Wow what a week. Last weekend I was fortunate to have been able to speak at the Charlotte area code camp. Many thanks to the Charlotte Enterprise Developers Guild for hosting the Charlotte Code Camp. They had a very nice venue (Piedmont Community College) and it was very professionally put together. I had a good crowd of attendees to my presentation "Introduction to Developing Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services V3". I was a bit concerned about the presentation before hand as I had to significantly cut out portions of the presentation to fit in the 1 ½ hour window. I think I pulled it off well enough but I would have liked to cover things in some more detail and used some of my original code samples instead of the "Hello World" snippets. I think those type of snippets have a place but all in all I don't like "hello world" samples. Many of the attendees had requested the slide deck and code sample and I promise to post them up as soon as I get back into town. I had to immediately leave on a trip to Chicago for some planning on the second phase of the initial implementation of a commercial educational product built upon SharePoint 2007 that I'm currently leading up the development side of the efforts on for my partner B&R Solutions. It's a great project I hope to actually be able to talk about it soon.

In the mean time I wanted to give a quick shout out to some great folks that I met at the Charlotte Code Camp including Bill Jones (MVP), Brian Gough (Culminis), Marty Elvidge (Logical Advantage), Dan Thyer (Logical Advantage), and Crystal Williams (MetaLogix) to name a couple. I really enjoyed my discussions with you and hope to see all of you soon. I've received almost a dozen emails with questions on topics related to my discussion. I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to follow up on most of your emails yet but I promise I will. When it makes sense I'm going to post a couple responses on my blog. A couple questions I plan to share on the blog over the next couple days that I've received some questions on include:

  1. When to use SharePoint Lists vs storing your data in a standard relational database.
  2. Why you would want to build your application on SharePoint (and just as important why you wouldn't)
  3. When to use the smartpart vs using standard Webparts
  4. My experiences with AJAX in SharePoint and Web Parts (both smartpart and Web Parts)
  5. Reporting on SharePoint Data

After a hiatus of a year from speaking (crazy project schedules, starting a new company) it has felt really good to get back in the saddle over the last couple months. There is nothing more motivating then hanging out with other developers and there is nothing that keeps me on my toes more (and keeps me humble!) then fielding tough questions from an audience. I hope everyone enjoyed my presentation as much as I enjoyed presenting it.