SEF 2008, Day Two

One of these days I’m going to learn not to stay up all night drinking and hell raising when I have presentations to do the next day – but apparently I haven’t learned this lesson yet. Fortunately, my first presentation, From .NET to SharePoint – Introduction to SharePoint Programming for .NET Developers, wasn’t until 10:20; any earlier and I don’t think I could have pulled it off. There’s just no way to cover all the information in an hour but I think I got the point across without losing anybody. All my demos worked, which was a pleasant surprise as I was still working on the code up until the day before.

After my presentation, Todd Klindt (who wasn’t in much better shape than I was) tackled Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 – another tough topic to cover in only an hour. He made it through, even though he lost his printed notes somewhere along the way and had to do his demos mostly from memory. I even managed to stay awake this time and actually picked up a few tricks (I didn’t know you could attach a task to an error instance in the event log – that’s handy).

For better or worse, I had the last presentation of the day on a very deep subject. I reprised my Full Speed Ahead – Developing High Performance Applications for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 talk from the UK User Group, so I had the unfortunate task of taking devs through some dense code at the very end of the conference. They hung with me and even Todd said he understood some of it – which is lucky as I need a hand from time to doing demos so I may pick him as my sidekick next time (just kidding TK – I wouldn’t do that to you. Then again…).

We met up back in Stockholm after the conference with Mike Fitzmaurice, Steve Smith and Penny Coventry and had dinner at a Belgian restaurant in honor of Patrick. The food was amazing and we swapped lots of war stories over some good Belgian beer. It’s always a treat to hang out with my fellow MVP’s – we’re really just one, big, dysfunctional extended family. I especially enjoyed spending some time with Mike Fitzmaurice; for some reason, we always seem to pass each by when we’re in the same place at the same time. It was also the first time I met Reza Alirezaei face to face, which was strange because it seems like I’ve known him forever. Also, Steve and I cooked up some ideas for a small conference in the UK early next year so keep an eye on our blogs for more information on that.

Although I only got to see a small slice of it, Sweden seems to be a fantastic country. The people were very friendly, the food and beer were good, and the countryside was breathtaking. We made some great new friends and look forward to coming back next year if Goran hasn’t gotten tired of us by then. Speaking of which, a special thanks to Goran Husman and his team for treating us so well and pulling the whole thing off without a hitch.

I’m headed back to the UK for a couple of days to tend to some business there and then back to Texas over the weekend. I’ve been doing quite a bit of travelling lately so it will be good to be home for a while. The next event on the calendar is Tulsa Techfest in October – if you’re in the region be sure not to miss it. Last year was a blast and this year promises to be even better.

Until then, Happy SharePointing!