SUGUK Presentation Wrap-Up

Last night I presented Full Speed Ahead – Developing High Performance Applications for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to the SharePoint UK User Group in London. We had a record turnout of 139 people; in fact, so many showed up that we ran short of pizza and drinks. Fortunately, the local pub was a quick stroll down the road and we invaded it like a geek army on a seek and destroy mission. I don’t think they were quite prepared for that many SharePointers in one place at one time.

My thanks to Nick Swan and Steve Smith for inviting me to the event. These guys really know how to organize a user group meeting and the Microsoft offices in London are superb. I didn’t even have problems connecting my MacBook Pro to the projectors – that’s a first! I also sat down with Nick for about thirty minutes before the meeting and recorded an interview for his SharePoint Pod Show series. They’ve already recorded two fantastic episodes – if you haven’t tuned in yet be sure to hop on over to www.sharepointpodshow.com and check it out. My interview should be up in a few weeks.

A good 40% of the user group crowd were developers and I always enjoy seeing the light go on in someone’s eyes when you talk about a problem that they have been struggling with. Even the admins seemed to appreciate that the more they know about certain aspects of development, especially when it comes to performance, the better it helps them do their jobs. I showed a bit of (very early) Sonar Professional functionality in my presentation and the crowd seemed to appreciate the new features that we will have in the enterprise product (for those that asked, the beta should be ready by the end of the month; email me directly and I will get you on the beta list).

Props also to Matt Groves for his talk on SharePoint and Extranets. I have to admit that I don’t know a whole lot about this subject as it’s not within my area of expertise so I learned quite a bit from his presentation. He hinted at a longer version that he has presented in the past; I hope he posts the entire deck for everyone (like me) who needs more information on this topic.

The slides and code samples from my presentation can be found here. Please note that the code samples are in a transient state; I’m updating them for my upcoming talk at the SharePoint Exchange Forum in Sweden this September. As of this moment, the features and solution package files are only placeholders in the solution (which requires Visual Studio 2008). There is also no list definition for the source news articles list. I will get all of this bundled together in the next couple of weeks but for now you can create the list manually using the Custom List template (the code tells you exactly what fields to create – only one, the "News Type" field, is a choice, the rest are just text). You can use any layout page type you like – I chose the "Basic Page" system layout to bind my content type to for the presentation. I will also be adding some web services functionality and LINQ to demonstrate those techniques as well. If you have any problems, just leave a comment and I’ll try to give you a hand.

Thanks to everyone who attended. I really enjoyed it and look forward to seeing many of you in Barcelona for TechEd Europe this November.

Cheers!