel is the entire creative team and production staff behind the Totally Unofficial Gonzo Lotusphere Page. The URL tells the story: He not only does it to Notes, he does it in Notes. I went because I had to find out whether Turtle, who in previous years has been famously reclusive, actually exists or is a myth. After his session, I can report that he is not a myth, he is a mythter.
A detailed summary of the session isn't possible (or even really very necessary). But Wenzel did mix large helpings of Lotusphere folk history with a cook's tour of his site and some of its features, like the polls. (You can vote on what you think Ed Brill's previous career was, knowing that it takes only one form and two agents—one to create the poll, the other to handle the responses and update the vote totals.) "Simpler than it looks," he said, yet "more complex than it seemed at the time."
He also revealed that his crunchy technogeek exterior is just a mask for a soft, chewy center when he spoke of the Lotusphere culture. "It's more than tools, more than code, more than certifications... Lotusphere is a community where you can be yourself, you can recharge. At home, when you do something good, somebody is sure to ask you, 'Why didn't you do that in Outlook?' Here you're with thousands of people who won't ask you that."
The Lotusphere culture, he said, is "old, very deep, very strange—and I'm making it stranger every day. It's your conference—do something goofy."
Then he mounted his Segway transporter and made one of the most effective exits in breakout session history, zooming down the aisle and out of the room. He returned moments later to lead the audience in a sing-along of Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again." There was hardly a dry eye in the house.
There's relief in sight
After Tuesday comes Wednesday. The pace slows a bit, and there's time to visit the Technical Labs. The old standbys are back again—Meet the Developers, Globalization, e-Learning, and many more. The Conference Guide lists 12 labs, in fact, and an additional lab labeled "New this Year"—the IBM Software Services for Lotus (ISSL) Hands-on Training Lab. It's very carefully not called Lab 13 in the Guide. But we're not superstitious. We'll make a visit and bring back a report, if we live to tell the tale. |
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