2009 SharePoint Best Practices Conferences

This coming year we have not one but two Best Practices conferences on the calendar and the good news is that the folks across the pond are finally getting a chance to participate. The first conference is being held in San Diego, California on the 2nd – 4th of February. The second takes place in London April 6th – 8th. If you had a chance to attend the Washington, DC conference held earlier this year then you know that the quality of content is as good as it gets; if not, you really need to make attending one of these a priority.

I know there are a lot of conferences throughout the year – TechEd, SharePoint Conference, ODC, PDC, and so on, but the Best Practices conferences are truly unique. Unlike the other events, where the focus is usually on new technologies or forthcoming features, the BP tracks are all about proven methods and repeatable results. The speakers are generally tops in their respective areas of expertise and they distill a great deal of information down to the brass tacks of what you really need to know in order to save time, money and effort. This isn’t just about the how but also the why and, most importantly, the why not. You’ll hear tons of real-world examples that you can take back to your boss and say, with a relative degree of confidence, "this is why we should (or should not) do it this way". That’s worth it’s weight in gold, if you ask me.

I’m presenting two sessions at both conferences:

Developing High Performance Applications for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007  

Developing scalable, distributed, high performance applications for SharePoint Server 2007 can challenge even the most seasoned .NET programmer. Overcoming these challenges requires programming techniques that focus on optimal code execution and efficient application delivery. In this session you will discover proven methodologies for eliminating performance bottlenecks, reducing resource utilization, preventing memory leaks, improving render times, making efficient use of caching mechanisms, and avoiding common API mistakes that can negatively impact performance. You will also learn what tools and techniques are available to measure application performance, isolate under-performing objects and enforce optimal programming practices.

Designing and Deploying Enterprise Branding Solutions using Custom Site Definitions

Customizing the SharePoint 2007 user interface for enterprise portal applications often requires more power and flexibility than SharePoint Designer can provide. Custom site definitions give designers and developers a wealth of options for building dynamic, scalable, and extensible templates to support corporate branding initiatives. Learn how to determine when custom site definitions are required and discover how to leverage the power of the SharePoint feature and solution framework to create and deploy self-contained branding solutions that can improve portal performance, reduce time-to-delivery, and enhance maintainability.

If you’ve heard my High Performance talk before, be sure not to miss the new and improved version – I’ll be demo’ing cross-site queries and data aggregation in addition to the large list performance tricks. I’m really looking forward to these conferences – they’re a great way to kick off the new year and make sure your SharePoint projects get going in the right direction from the beginning. If you need a bit more ammunition to convince your boss to pony up the dough to send you, check out Ben Robb’s excellent post on the subject.

See you in London and San Diego!

Update: Good news for all you devheads coming to the UK Best Practices Conference. Looks like there was a bit of overlap between mine and Andrew Connell’s sessions so I’m going to tweak things a bit and go even deeper into some of my demos. Ever wondered how to create relational lists and use them as part of a dataset? Or how to leverage MOSS search to retrieve list items across multiple site collections? Then you don’t want to miss this presentation. Admins, beware – this one is pure devspeak. If you’re new to the whole SharePoint development thing then be sure to hit AC’s sessions first for the fundamentals and architecture pieces (these are absolute prerequisites) then let your inner codemonkey out for all to see! I’ll post links here to the track schedule as soon as it goes live.