SharePoint Saturday Tulsa Presentations and Code Samples

One of the things that baffles people when they first move to our particular neck of the woods (that being North Texas and surrounding environs) is how quickly the weather can change. It’s not uncommon to see forty or fifty degree temperature changes in a single day. It can be ninety degrees on Monday, snowing on Tuesday and a tornado on Wednesday. This has a tendency to bother folks who are used to more predictable weather patterns. One of the most unusual aspects of our weather is the annual occurrence of a freak snowstorm sometime in the early days of spring. Last year, it happened on the last day of the SharePoint conference, causing no end of grief for people connecting through D/FW airport on their way home; this year, it picked this past weekend to make it’s frigid appearance.

Naturally, I was four hours into a five hour drive from Fort Worth to Tulsa, Oklahoma when Mr. Frost reared his ugly head. Whiteout blizzard conditions hit about fifty miles outside of Tulsa and continued for the rest of the day. Since I’m a proper redneck and cruise the highways in a four-wheel-drive truck this doesn’t bother me much but it sure makes all the sedan and minivan drivers nervous – I passed several steaming carcasses left for dead on my way into town (the cars, that is, not the people – strangely enough, I only saw one vehicle with an actual person in it and he seemed to have the situation well in hand).

This didn’t bode well for attendance at the first annual SharePoint Saturday event in Tulsa but SharePointers are real troopers – we still had a fantastic turnout. Kudos to David Walker for putting together yet another successful event. I did three sessions (two planned and one unplanned due to a cancellation – good thing I have lots of preso’s in the can that I can pull out at a moment’s notice). There were some quality SharePointers there – Becky Isserman, Steve Walker, Dennis Bottjer, Mark Rackley, Corey Roth, and more. The community in that region is really strong and folks around Oklahoma and western Arkansas are lucky to have that much talent in such remote areas.

I have posted my slide decks here:

Configuring SharePoint 2007 for Optimal Performance (also includes the scripts for implementing compression in IIS)
Designing and Deploying Enterprise Branding Solutions using Custom Site Definitions
Developing High Performance Applications for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Code samples for the last two can be found here (for the site definitions project) and here (for the high perf code). Please note that I have not had a chance to extract the custom content types for the high perf demo into Features yet – I’ll do that on the trip over to the UK later this week so keep an eye out for posts from the Best Practices UK conference for those if you really need them. And remember – the code is not for production purposes, they are only samples (there’s no unit testing, no class abstraction, no refactoring, etc.) – you’ll need to do some cleaning up before you use any of the sample methods. I hope to have it all broken down into more of an MVP-like pattern before TechEd in May so you can leverage those concepts in your dev environment.

Thanks to everyone who braved the elements for this weekend’s event. I look forward to seeing you all in October (or whenever David schedules the next TechFest).