Dev Team Assemble

Day three was a lot of fun as I got to spend three hours in the labs and ran through some pretty cool stuff.  Linq to Sharepoint, Upgrading sites, REST API etc.

As far as the sessions went I was hoping the MultiLingual sites session was going to make me happy with some great news about variations.  Instead it seems to be status quo on that system with MS playing the line that you need to plan ahead for this...makes sense but not always possible.  The multi language user interface or MUI for all the chrome is available in every site now and you can switch languages off the site actions bar.

MindSharp had an awesome evangelistical session in the big room on Developiong with REST and LINQ in Sharepoint 2010.  This was another really great session on developing against the new Client Object Model, the Server OM, the ListData.svc REST service.

All in all it was another good day...If I didn't have to spend thenight doing homework it actually would haev been mouch more fun

Technorati Tags: conference, SharePoint, web parts

The second day of the conference was great and a couple of sessions really stood out above the others in my mind....there was a great session in the morning on web part development and some of the new things coming up in that.  AJAX is baked into SP now which is great but there is also a bit of a learning curve surrounding XSS and making sure we understand cross-site scripting and how SharePoint really cracks down on this.

There was an amazing session on SharePoints new COM or client object model that exposes all sharepoint objects to the client (.NET CLR, silverlight and javascript).  Essentially we will be able to a LOT more work on the client side which makes me feel warm inside.

I finally got to play around with SharePoint 2010 in the labs which was great.  I was dying to get a feel for the product because it feels weird listening to all these sessions without actually having your hands on it.  I definitely will be spending more time in the labs.

The Huey Lewis and the News Beach Party was a lot of fun but I left there feeling a little...drunk for lack of a better word.  Good times in vegas...

Technorati Tags: conference, SharePoint, web parts

Yesterday started with a hangover...for me.  On Sunday there was a SharePint event at the Eye Candy bar in the middle of Mandalay Bay and I was one of the  unfortunate souls whohappened to have drank too much   The Keynotes were pretty cool...nothing overly stand out there was a lot of talk about the new product and moving forward and a couple of demos that probably were a little too long.  Truth be told my butt hurt from sitting through almost 3 hours of Keynotes so I was happy when it was done.

In the afternoon the actual session began.  for me it was the Whats New For Developer Overview, Visual Studio 2010 Tools Overview and Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010.  We covered a lot of ground in the first two and and they were very much an overview of all the features available.  Things like running SP on the desktop client (x64 win7 or vista), visual studio 2010 build, debug, deploy, the developer dashboard, Linq to SharePoint (YES), the ribbon and sandboxed solutions.

The final session (the web content management one) was a bit of a disappointment.  It was a level 300 session and seemed like they dumbed it down for beginners, i mean they were teaching us how to make web pages via the UI.   There was some interesting stuff in the presentation but at no point did they really dive in and demo things like the variation model improvements or content deployment fixes they have made.  It was just alluded to.

Either way it was a pretty good day...met some great people from all over the world so far and I hope that continues.

Technorati Tags: conference, SharePoint, SPC09

From November 2008:

Whew...its been a long week and its only Thursday. This years conference was much the same as last years with the exception of being held in various portions of the Mandalay Bay convention center as opposed to on one floor. This made for lots and lots and lots and lots of walking. But I'm still young (yes i am) so it makes for good excercise to walk off all the food they shovel in your mouth.

Most of the sessions I attended were really good with the exception of a couple. I wouldn't blame the speakers because these problems were mostly due to technical issues like the computers not working, the projectors broken or feedback in the presenters microphone sort of thing. All in all there were some great things presented this week.

Some of the sessions that really stuck out were:

Kimberly Tripp - Index Internals and Usage
This was a great session that talked about thins like SQL Server Statistics, Query Optimization, Types of indexes, diminishing returns on performance, etc. Of all the session I think this one stood out the most and because it is probably the most relevant for me right now being one of the "SQL Server DBA" for my company (Christie Digital). I say it that way because its a committee based DBA

Rick Strahl - Using WCF for JSON and REST Services with ASP.Net

Great session....last one of the conference for me so it really sticks out but essentially this covers the next gen replacement for ASMX or first gen webservices in the .NET Framework.

John Papa - Practical Strategies with the Entity Framework

For me this was an introduction to the Entity Framework that was released in VS 2008 SP1. John did a great job of quickly introducing the technology and getting on to the meat and potatoes of what we were there to discuss. There was a good discussion on how to use the IDE to build the data mappings and what happens after you make changes to the backend server, which coinceidently can be any data source...not just SQL as Linq to SQL supports.

Things I would change...(and only because its my blog and I can say whatever I want!!!)

...the time between sessions was ridiculous...one hour or in some cases and hour and a half is just way too long. They could have added an extra session or two to the day. I realize they want you in the expo hall but they could have extended the day to facilitate that or leave it open all day and then some people may skip a couple of sessions here and there to go and see what the vendors are offering. this was my gripe last year and its my gripe this year. Its probably going to be the thing that keeps me from going to this in the future.

...provide video or podcasts of the sessions so we can take in the whole conference...even the sessions we didn't get to go to. I see there point about this being intellectual property and the speakers are consultants and this is their livelyhood but I mean if they are willing to teach this at a conference...and we pay to see it...shouldn't we be entitled to review this information after the fact? Maybe they will supply it on their site (i heard they were recording the sessions this year).

...ease up on the food. Damn, there was too much...I ate too much...I felt stuffed the whole time...I guess this is really my fault! Okay dont change that

Technorati Tags: .net, ASP.NET, conference, Development, SharePoint, SQL Server, sql server 2005