SharePoint Saturday Goodness

First off if your in the Raleigh area and you haven’t registered for SharePoint Saturday Raleigh, What are you waiting for! Go register, I promise it will be a great time!

I’m particular excited about the Raleigh event not only because its the first home town SharePoint Saturday for me and the great new SharePoint 2010 content but also because its going to kick off a couple months of speaking at other SharePoint Saturday events. The new addition to my family, Ava now 5 months old, has kept me pretty busy the last few months but I’m looking forward to getting back out in the community again. And what a great time to! I’m looking forward to sharing some of the great new developer experience available in SharePoint 2010. If anyone has ever heard me rant about the state of SharePoint 2007 developer tools (whether you agree or disagreed with me lol) then you can understand just how excited I am about the developer experience in SharePoint 2010 (and Visual Studio 2010).

On the developer experience I plan to split my sessions across a couple of developer topics:

SharePoint 2010 Developer Goodness (SharePoint Saturday Raleigh, Virginia Beach, Richmond)

Although few argue the business success of SharePoint you’ll find far fewer developers singing the praises of SharePoint. For developers the lack-luster integration with Visual Studio was often a pain point. For developers and designers alike SharePoint Designer, with all of its portability and applications lifecycle consequences were also a source of frustration. For all the heavy development environment requirements could often be a show stopper. With all that and more in mind SharePoint 2010 represents a significant step forward fore SharePoint as a development platform. SharePoint is now a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010. SharePoint Designer can now fully participate in application development lifecycle. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are now viable development platforms for SharePoint. In this session we will be introducing the new features of Visual Studio 2010’s integration with SharePoint. We will be providing on overview of SharePoint Designer 2010 new ability to produce WSP packages. Lastly we’ll be touching on some of the new built in tools for developers including the Developer Dashboard.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Workflows – Joint Sessions with Michael Lotter (SharePoint Saturday Kansas City)

SharePoint 2007 introduced the SharePoint platform to Windows Workflow. Along with it came some first generation design tools and a very disconnected experience between developers, designers, and business and between the toolset they work with including Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, and Visio. Did you ever wish that the Visual Studio experience wasn’t as painful, or that you could make your SharePoint Designer workflows more portable, or that you could take your workflow designs developed by your business and port them into SharePoint? Well the wait is over with SharePoint 2010. In this joint back to back session we will be showing off the new features of SharePoint 2010 that allows you to develop workflows using Visio, import them into SharePoint Designer, make modifications in SharePoint Designer, extract to Visio for further modifications and finally extracting into Visual Studio for some hardcore workflow modifications.

November 7, 2009