Get XPATH of element in IE

Ever had the need to get the XPATH of an element and you are using IE.  Well, here is how you can:  Create a bookmarklet with the following javascript:

javascript:function getNode(node){var nodeExpr=node.tagName;if(!nodeExpr)return null;if(node.id!=''){nodeExpr+="[@id='"+node.id+"']";return "/"+nodeExpr;}var rank=1;var ps=node.previousSibling;while(ps){if(ps.tagName==node.tagName){rank++;}ps=ps.previousSibling;}if(rank>1){nodeExpr+='['+rank+']';}else{var ns=node.nextSibling;while(ns){if(ns.tagName==node.tagName){nodeExpr+='[1]';break;}ns=ns.nextSibling;}}return nodeExpr;}function getXPATH(){var currentNode=document.selection.createRange().parentElement();var path=[];while(currentNode){var pe=getNode(currentNode);if(pe){path.push(pe);if(pe.indexOf('@id')!=-1)break;}currentNode=currentNode.parentNode;}var xpath="/"+path.reverse().join('/');clipboardData.setData("Text", xpath);}getXPATH();

Bookmarklets are just a simple bookmark and you use the script as the url to the site instead of an actual url.  Hope someone else finds this useful.

The code above was adapted from http://functionaltestautomation.blogspot.com/2008/12/xpath-in-internet-explorer.html

Random thought for the day... Programming in other countries

I had a random thought today while helping someone on my codeplex project (http://spdactivities2010.codeplex.com/):

What language is used to program stuff in other countries?  do they still use english to write their code?  I would assume javascript has to be, since it isnt compoled code, but what about compiled code such as c#?

Hopefully someone with internation experience will hop on here and enlighten me.

-R

SPC2011 Lab

The lab here at the conference is pretty cool.  There are a ton of great lab exercises available to run through to help you get the best out of the product.  I'm hoping to find a way to offload some of the source and the walkthough documentation so that I can use it later.

The lab at SPC2011.  This is a few of half the lab, there are just as many machines to the left of the frame of this photo.

There are quite a few machines available to use, and they even spent the effort to put some cool lighting in the room. Each machine is a thin client with dual displays, which I believe is the same concept the VP of IT at where I work is looking to go to for a lot of the associates at our company.

Disney!!

Last night was our trip to disneyland.

Dinner

Had dinner tonight with the guys from Winwire, and met lots of new people.  Had a great time, and ate lots of great food.

Dessert....  yummy :-)

Now im off to bed, tomorrow will be a long day ending in a long night at disneyland.

Winner winner chicken dinner

So at lunchtime I walked into the vendor booth area, and Quest Software was having an instant raffle to win 25 bucks, so I grabbed a ticket.  3 minutes later they announced the number and lo and behold it was mine :-) 

There was also a free book giveaway, but the line was long and i was hungry.  By the time i got lunch and came back, the books were all gone.  I'm going to have to roam that room more often to make sure i dont miss out on more free stuff.

Denali

So MS has been hyping the new sql server a lot at the confernce.  Its codename is denali, and they have been showing demos of it.  I have to say, it seems quite impressive.  It has way better failover capabilites from previous versions, and they have made it even easier to setup/configure.

You can find out more by checking out the website: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions.aspx

Keynote

This morning was the keynote.  Normally keynotes are full of excitement and new announcements....  This one was not.  I'm hoping the rest of the conference doesnt fall so flat.  The setup in the main ballroom was impressive (see the pic below), and the speakers held my interest for the most part.  A vast majority of the keynote was spent tooting their own horn on how much functionality they packed into office 365.  There was one redeeming part of the keynote - they demonstrated live a SQL failover with the new not yet release SQL server.  They had a monster sharepoint farm (1 TERRABYTE of ram, 80 processors, 100 TB of disk space) and they failed over the entire farm by unplugging the primary SQL server.  The whole farm came back up on its own within 40 seconds.  Given that they had a user load of 7500 concurrent users, and a 14 terrabyte content database attached, that was extremely impressive.

Anaheim Conference Center

In a word: impressive.

From the outside

This place is huge (my feet hurt from all the walking)

Here is another pic of the place:


Looking out from the escalator

Arrival

When i arrived in LA, i started to remember why i left CA.  The smog, the traffic, and some really crazy people.  Even so, I was still very excited because In-N-Out was in my near future.

After I picked up my rental car and started to drive from the airport to my hotel, I was pleasantly surprised to see how close my hotel was to disneyland.  As I neared my hotel, there were fireworks going off in there air, and as I pulled in I realized that disneyland is literally just a few blocks from my hotel.

The hotel im staying at is awesome.  The room is a  spacious two room suite, and the entire center area of the hotel is wide open.

Inside the hotel

First floor

From the outside

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

I'm so excited!!!  I just found out yesterday that I get to go to SharePoint Converence 2011.

http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/default.aspx

I plan on posting my thoughts on each session I attend as a blog post, and ill try my best to include pictures.  Want to know one of the coolest things about this event beside all the awesome tech I'm going to get to learn?  Its at Disneyland!

I've never been to Disneyland, but i have been to Disneyworld when I was really young.  This should be a lot of fun.

Boxed Music Drums

So the guy i bought my TD-12 from actually makes hand drums commonly called tongue drums.  They are pretty cool and wanted to share his site with everyone.  So without further adieu...

http://www.boxedmusicdrums.com/

SharePoint 2010 - Hide recently modified section on wiki pages

Want to hide that pesky recently modified section? Well, you can!
All you have to do is add a content editor web part to your page and then drop in the following code.
<style type="text/css">
.s4-recentchanges {
DISPLAY: none
}
</style>

Check out my other post on hiding the quick launch.

SharePoint 2010 - Completely Hide Quick Launch

Ever wanted to completely hide the quicklaunch on a page or two in sharepoint but just didnt know how? Well, its EASY!
All you have to do is add a content editor web part to your page and then drop in the following code.
<style type="text/css">
#s4-leftpanel {
DISPLAY: none
}
.s4-ca {
MARGIN-LEFT: 0px
}
</style>

Bought a new to me TD-12

So a few weeks ago I bought a new (to me) TD-12 as an upgrade to my TD-9.  Let me first say, wow!  I love this thing.  Its amazing how much better it sounds than my TD-9 and the crazy amount of customizations you can do.

One thing I am a little disappointed in is the community surrounding the TD-12.  There really doenst seem to be many people that like to share their customized kits.  There is even a company out there (vexpressions) that sells the config files.  I'm a bit shocked that people actually pay for configurations they could do themselves and simultaneously curious as to how good the kits are.  The few kits i found online that others have shared really werent that great, so im quite skeptical.

This has led me to want to get much more involved in the vdrum community and to try to encourage others to share their kits.  I'm not sure how much storage wordpress will let me use up, but i would like to start a post on here to start sharing the syx (sysex) files that contain the custom kits so that others can use them.

If im feeling really bored, i also want to recreate the vdrumlib software and make it freeware, as i think something like this should be readily available to the masses for free, not something you have to pay 20 bucks for.

 

If youve stumbled across this post, and have some kits you want to share, please comment and share them!!!  I will be starting a new thread that just contains customized kits and will keep it up to date with all user provided kits.  I will link to that post from here when it gets created.

 

Thats all for now...  -Rob

SharePoint 2010 My Site Activity Feed, RSS-style | SharePoint Blog

SharePoint 2010 My Site Activity Feed, RSS-style

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Brad Saide

The Activity feed in the My Site for SharePoint 2010 is Great – you can see at a glance what everyone’s up to and what the topics of interest are. However, it’s not that clear how you might consume it as an RSS feed…

To get your activities in RSS format, browse to the activityfeed.aspx page at http:///_layouts/activityfeed.aspx

To get the activities of your colleagues in RSS format, append the consolidated=true parameter to the query string – http:///_layouts/activityfeed.aspx?consolidated=true

Finally, if you want to get the activities of a particular user, pass in the user account using the publisher parameter – http:///_layouts/activityfeed.aspx?publisher=domain\username

Remember, in order to consume these feeds using the OOTB RSS Reader, you need to have the site running in Kerberos mode or Claims mode using Kerberos

via SharePoint 2010 My Site Activity Feed, RSS-style | SharePoint Blog.

Welcome to SharePoint and Other Things!

So i decided to start a blog to chronicle my successes and frustrations with SharePoint 2010 and everything that comes with it.  Hopefully this blog will grow into something useful for the SharePoint community at large.  Here we go!!