The SharePoint Cowboy Saddles Up for the Land of ABBA

Thanks to fellow SharePoint MVP Goran Hussman I’ll be presenting two talks at the SharePoint and Exchange Forum (Warning: Link is a machine translation – please don’t blame me for the garbled Swedish!) near Stockholm, Sweden in September. I’m really looking forward to this trip for a few reasons: 1) I’ve never been to Sweden but I have some good friends who are Swedish and I’ve always wanted to visit, 2) I hear the nightlife is fantastic, 3) It will be a welcome change from 100+ degrees in Texas for the entire summer, and 4) How can you go wrong in the country that brought us ABBA, Europe and Ace of Base?

Here’s a synopsis of my sessions:

1. Full Speed Ahead: Developing High Performance Applications for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Discover tips, techniques, tools and best practices for creating high performance MOSS 2007 applications using Visual Studio 2008, C#, the SharePoint object model, web services, and the latest features in the .NET 3.5 framework. Learn how to measure application performance, optimize code execution, and configure SharePoint to support data intensive, highly transactional line-of-business applications.

2. From .NET to SharePoint: Introduction to SharePoint Programming for .NET Developers

Learn how to leverage your existing .NET skills to begin creating scalable, secure, and high-performance SharePoint applications. Take a quick tour through the creation of web parts, discover how to extend SharePoint to remote applications using web services, and learn how to package and deploy custom solutions from within Visual Studio 2008. Find out what tools and utilities are available to make SharePoint development faster, easier, and more efficient.

I’m pretty excited about both talks. For a couple of years now I’ve wanted to show SharePoint developers the true impact of varying programming decisions on application performance but I’ve never had a way to truly quantify my recommendations. Now that we have Sonar, I can finally demonstrate how small changes in the way we interact with the object model can have big performance implications. This is my first opportunity in a formal setting to present this information and I have a feeling it will be well received (at least I hope it will, or my plans for TechEd next year are in jeopardy ;-)). I’ll be giving a scaled-down version of the talk at the SharePoint UK User Group meeting in August to try it out on a pretty tough crowd – no way I’ll sneak anything past Ben Robb, Spence Harbar, Nick Swan or Steve Smith so I’d better be on my toes.

The second presentation is an outgrowth of the intro I did at TechEd Speaker Idol for .NET developers just getting their feet wet in the SharePoint world. The large number of devs who approached me after that wanting to know more about SharePoint development convinced me that a more detailed presentation is needed on this topic. This is no 200-level intro, though – I’m going deep into my "stacks" (the wildly popular slide that contrasts what you have to build by hand in ASP.NET and what comes out of the box in SharePoint) to show how .NET developers can get a jump start into SharePoint programming. Trust me, there will be lots of code and demos – it’s only 300-level because I have to skim across a bunch of topics in a short time frame; no marketing-speak here – this is definitely a talk for code monkeys.

So if you happen to be in that part of the world come September, join me at the SharePoint and Exchange Forum in Sweden for some good times and good information. Fellow MVP’s Goran Husman, Todd Klindt, Steve Smith, Penny Coventry, and Reza Alirezaei will all be there, which makes for a good mix of IT Pro and Developer content (and you can bet on some good after-hours entertainment or my hat ain’t black) . Don’t miss out!