Little off the usual but as a fan of the Lions Rugby team I thought I would share this great news. One of the biggest complaints people have with Lions Rugby is going to Ellis Park for the game, once there it is great but driving through some of the worst parts of Johannesburg is a major put off and then there is the serious lack of parking.

Well it seems they have taken that to heart and have not only four dedicated parking areas they have also arranged a park & ride facility! This should hopefully bring in the fans.

Official Press Release:

15 March 2011: The Lions will be playing Western Force this Saturday, 19 March 2011 at Coca-Cola Park.

Lions Professional Rugby invites Lions supporters to get to Coca-Cola Park early and to make a day out of it.In addition to the match, this weekend will see the launch and introduction of the Lions pre and post game stadium parking and braai activities.

Gates will open at 1pm and Supporters Club Members and Season Ticket Holders will be welcomed into the exclusive MTN Supporters Arena where they can enjoy live entertainment by Jaco Dennis, big screens and the Coca-Cola Gig-Rig. Refreshments aplenty will be available for purchase in the arena which will open from 1pm.

The Bulls vs. Stormers match will be shown on the big screens after the Lions match in the MTN Supporters Arena which will close at 10pm.

Expanded bar facilities for the general public will be situated next to the MTN Supporters Arena.

Plenty of family orientated activities are planned ranging from Park & Braai through to extensive children’s activities.

The NEW Lions Kiddies Entertainment Corner (west of the turnstiles) will be open from 2pm and will have face painters, jumping castles and tattoo artists applying rub off tattoos to the youngsters. In addition balloon makers and stilt walkers will be aplenty. Mufasa will be making an appearance to hand out some goodies.

Children are encouraged to visit the MTN World of Rugby area(the grassed area on the north of the stadium) to test their rugby skills, make some new friends and enjoy a unique rugby experience.

Prior to kick-off, supporters are in for a treat with some dynamic in-stadium entertainment. Chinese Lion dancers will dazzle supporters with their skills and some other exciting well known entertainers are in the pipeline. 

Parking tickets for the following areas are available from Computicket:

• Beeld (South)
• Johannesburg Stadium B Field

Parking is also available in the following areas and tickets can be purchased from the Coca-Cola Park Ticket Office:

• Ellis Park Stadium Arena (formerly Standard Bank Arena)
• Cricket Oval grounds

These parking tickets cost just R50 each. Parking tickets will also be sold match day by vendors wearing orange bibs for the Beeld, Ellis Park Stadium Arena and the Cricket Oval grounds at R50 each.

The two new parking areas specifically orientated toward allowing spectators to Park & Braai (Gas only) have been made available for this match.

Platinum parking will be available for season ticket holders only and is situated on North Park Lane just 40 meters outside the stadium.

Silver parking tickets for the JHB Stadium Athletics track(150 meters from the stadium entrance) are available to all Lions supporters.Parking tickets in both areas cost R100 each and are only available from the Coca-Cola Park Ticket Office on a first come first serve basis.

The Park & Ride from Mugg & Bean Cresta and will also be running and for just R60.00 per person you will get a return bus trip,safe parking and a complimentary bottomless coffee or lemonade from Mugg &Bean. Busses depart from Cresta from Entrance 3 (Cnr of Judges and Republic Roads) from 2pm and will leave Coca-Cola Park 30 minutes after the final whistle. Remember to take your Park & Ride ticket to Mugg & Bean after the match for your complimentary drink.

"The Lions Den will never again be the same as the Lions will now be catering for families young and old. The entertainment before and after will be top drawer. The Lions sportainment is here for all. Come and support our young team against the Western Force this Saturday", Lions Shareholder Robert Gumede said

Supporters are encouraged to come early to the match and enjoy the MTN Supporters Arena and Kiddies Corner and to support the Golden Lions as they face the Sharks at 2:40pm. TAU rugby – where enthusiastic eight year olds will take to the field – will be played from 1pm to1:40pm.

For the perfect family outing, get to Coca-Cola Park on Saturday where there will be activities and entertainment catering for all ages.

For more information visit www.lionsrugby.co.za

MVP Summit is over for 2011 for me, in less than a few hours I board a plane and start the ~23 hour trip home. This was an awesome trip filled with learning both about Microsoft but also personally and the experiences had here rate among some of the best in my life:

• Being able to attend a special dinner with various Microsoft technical fellows and vice presidents was amazing. My hero, Anders Hejlsberg was there and so were many other geek rock stars (Hanselman, The Gu and so on). What inspired me is the humility they all have. The whole dinner was amazing.
  
• Shooting real guns for the first time was ridiculously fun and I thank Martin, Mike & Chris for offering me that unique experience.
  
• Then heading to the snow (the real stuff this time, not the ice version Canada gave me) and snow boarding. I even threw snow balls!
  
• In South Africa we drink a piss we call beer and don’t think much about it – but here in America they do care. They have hundreds of micro breweries and so many technical terms for the beer. It is just staggering! It is also a lot of fun to go and sit in a brewery and drink the freshest of the fresh beer
  
• Then the Museum of Flight was just geek paradise for someone like me who loves the idea of flying (I do not think of 23 hours in economy class as flying) and space. Even the 4d simulator where you can go inverted and upside down was awesome. I even found time to be President of America for a few seconds.
  
• But most amazing was the new friends I made and the old friends I met up with. It was just awesome in every aspect, but especial mention must go to Rudi Grobler, who left SA with me, shared rooms, and did all the awesome things above (except the special dinner, next year he will be there) and Rein Hillman who put me & Rudi up at his house, opened his family and shuttled us ALL round Seattle.
  
  
  

Oh, and if you wanted to know how many Dr Pepper I consumed – 17, excluding how many I can get on the planes

As I sit on the couch of the place I have called home for the last 5 or so days with my bags packed, Rudi trying to cheat at chess and the children of the house going to bed, it is insane to think that it was almost 2 weeks ago I was in South Africa trying to find enough clothes to bring and now it is over

The first rule of being a MVP is don’t talk about fight club NDA material and unfortunately a lot of amazing (and even some boring) news we learnt this week was NDA.

So what can I share with you?

• Microsoft is listening – I have mentioned this before but the sheer volume of input sources to Microsoft is staggering. Some of those sources don’t always have good things to say, but Microsoft does factor that in and it is important. If you want Microsoft to change, tell them – just don’t insult them when you do.
  
• Microsoft is a business – It is there to make a profit. So when it pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into research, you can expect it wants a ROI. Being this is a technology blog, what does that mean? WATCH MICROSOFT RESEARCH.
• MVP’s are smart – I have said before that being a MVP is an award for community work but it is not until you sit in a room with some of them you realise how smart they are, and how well they can shoot:

To everyone from Microsoft who made this week special and for trusting us with information on project double rainbow unicorn*, thank you for all of it – it has been AMAZING! 

* If you have no sense of humour, project double rainbow unicorn is a joke – no such project exists or at least none I know of.

What I learnt at MVP Summit today?

It’s COLD, really, really cold. It’s raining and windy, which makes it colder.

This explains a lot about Microsoft & Seattle:

• Lot’s of micro breweries – cause beer helps with the cold
• Lot’s of coding – cause it’s too cold to go outside
• Lot’s of awesome friends – cause nothing rocks like chatting to a friend at a fire in Starbucks
  

Day 2 of Summit has been a blast as Rudi Grobler (friend of The show) and I, spent the day seeing a different side of Seattle and surrounding as we were shepherded about by Rein Hillman, a local to these parts. Having a local with a car makes a huge difference – you eat and see things that no tour guide will ever tell you. Like:

• The best Tereyaki: Yummy Tereyaki
• The biggest geek shop: Fry’s
  
• Some awesome board game shop
  
• A few of the local bars – most were closed though, so no planning on our side.

All in all, a lot of fun and food  

In the evening we headed down to Kent and the ShoWare Center to watch ICE HOCKEY! Which is an insane sport where I do not understand a thing that happened except goals – rest was just too fast and complex for my brain. I wish I had half the skills and reflexes those guys have.

Time to hit the pillow, tomorrow is all starts and I need my energy!

It is amazing how much can change in 3 minutes, this was the learning from the 1st day of MVP Summit 2011. I arrived in Seattle with Rudi Grobler for MVP summit after 23 hours of travelling which is frankly just ridiculous.

During that time I did a lot of thinking and reading (thank god for my Kindle) but shortly after arriving in a VERY cold Seattle I had my first 3 minute mind change. I walked out the lovely SEATAC airport and saw SNOW! I get like a kid with snow, but within 3 minutes the cold was just too much and the appeal of the snow wore off

One of things we did was head to the awesome Microsoft Store – this place is just fantastic. They have so much in there but so little feels like a store. It really feels like a place to go an experiment and play with Microsoft tech: There is Kinect stations, Microsoft Surfaces, tablets & laptops running Windows 7 and a variety of Windows Phone 7 devices.

The 3 minute lesson here if from the store people – having super friendly and knowledgeable really means that it is so much better and easier to buy there. I hope that this fantastic learning in the consumer space is the start of something more at Microsoft.

Finally we hit a place called The Parlor for some beer & pool and run into a Microsoft Team (WinSE – suspect is second edition, since they had a service pack 1 disk "SE" = Sustained Engineering), just guessing but I think it was their ship party.

After some pool, where Rudi kicked my ass until another friend Rein Hillman arrived (which is when I fought back fantastically) we left and I had my final 3 minute lesson: Walking with your hands in your pockets, cause it is cold, means you need to using something else to stop your fall and your face doesn’t work well.

Update: Thanks to Chris Johnson to tell me what SE meant.

March 19, 2012: This tool has had a major make over since the original release!

I’m sure, as a SharePoint power user, you’ve had the fun of your boss walking up to you and asking why the public holidays aren’t in your SharePoint calendar? (guess what happened to me last week)

You would think this would be easy, in fact Outlook supports adding holidays to calendars easily. So why isn’t SharePoint easy like that too?

I’ve had this asked a few times and never had a good answer to do it, so I decided that a simple tool needed to be built to solve this once and for all – Let me introduce SharePoint Holiday Loader (SHL).

SHL takes a standard holiday file (.hol) and allows you to publish that to a SharePoint list!

This tool is very easy to use (just need the file, the server and the calendar name) and it is free and open source. You can get the download the tool, source code, leave comments (or complaints) at: https://bitbucket.org/rmaclean/sharepoint-holiday-loader/

My old Logitech V450 mouse had an odd issue, if Windows was put to sleep and pulled the dongle out, Windows woke up. This never bothered me much since I got into a habit of doing that before I put Windows to bed.

However with my new Performance MX Mouse (aka the mouse Batman would use) it does something similar which a change of habit just can’t fix.

The new mouse has a TINY dongle which is designed to be left in all the time and I do that, however any mouse movement or button pressing will turn a sleeping Windows on. So if when I forget to turn the mouse off and toss it in my laptop bag, it will turn the laptop on and the start the process of converting my laptop bag into an oven.

The solution to both these issues is to disable this wake up feature.

Step 1) Right click on the Computer start menu item (or My Computer icon on your desktop) and select Manage

Step 2) Click on the Device Manager node (under System Tools).

Step 3) Expand Mice and other point devices, right click on the mice and click Properties

Step 4) Head to the Power Management tab, and untick Allow this device to wake the computer and finally click OK

This will prevent both the issue of dongle changes or mouse action from waking up your computer.

Foot note: how porn does that last line sound…

With SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 the ability to be a productive developer was key and there is tight out-of-the-box integration and this means that it is easy for SharePoint developers to put code into source control easily. Hilton Giesnow covers this brilliantly in a video he has: http://bit.ly/g71Gnb

Imagine a number of dedicated SharePoint developers, they may have an enterprise ALM solution like TFS and on their own machines have SharePoint 2010 Developer and VS2010 installed and life is good – but what about the individual, or ad-hoc, developer?

The problem for him is that installing SharePoint 2010 is a resource hog and you may not want it running all the time (what Hilton nicely calls the 9 to 12 development) and what about if you switching between projects, how do you switch SharePoint? The solution I found, is to have a virtual machine (VM) for SharePoint with the dev tools installed and do all work on the VM. This is great because the overhead is only there when you need it and you can easily switch between different virtual environments. The downside: source code management.

Sure you can hook up the VM to the network and manage code using the source control as you are used too, but this isn’t always easy or possible, so what else you can do? I had this problem recently where the source control is on one domain and my development was another domain. I choose to use the Mercurial Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) and I thought I would share this experience with you.

DVCS differs from “traditional” source control like TFS or SubVersion which has a client/server model where each developer is a client talking to a central server, however in DVCS every developer is their own server and does pushes/pulls (think like a sync) between other developers.

What this enables is a very lightweight set of tools installed along side SharePoint and the developer tools on the VM. At the end of each day I could run Mercurial on my machine and pull the source control down to my own machine. This meant the VM had the code and my “real” machine had the code. Then this code could easily be checked into the corporate source control system creating another backup and ensuring compliance with source management policies!

This has been a very exciting project and this configuration really made the management of the source code very smooth.

I purchased a Logitech Performance MX Mouse (to replace my other Logitech V450 mouse) which has a number of fantastic features:

• Darkfield optical sensor which works on everything, including glass
• The awesome and tiny wireless pickup that can remain plugged in all the time.
• Ability to charge off of USB and still work! 
• 7 Buttons

One of those 7 buttons defaults to a feature called Application Switcher. For Mac users this is exactly like Expose and for Windows users it is like a full screen task switcher. 

In fact on Mac runs Expose but on Windows this is a custom application and really doesn’t have the feel or the polish that the Flip 3d (the Windows+Tab thing) which ships with Windows Vista and Windows 7.

So how do you change this? There is many posts about using macro’s, assigning specific applications or even hacked drivers but from my own experience this is no longer needed and it appears most people do not know about it because it is so well hidden.

The first step is to download the latest version of SetPoint, the mouse software, from Logitech which at time of writing is 6.2. However the mouse actually ships with 4.7, a version over 3 years old! This is really odd since the mouse was only launched less than 1 year ago!

Once upgrade go to the Button Settings section, select the button and set the task to Other this will bring up a dialog with a massive drop down full of options. If you look in here for Flip 3d or maybe some alternative on application switcher you will not find it. However there is an option called Document Flip, which you guessed correctly is Flip 3d.

Set your mouse to this and viola!