SharePoint Connections: Day 3

Day 1 was my workshop with Ben Curry, Day 2 was odds and ends session (and getting my butt kicked by a supermodel). Now it's Day 3. Overall impressions are pretty good. I’ve been underwhelmed by the keynotes I’ve attended (didn’t hit ScottGu’s because I was in a different one), but the general sessions have been pretty solid. Right now I’m listening to Todd Baginski talk about the SharePoint object model. This is one of the best presentations I’ve ever been to: almost pure code and demos with very few slides. Todd has a great SharePoint tool he’s written for various odds and ends, and he’s walking through its code and showing the most important pieces of the code and what they do. Wow. Pure gold. One mission I’ve been on here at DevConnections is to hook up with a number of folks/companies who’ve been supporters of the .NET communities I’ve been involved with. These companies have given the .NET community tons of swag and a lot of financial support, and it’s been great to put a face to an e-mail address and shake a few hands while saying “Thanks!” I caught up with folks from Telerik, Infragistics, Pearson Education (Addison Wesley, Wiley, etc.), Wrox, JetBrains, and a few others. I’ve also manged to catch up with a few folks who helped out with Windows Developer Power Tools. I stumbled in to Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack this morning. It was great to chat Scott because a couple years back I reached out to him and asked for some comments for my “Ask The Pros” series for VisualStudioHacks.com. Scott gave me some great bits for those articles — and he didn’t know me from Adam. He also gave James and I some great tough love technical review comments on drafts for Windows Developer Power Tools. Later Now I’m listening to Charlie Poole (!!) and Jay Flowers talk about NUnit and CIFactory. I’d initially started out in a SharePoint session, but the presenter was spending time waiting on a new virtual machine to extact and configure. Apparently, the demo VPC he was given didn’t work, so he thought it would be OK to talk to some slides while his VPC was getting set up. Sorry, waste of my time and frankly this session was a better one for me anyway. Noch spaeter I got to sit with Charlie over lunch and discuss a wide range of topics. He’s a very interesting fellow to sit down with and chat. We hit NUnit’s future direction, communities for open source projects, Fitnesse, and world travel. I count myself awfully fortunate to have gotten some of his time. Neil Iversen gave a great talk on advanced features in MOSS. He's a great speaker and very pragmatic in his approach -- and he's all over PowerShell which I loved. I'm definitely hitting his PowerShell for SharePoint Devs tomorrow. Another great presentation by Todd Baginski on SSO in real world situations. Todd actually created a demo site in MOSS and put all his code and presentation materials within, then saved it out as a site template and posted it to his blog. Amazingly cool way to get code out! Overall this was a great day. Hooked up with good folks and got some seriously good ideas on work and how to go about future presentations.