Speaking at TechEd New Zealand 2010

This year, I am presenting two sessions at TechEd New Zealand 2010:

Session 1

OFS203 Building Business Applications using Business Connectivity Services using SharePoint Designer 2010 (Part 1)

Track: Office & SharePoint

Time: Tuesday, August 31 11:50 - 12:50

This session will show how to build business applications with no code using the new evolution of the business data catalogue. This enables IT to deliver more value to the business more quickly. This session will also show you how to connect workflow to business processes without using any code.

Session 2

OFS401 Business Connectivity Solutions Runtime and Object Model Deep Dive (Part 2)

Track: Office & SharePoint

Time: Wednesday, September 1 16:15 - 17:15

SharePoint 2010 includes the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) features – the evolution of the Business Data Catalog. This talk is a deep dive into development with Business Connectivity Services using Visual Studio 2010. It covers both simple and advanced data modelling, using the BCS APIs to create metadata models and connecting those models to search. This talk also covers how to create External Content Types and External Lists programmatically, performance tuning techniques and taking external data offline to Office 2010.

If you are attending TechEd, feel free to come to my sessions or if you are unable to come to my sessions, drop by to say a Hi! :)

If you are looking for session resources, visit here. The page will be updated soon to hold links and resources on BCS.

SPTechCon - a recap

After the massive success of Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009, where SharePoint 2010 was introduced, SharePoint Technology Conference (SPTechCon) held last week at San Francisco was a blast! With more than 700 attendees and 37 speakers, the conference had over 80 sessions which included half day workshops, full day workshops and technical sessions.

SharePoint 2010 was the major highlight of the event, in particular Tom Rizzo’s keynote. If you don’t know who Tom Rizzo is, he is the Director of the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. The keynote was pretty interesting and Tom took us through the various new features in SharePoint 2010. He even discussed how the team would propose new ideas/suggestions to Bill Gates when SharePoint was young and growing.

The conference was filled with enthusiastic people who wanted to learn, discuss and share their knowledge about SharePoint. You could hear the word ‘SharePoint’ echoing around the place at all times. The amount of interest people showed on the upcoming version of SharePoint - SharePoint 2010 - was tremendous and I was very happy to hear that many people are ready to evaluate the product because of its rich feature set (unlike the few who wanted to wait for some service pack(s)). There is no doubt that SharePoint 2010 is off to a good start!

I am thankful to David Rubinstein, Conference Chairman, for giving me the opportunity to speak last week at the conference. I presented a half-day workshop on SharePoint 2010: Developing with Data Technologies and a session on Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010. I have to say the audiences were great and never stopped asked questions, making the session more interactive and interesting. It’s not often you get these sorts of audiences, and it is always good to learn something new from your audience, even if you are the speaker.

You can download my session slides below:

1. SharePoint 2010: Developing with Data Technologies
2. Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010

Oh, and Tom Rizzo also announced that the product team is planning to launch SharePoint 2010 by June 2010!

SPTechCon – The SharePoint Technology Conference

Coming February 2010, there is another SharePoint Conference – SPTechCon in San Francisco February 10-12, 2010. Whether you are a SharePoint user/developer/IT pro, this conference covers everyone and has a total of 101 sessions and workshops for your needs!

I will be presenting the following workshop and session at the conference and will be looking forward to meet you all!

Topic: SharePoint 2010: Developing With Data Technologies

Audience: Developers

Technical Level: Intermediate

When: Wednesday, February 10, 1:30 - 5:00pm

SharePoint provides a wealth of features and services which allow developers to quickly develop solutions to organizational problems. Developers can quickly create solutions with relate data, connect to other systems, manage a process flow, and can be deployed anywhere. SharePoint 2010 opens up a wide range of options, namely:

1. SharePoint List Lookups and Relationships

2. LINQ to SharePoint

3. Client Object Model

4. REST/ADO.NET Services

This three hour deep dive workshop will take you through the various steps of building SharePoint applications using the new Data Technologies.

Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint

Audience: Developers

Technical Level: Intermediate

When: Friday, February 12, 11:30am - 12:45pm

For SharePoint developers, Visual Studio 2010 not only provides a provides the development environment and native tools, but also the opportunity to engage in SharePoint development. Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint (VSTS) provides a rich developer experience for building SharePoint 2010 applications. Whether you are looking to build a simple web part or advanced SharePoint development, VSTS helps developers to get started right away on solution development. The most interesting part is the ability to extend this framework. This session will take you through the various features of VSTS, building complex and simple SharePoint applications using VSTS and also extending the framework.

Office DevCon Session Downloads

As promised, you can download my Office DevCon session slides and project below:

SharePoint Conference – My slide deck and samples

The first ever New Zealand SharePoint Conference which was held last week (July 2nd – 3rd) was a blast! We not only had local speakers, but also international speakers which included:

1) Joel Oleson

2) Paul Culmsee

3) Erica Toelle

3) Steve Smith

4) Paul Papanek Stork

I have uploaded my slide deck and samples for my talk– SharePoint Custom Field Controls.

You can download them below:

Hats off to Chandima, Mark Orange and Debbie Ireland for organizing the conference and everything!

Meet you @ New Zealand SharePoint Conference

The first ever New Zealand SharePoint Conference is just a day to go! If you haven’t registered yet, you can still do so!

If you have already registered, check out these excellent sessions and feel free to come to my session on Developing Custom Field Controls in SharePoint.

If you are not familiar with Field Controls – they are one of the essential key components in Publishing Sites which deliver and capture the contents of a Publishing Page. I will update my blog with download links to slide decks and samples after my presentation.

See you there!

Developers, Developers, Developers

This is your chance to tell what you think about Microsoft! Invitation for The Microsoft New Zealand Developers Focus Groups 2008!

Microsoft wants to hear from you. Tell what you love and hate about Microsoft! Every year Microsoft uses your feedback to improve their products and services. This year, in addition to the annual online survey, they are planning to hold focus groups around the country and are looking for NZ developers to have their say.

Scott Wylie , the Director of the Developer and Platform Strategy Team for Microsoft NZ, will be facilitating these sessions. Scott’s role is to listen and understand your feedback which will enable his team to provide better support and resources for NZ developers.

If you would like to participate, please email your interest to nzeditor@microsoft.com with your contact details and preferred focus group (by session number as listed below) you would like to attend.

Christchurch

Christchurch Convention Centre / Tuesday 11th November 2008

Kilmore Street, Christchurch

Session 1: 8:30 -10:00

Session 2: 11:00 -12:30

Wellington

Microsoft New Zealand Wellington Office / Thursday 13th November 2008

Level 12, Vodafone on the Park, Lambton Quay, Wellington

Session 3: 8:30 -10:00

Session 4: 11:00 -12:30

Auckland

Microsoft New Zealand Auckland Office / Wednesday 19th November 2008

Level 5, 22 Viaduct Harbour Avenue, Auckland

Session 5: 8:30 -10:00

Session 6: 11:00 -12:30

Meet you @ Tech Ed and Bloggers Dinner

I will be there at Tech Ed (only tomorrow) and Bloggers Dinner night tomorrow (Monday) :)

If you happen to be there, please give a yell and let us meet :-P