I drove up with Michael Lotter, Becky Isserman, and Nas Ali from the B&R crew last Saturday to speak at SharePoint Saturday in Virginia Beach. Thanks to everyone who attended my session, Back to the Basics – An Introduction to SharePoint Feature Development and Deployment. With my session along side Joel Oleson I was really only expecting a handful of folks so I was pleasantly surprised when we counted over 60 and we had to bring in extra chairs. Michael Lotter, Susan Lennon, and a host of volunteers did a great job at putting the event together. I was amazed to see over 200+ registrations for a SharePoint specific event outside of a DC or New York. I look forward to speaking in D.C. and other SharePoint Saturday events in the near future.

As usual my favorite part of speaking at events is hanging out in the speaker lounge talking with all the other great speakers. I really enjoyed talking with Joel Oleson (formerly from MS) and Thomas Eckels from Quest Software and I had a great chat on SharePoint development tools (or the lack there of lol) with the guys from Susquehanna technologies. I had the pleasure of chatting with Todd Bleeker for a bit and I have to say its rare to find someone who can outdo me in the talking department and the amount of knowledge on SharePoint in that man’s head is truly impressive.

I met a lot of great people at the event. If you have a SharePoint Saturday event come to your town I’d highly recommend attending. It has great coverage on many aspects of Sharepoint from development and administration to end user content.

For those of you interested or request the following are links to my presentation material:

Back To Basics - Feature Development Source (zip)

Back To The Basics - Feature Development Slides (pptx)