SharePoint Connections: Day 4

First off, some highlights from yesterday which I didn’t hit in my Day 3 post: I spent most of my evening at an MS-hosted party for speakers and MVPs chatting with great folks like Phil Haack, Jon Galloway, Neil Iverson, and Jay Flowers. People milling about in other corners included Juval Loewy, Michelle Leroux Bustamante, Carl Franklin, and a passle of other Big Names. I am soooo small fish in a big pond! Phil and Jay both wrote articles for my book so it was a lot of fun finally meeting them in person. Neil and Jon are both passionate, wicked smart folks who were just great to gab with — and I got a lot of great thoughts on MOSS things from Neil. I think I also managed to ask Christian Weyer if he was Miguel Castro, who I was trying to hunt down since he’s speaking at Dayton in December. Sorry Christian. That’s rather embarassing, especially because I was sober… This morning I sat through the first half of a two-part session on InfoPath forms and workflow in MOSS. Very informative, but the presenter finished up 45 minutes into a 75 minute session. What, was the session duration a surprise to him? I wish he would have filled up the entire session, particularly since he was rather snarky about attendees holding all questions until the end. Yeesh. The second session of the day was actually a very cool surprise for me: I got to sit up on stage with Phil, Jon, Joe Brinkman, and Rob Conery for a panel discussion on open source architecture. Seriously small fish, big pond. I’m still surprised event security didn’t run in and grab me off the stage. That discussion morphed into a lot of different directions which was quite cool. We talked about building a community around contributors and commiters, marketing OS projects, dealing with bugs and features, and yes, architecture. It was a lot of great conversation, and it was very, VERY cool to be up on stage with four guys who are industry leaders. Right now I’m sitting through a good session on virtualization for MOSS environments. There’s a lot of great info so far. The only downside is that the speaker has decided that sitting down and hiding behind the monitor is a great way to present. Ugh. (Maybe he’s got mobility issues, in which case he should have at least moved his chair out from behind the table.) Also turns out he had only enough material for 45 minutes. Grrr. The short session on virtualization actually turned out to be have a golden lining: I went over and listened to Joe Brinkman talk about PowerShell in the DotNetNuke environment. I caught the last 20 minutes or so of his talk — and saw his very cool concept of fronting PowerShell in an aspx page. This gives you full access to all the PowerShell goodness on the hosting machine. That is very cool. There are some trust issues he still needs to work around, but it’s a killer concept and I’m going to steal it for some MOSS work. The final session today was Neil Iverson’s PowerShell for SharePoint. Gold. Sheer gold, and a great kick to get my lazy ass in gear and get serious about rolling back into exploring PowerShell. Neil’s a great speaker and it was great to hear him both because he’s sharp and also because he covered PowerShell which is sort of esoteric and off the beaten path. The closing session was a complete goat rope. It was supposed to be Q&A with a panel, but turned in to a group of attendees griping about everything from lack of video recordings to break time to session duration to a lack of wireless. Hey, dumbasses: The panel up on the stage had Kimberly Tripp, Juval Loewy, Rocky Lhotka, Steve Smith, and a bunch of other internationally known experts. Do you think you could perhaps get over your pique and direct those complaints to the event planners and ask one or two intelligent questions of these great experts? Yeesh. (Actually, I’m probably just being whiny because, as usual, I didn’t win anything in the swag.) I’ve got a bit of work to wrap up tonight, then it’s time to prep my VM for tomorrow’s MOSS development workshop with Todd. I'll have to leave a bit early to catch my flight, but it ought to be a great few hours.