Sorry this has taken me a few days to get online. After attending the SharePoint Best Practices Conference (SPBP) in McLean, Sept 15th – 17th, I hurried back to get in two work days – which included hosting 2 SharePoint User Group meetings on Thursday, Sept 18th, and then my husband and I flew to Boston Saturday early to attend (and speak at) their Boston Code Camp 10. I'm in the airport now, Sunday Sept 21st, on my way home. So here's my summary of my experiences at the SPBP Conference….
This conference is different from the rest of the other conferences I normally attend, because it isn't only targeted at developers or IT Pros; it was also for CIOs, Project Managers, etc. The tracks identified which audience (sounds like MOSS!) they were intended for.
I'm pretty picky about who I want to give my time to, and I attend a lot of conferences – especially on SharePoint – so I'm uber-critical of speakers, and am always searching for the best of the best. Also, since I'm an independent consultant, I pay for my own registration and travel expenses AND I'm giving up billable hours when I'm away from my customer, so please keep that in mind as I pick my best sessions/speakers. I'm hard to please and I'm looking for information I haven't already encountered from other conferences, books, blogs, tweets, user groups, Code Camps, etc…..
From a developer's stand point, you can't go wrong attending one of Todd Bleeker's developer sessions. I wish I had a tenth of Todd's energy – or knowledge! He's the first SharePoint instructor I ever gave up my own hard-earned money to attend, and the first I ALWAYS recommend to anyone looking for SharePoint developer training. Todd always delivers on value for my time – because he's famous for cramming a lot of information into his presentations. I attended Todd's Best Practices for Developing Web Parts. As expected, Todd delivered. Some key take aways from Todd's talk were: Don't write SharePoint web parts – they're for backwards compatibility - only write ASP.NET web parts; use the iCallbackEventhandler rather that AJAX for more performant web parts; and Todd's 10 steps for creating and deploying web parts (Start with well-named assembly, Sign and strongly name your class, Set config values in an XML file, Strike CTRL+Shift+B to build your project, Slap into SharePoint (at this point you know you have everything set up for a successful deployment to SP), Sharpen logic and rendering in your code (i.e. begin your coding), Secure the assembly, Supply a Solution, Specify files to include (in the solution), Store and deploy the solution). Use property bags to store config info (web part, feature, etc.). Get Spence Habar's app pool tool to see which W3WP process to attach to for debugging.
Todd's the man for developing, and Dave Mann is the man (get it?!?!) for Workflows. I first ran into Dave at a past Philly Code Camp – and learned then that Dave is the go-to guy for Workflows. He wrote the first (and at current blogging time, only) book on SharePoint Workflows. I attended Dave's Best Practices for Designing, Implementing and Supporting an Enterprise Workflow. Like Todd, Dave also delivered. (That's why I try to find who's who in the technical world – you can count on the Pros to deliver. Which may be my best take away from this conference – I've added some new Best of the Best to my personal list of good SharePoint speakers). One of the things I learned in Dave's talk is to use the Workflow History for debugging your workflow, but to take the logs out of your workflow when ready for production. Also, you can throttle workflow using the command line stsadm –o setproperty –pn workflow command. (I'll be checking that out when I get back to work).
Dave and Todd were the speakers that were already on my personal Best Speakers. The best of the conference for me was finding other experts that I now know are worth following in blogs, or attending their sessions. New to my list are Mike Watson and Ben Curry. I've heard of Ben of course (he works for Mindsharp and is one of the co-authors of the MSPress Best Practices book – I heard the book was his idea), but had never had the privilege of hearing him before. Mike works for Microsoft on the SharePoint team so brings that insiders point of view. I attended three of their sessions; one on Disaster Recovery and another that had so much content it evolved into a 2-session presentation on Capacity Planning and Monitoring. Once I ran into their sessions I made sure I didn't miss any others. Tons of real-world suggestions on planning and running a MOSS farm. I have lots to take back to my customer's admins to consider.
The other person I got introduced to was John Stover. John runs an online SharePoint User Group (http://www.thesug.org/Pages/default.aspx ) and was also working as a vendor in the Expo Hall. John's talk was on Using SharePoint to Deliver Business Intelligence- which is probably the closest to what I do as a SharePoint consultant/architect. I attended John's talk since I would be presenting a talk this past weekend at Boston's Code Camp on using SharePoint Designer to build Dashboards. John's talk helped fill out some speaking points for my upcoming presentation. Thanks John!
My last new speaker I was privileged to hear was Rick Taylor. Rick formerly worked for Microsoft so he had lots of insider tips. Additionally, he's very funny and just plain fun to listen to. All of these speakers are on my Best Practices for Speakers list! I'll go out of my way to attend their sessions in the future. I also have a list of speakers I've never had the opportunity to hear – that I'll be sure to make time for at future conferences, and those include Bob Fox and Spencer Harbar. Again, keep in mind my initial warning: I'm VERY picky, so your mileage may vary! Happy Conferencing!
Oh - one last thing! A shout out to the BEST Mindsharp sales guy - Jason Scott - for all the hookups he did for me! Thanks Jason!!!