I have been feeling lost in my career choice for a while. I have always considered development and code as an artform, something that requires a very important ingredient to be successful. In the last few weeks this particular point became more prominent, and I have finally found the missing ingredient. I have found what is missing in my career, and I am surprised about where it is leading me.

I struggled for a while to find a way to remove the WebPart entries orphaned by the deactivation and rectraction process in SharePoint, and found a neat way to this using the SPFeatureReceiver. After some testing I posted an article about it in the SharePoint section.

Another life update this time featuring information about the response to my role change as an evangelist and community lead, my visit to the doctor and our very pregnant Sharpei Cross.

I am more and more amazed lately by the lack of hardware, networking and general computer basics knowledge demonstrated by developers. I have always maintained that this is a very important part of a developers knowledge tools and in this article look at how this knowledge solved various problems in an asset management system I developed more then 2 years ago.

I have maintained To Dev or not To Dev as my development and technical blog for the last 3 years, however the time has come for Diago.co.za to evolve and I have decided to shut down To Dev or not To Dev. The blog will remain as a reference point but no more entries will be added.

I have been actively involed in the South African technology community for the last 3 years. I have always been a proud and passionate member of the community, involved as a technology evangelist. I have achieved a lot in this time however it hasn't been without a heavy cost. The time has come for me to step back and slowdown, as my family and my body is not the only parts of my life suffering from my current involvement.

I wrote my first article on SubText skinning covering the steps required to split the SingleColumn control into smaller pieces when used in custom skin development.

I spent the Easter weekend redesigning the Diago.co.za website and am extremely proud of the new theme. I also cleaned up the site a bit and also added some new LiveWriter support to SubText. I cover in detail the changes made to SubText for the new design as well as some background on the changes and other blog engines investigated for possible replacement of SubText. However SubText proved to be able to provide the required features after all.

More and more often the last few weeks I have had developers ask me about setting up a Development Environment for SharePoint Server 2007. There is quite a huge amount of information about this topic on Google, however I find that a lot of it is not up to date. I posted a set of articles on this topic.

I have come to realize there is confusion around what is required for running 64Bit guests virtual machines. I put together a wiki entry at work on this topic recently and decided to publish it on my blog as well.