The conference continues to inform and inspire...  Today I started off with Eric Shupps’ session on Custom Site Definitions, very entertaining but also very informative, he took us through packaging up our site definitions, the pros and cons of SPD and even some places where it is good – rapid prototyping of a master page before building it for real into a solution, so often internally we tend to only use it for DVWPs.

Next up was Maurice Prather with Secure Coding for The Administrator, it’s amazing the ongoing banter between dev’s and admins . We took a look at Secure Code, what does it mean?

·         The practice of writing code that can withstand malicious attacks

·         Secure code is Robust Code

Maurice expanded on this and then took us through the extra protection that SharePoint puts in place for us, stopping code from doing what it shouldn’t, but also the cases where Full trust can creep in and prevent these safeguards from working. Watch out for changes to PageParserPaths settings in your web.config files.

Neil Hodgkinson on Patching SharePoint – I thought I would know most of the content of this session, how wrong could I be? Neil gave us a really thorough tour of Hotfixes, Cumulative Updates and Service Packs. I hadn’t realised that the Revision number in a build number, e.g. the 1000 part of 12.0.6219.1000, had any meaning beyond just an arbitrary number, but it does:

1000 – Service Pack

30xx – Private build – you really should not be running these in production

5000 – Hotfix or CU

500x – COD Build

He also clarified the differences between Microsoft’s minimum supported build, recommended build and the latest and greatest build and how these affect the type of response you will get from PSS.

Building High Performance Solutions on Moss 2007 or should that be how do I cut down the bandwidth that Moss eats when we use it for Internet facing websites? Andrew Connell gave us some good solutions touching on your site topology for location of secured items, “customised” pages came up once again, reducing the page payload, how to speed up the CQWP and instant improvements with the art of IIS HTTP compression. A  slip on who should be in the kitchen, whilst explaining that you should just crank up the compression level to start with, will his wife hear about it though, did it make it to twitter?

The final session I sat in on was the IW Open mike session, and heard my favourite quote for the day, in answer to a question about the size of content DBs Rob Foster said “if you let content DBs grow bigger than 100GB then you run out of hours in the day to do the daily backups” to which the reply came “That’ll be a limitation of the solar system then!”.

I can’t believe it’s the final day tomorrow, it’s gone very quick and no sign of flagging. Just need to choose where to eat tonight...

Well, a fantastic first day at the conference. Steve Smith and the team at Combined Knowledge have done a sterling job of organising the event. A great line up of speakers and a plentiful supply of refreshments and delicious pastries to keep us awake during the day.  There’s 20 or more sessions each day, I can’t yet clone myself so here’s a taste of the sessions I attended.

Keynote

Joel Oleson kicked the speaking  off with a great Keynote giving us 10 steps to a successful deployment. He started out with the Killer bunnies from Monty Python, a very apt analogy for SharePoint. So many people rush in and deploy it without fully assessing the size of the task and planning it out. This led nicely into the first step being “overcome the denial to confront Reality”, and finishing with the one we are oft prone to forget “Keep it simple stupid”.  Spencer Harbar kindly demonstrated how to suggest to the speaker that he has overrun by putting his stuff in place on the platform as Joel was still speaking.

There’s 4 tracks to choose from throughout the day, IT Pro, Developer, Information Worker and Business Adoption.  Not deliberately, but just from choice of what was most interesting to me I managed to attend a session from each track today.

Collaboration vs. Publishing Sites. – IW Track

Interesting stuff from Mark Eichenberger on using Collaboration, Publishing or his suggestion of Hybrid Sites.  He highlighted a number of differences between collaboration and publishing at page, site and site collection levels, and then ably demonstrated an alternative approach that gives us quick launch navigation on the web part pages and removes the web part page icon without tweaking the files in the 12 hive. Very nice solution.

A Case study in Governance, Business Adoption Track - Natalya Voskresenskaya. ( I hope that’s spelt right!)

Natalya took us through her Best Practice for Governance –

·         Start with Thorough Discovery

·         Implement a Governance Plan

·         Define your growth strategy

She took us through the case study and gave us a really good understanding of Governance Plans and how to go about them. She took us clearly through all the parts she felt necessary to a governance plan, and the fact that it needs to be a living document  not just 40 pages that sit there and no on e reads. My favourite quote from the session was “Do not engage with a company until it is ready forSharePoint”.

How can I kill my file servers? IT Pro Track, Joel Oleson

I thought the title for this session sounded great. Joel shared some great examples for approaches to moving data from file servers, not just to SharePoint but also to nearline or off-line storage. Is all that data on your file servers really necessary to be instantly available? Ask yourself how knows the data best? IT or the Business Users? And so therefore who is best placed to move the data?

Test Driven SharePoint Development, Dev Track, Andrew Woodward

Whilst I had come across this I still hadn’t really grasped how it would work in practice, and this is exactly what Andy showed us, not only TDD but how we can achieve this with SharePoint using Typemock Isolator to “fake” SharePoint. Few slides and lots of code, just the way I like a dev session to be.

Andy had been concerned that we wouldn’t be able to see the screen from the back of the room, but it was fine, nice and clear, I think a nice touch was that the mike picked up the keyboard tapping...

Anyhow great stuff, the fog has cleared and I now understand better what he’s been talking about, or should that be evangelising?

Vendor night

Roulette and Blackjack, with free chips... great fun, loads of vendor prizes in the draw, but sadly my name was not called out.

More tomorrow...