Conferences

Vegas Baby…Booked My Flight

Darrin Bishop — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:22:33 GMT

Just spent the last hour booking my flight to SharePoint Conference 2009. I will be there and just might show up speaking at one of the vendor sessions with my old friend Martin. If you haven't been to Vegas or a SharePoint Conference you will be in for a treat. If you do any work with SharePoint at all this is the conference you will not want to miss!

Conference Site: http://www.mssharepointconference.com
Sessions: http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/SessionSneakPeak.aspx
Twitter:http://twitter.com/SPConf

SharePoint Summit, Montreal

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:39:52 GMT

This week I am up in Montreal Canada speaking at SharePoint Summit. Spent the day working on slides and demos. The conference selected a Feature and Solution talk but I ended up with one of the 45 minute slots. Ouch, you cannot do Features and Solutions in 45 minutes. Thanks everyone who stayed on into the break to let me deploy the solution. Slides are available here: SPTechCon Features and Solutions

So far I have not had time to sit in on a full session but I have managed to meet up with Serge Tremblay, Reza Alirezaei, Eli Robillard, Bill English and Matt Passannante. Also met up with Mike Fitzmaurice who was on hand as a vendor (Nintex) and a speaker.

SPTechCon Day 3 Wrap Up

Darrin Bishop — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:38:52 GMT

I started day 3 delivering my session on PowerShell and SharePoint. One of the first demos failed but we - the attendees and I recovered nicely. Seems that most in the audience has had little exposure with PowerShell but they were eager non-the-less. We spent the session working with PowerShell and SharePoint using both the object model and STSADM. The session actually went over by 15 minutes when one of the conference organizer stopped by to mention that it was time for a break. Not one person mentioned that we were going over or got up to leave. I don’t think I have had such an attentive group of attendees. This was my final presentation for the conference.

I spent the day catching up with work and emails but did manage to attend Todd Klindt and Shane Young's Better with SQL Server 2008 and Server 2008 - For Todd's Benefit Windows Server 2008 :) but that is an inside joke.

That was it for me for SPTechCon. The next SPTechCon is scheduled in Boston, June 22-24 2008. Check out SPTechCon for more info.

SPTechCon - SlideDeck for SharePoint/PowerShell Session

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:32:32 GMT

Here are the slides used in the SPTechCon's SharePoint/PowerShell session.

SPTechCon_PowerShellSharePoint

SPTechCon Day 2 Wrap Up

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:26:00 GMT

Started the day with the Key Note by Tom Rizzo. He did discuss the merging of PerformancePoint into SharePoint though nothing definitive. He did show a few Internet-facing MOSS implementations. He also covered a few items covered at PDC such as the web-based Office Companions which will what appears to be lightweight version of Office clients. Tom also covered Azure and services online. He did show the user SharePoint Online.

I finished up my slide decks for the afternoon and delivered ,my brand new SharePoint/Performance Point Business Intelligence session. Lots a good conversation with the audience and probably spent a 30m or more after the session discussing MOSS and BI.. There seems to be alot of interest in BI and SharePoint.

I did manage to sit in on the SilverLight /SharePoint session. Becky explained SilverLight and how it can work with MOSS. I finished up the day with pizza and a Q&A session with a few MS people.

Slide Deck for SPTechCon - Building BI Portals

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:24:24 GMT

Here is the slide deck for the session. This is primarily screenshots of using PerformancePoint Server to create Business Intelligence Portals that went with my talk. This was the first time these slides were used. The session went well and the question answer period went well into lunch. Will be improving them based on some of the great feedback received from the group.

SPTechCon - Building Business Intelligence Portals

SPTechCon Day 1 Wrap Up

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:18:02 GMT

Time to call it a night here in San Francisco. Though I got in late today I did manage to run into a few friends here in the Hyatt. Bob Mixon and I ran into each other a few different times tonight. Good discussions on PerformancePoint, PowerShell and SharePoint. I never made it to the SharePoint/Share Pint meet but instead met up with Shane Young, Todd Klindt and John Ross. Between all of us we managed to solve all the SharePoint issues and a few pressing economic issues as well.

My PerformancePoint demo instance decided to be problematic but I did manage to get it under control and now I need to call it a night. Tomorrow I will probably be posting Tweets on Twitter about what is going on. If you are interested then follow me on BishopD.

Arrived at SPTechCon in San Francisco

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:55:05 GMT

Despite American Airlines cancelling my flight the 24 before it took off, despite the bad weather that had me leaving a day early for the airport and despite being delayed out of ST Louis for 40 minutes and barely making my connecting flight I made it to SPTechCon in San Francisco. I was beginning to think that the deck was stacked against me.

SPTechCon started today with in the Hyatt with four half-day long pre con sessions. Tomorrow Tom Rizzo of Microsoft fame will be the keynote speaker. Wonder if Tom will clue us in on Performance Point Services for SharePoint.

I will no doubt be up most of the night tweaking my slides and demo for tomorrow. I will be presenting SharePoint and Performance Point together. On Thursday I will be speaking on PowerShell and SharePoint which I have done many times before.

Shortly I will catch a cab to the SharePoint/SharePint get together at the "The American Bull Bar Grill".

Chicago MSDN Developer's Conference Wrap Up

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:15:49 GMT

Chicago MSDN Developer's Conference is a wrap. The MSDN Dev Con's are put on by regional speakers using the same or similar slide decks from PDC. We walked in a little late after breakfast to catch the end of the keynote speaker. Very rarely do you find me watching the keynote. The most interesting bit of information from the keynote was the ability of Windows 7 to natively mount VHDs, basically allowing you to access your Virtual PC files without starting up Virtual PC. Even better you should be able to mount a VHD and then boot your laptop to that VPC.

I sat in on a very interesting session on ASP.Net and JQuery. I wasn’t planning on sitting on this one but decided to try something "new" that I knew nothing about. Turns out that it was a very interesting session. If you have not seen or played with Jquery you should take a look. Basically it extends or uses ASP.Net and Ajax via pluggable JavaScript libraries to give you quick access to the objects in the page and to apply code or behaviors. Saw some interesting demos on this topic.

I jumped into a class on OLSO - Microsoft's new domain modeling language. It was an interesting view into OSLO but the code is very early in the cycle, probably years away from release. Very interesting but only some early bits to play with for now.

Next I sat in on session on Live Framework and Mesh. I am intrigued by the social opportunities using Mesh but I just can't figure out where I would use this in a business use case. Seems like all the demos are more items that are for my personal life and not my business life. But then again - when SilverLight was announced, with all it's rotating graphics glory, I thought the same.

If you missed PDC it probably is worth the time and money to attend the MSDN DevCon in your area. Now it is off to catch the train for the 3 hr trip back home. I picked up a few books at the bookstore so I either will be reading about ASP.Net 3.5 or playing BioShock on the laptop.

Heading To MSDN DevCon Chicago Next Week?

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:49:31 GMT

If you missed PDC this year - and I did - you can catch a small portion of the presentations at Microsoft's MSDN DevCon.This is a one day event happening in various cities. I will be arriving in Chicago around 8p central on Monday Jan 12, 2009. We will be heading to dinner around 9:00p. Drop me an email if you want to meet up for dinner. Otherwise I will be at DevCon all day and plan to hang around Chicago for dinner on Tuesday Jan 13.

The day of PDC will be held at:

Hyatt Regency Chicago
151 East Wacker Drive
Chicago, IL, 60601

There is no SharePoint track but the session include Azure, Mesh, ASP.Net and SilverLight 2. All will be key technologies in the future. I have been wondering what can or should be done with Azure/Mesh and SharePoint. Any thoughts?

Make sure you check out the door prizes - not bad! Hope to see you there, for dinner either night or at the conference.

Oh, if you have not noticed, msdndevcon.com is built on SharePoint.

MS Developer Conference: http://msdndevcon.com