Taglined "The Geekiest Social Network", My developerWorks just keeps getting better. As I mentioned, the IBM developerWorks crew have really taken the social network via Lotus Connections to the community, resulting in an influx of new IBM Online Community (not everyone sticks to Lotus - sad to report ;-) ) Bloggers making the scene and really contributing some great content.

Aside from content generation, there's also the added bonus of grabbing your own Subject Matter Expert Connections Profile - which can work 24-7 for your business networking and collaborative efforts... provided your honest in your tagging and bio information of course!

If you haven't signed up yet, check out the following demo video showing off My developerWorks. And for those of you not particularly interested in social networking -- y'know... those of you with resession-proof jobs that know everything you'll ever need to know right now and are too busy telling the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn -- consider this yet another public example of a solid Lotus Connections playground!

And for those of you already in the Lotus Online Community who have an established blog, I'm actually working with the crew at developerWorks on that. More details on that as they materialize - which will hopefully be soon!

While working on the Public Build Event Calendar project, I found myself adding two things to the application that I thought might prove useful to Lotus Notes client developers. The first I'll discuss today when we cover how you can use a simple Profile document to apply View row color-coding logic to your Lotus Notes applications.

For those if you who are -- like me -- more visually minded:

I'm using my Preferences example application as my springboard here, which will allow me to easily:

1. Define a runtime formula that will evaluate against the NotesDocuments in my color-coded NotesView in my "Preference" NotesDocument through a combination of Color Fields, Text fields to store my templated Formula and my @ReplaceSubString-evaluated runtime formula.
   
   The runtime formula Formula is then written into a Profile NotesDocument (which I've named "colorprofile"), into a NotesItem on that Profile NotesDocument (which I've named "colorstatus").

2. In my target NotesViews, I create a hidden ViewColumn, specifying that this column is to "Use value as color", that it is "User definable", and that "Profile Document" that holds the runtime formula for the Color-coding matches the same name of my Profile NotesDocument ("colorprofile").
   
   Additionally, on the Advanced tab in the Column Properties, I make sure that the Programatic Name of said Column matches that of the defined NotesItem on the "colorprofile" storing the runtime formula I wish to use for this particular NotesView (ie., "colorstatus").
   
   I then specify a simple Formula for the Column that will allow me to (should I choose) specify a unqiue color scheme. In this case, I'm using @UserName.

3. Now, at runtime, my runtime formula is evaluated and the color-coding applied to my NotesView!

For those of you who -- again, like me -- prefer a hands-on demo:

The aforementioned second topic - which I'll try to get out tomorrow - will have us creating a simple Calendar-type NotesView, and using the RegionDoubleClick Event to pre-set the Starting Date and Time of a new NotesDocument based on your location/region at the time of your double-click! This approach is discussed (and used) in the Event Calendar Public Build project (Episode 2, I believe) - so if you want to you can check that out now!

In this episode, we work on more Views for our Event Admins, including an "Event Calendar" Calendar-type View, and use both Shared Columns and a "Color" User Profile to complete a simple yet powerful user interface for our Lotus Notes application.

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Author's Note: Let me know if you like these screencasts: the non-formal approach that I'm taking as well as the content itself that I'm convering. For the high-resolution, full-screen videos, I'm first tried Vimeo.com and now ScreenCast.com - both under the "free" license. An annual premium account would run me $60USD/$100USD respectively, so if you like what you see - or have any problems with the content or the service - please let me know!

- Update -

Public Build: Event Calendar - Screencast Episode 2 from Chris Toohey on Vimeo.

I really like the Vimeo service - so I'm providing a smaller-resolution screencast should you feel the same way. While you won't see the specific lines of code, I think it's a better usage experience.