“Things that Should be Easy in SharePoint Development” at SharePoint Saturday Boston

by | Sep 15, 2010 | MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Foundation, Speaking, WSS |

Update: Join me for an encore webinar of this presentation Friday, January 7, 2010 at 11:45 AM. Register today!

Update: The slides and source code for the demos is now available for download. Download powered by Black Blade’s SharePoint Zip

I’m very excited to be speaking at SharePoint Saturday in Boston, MA on September 25, 2010. I was supposed to speak there last year as well but had a last-minute scheduling conflict. It was definitely my loss. I heard from speakers and attendees alike how good the conference was. There’s no way I’m missing it this year.

My session is “Things that Should be Easy in SharePoint Development”. This is a 200-level session targeted at junior to mid-level developers. The goal of the session is to go through several SharePoint programming tasks that one would think would be fairly straight forward but are not. These gotchas can put off new SharePoint developers and cause project delays for even those experienced with the platform.

Here’s the session outline:

  • Querying Data
    What good is putting data into SharePoint if you can’t get it out when and how you need? We’ll look at some troublesome quirks that make it hard to get at the SharePoint information you need.

    • Relational Data Queries
    • Date Time Queries
    • Site Context via HTTP
  • Workflow
    The SharePoint workflow features are really good. Learn how to deal with the stumbling blocks to making them great.

    • Creating Workflow Tasks
    • Processing Task Changes
    • Working with OOTB task forms
    • Creating Custom Workflow Activities
  • User Interface
    The SharePoint user interface framework is highly extensible. Learn how to get the most benefit out of the web part framework.

    • AJAX
    • Reusable Dataview Web Parts
    • Web Part Connections with OOTB Web Parts
  • Platform
    There are 6 major SharePoint platform versions. Write code that will dynamically detect the SharePoint platform type and version, whether the code is running on the SharePoint farm or remotely.
    Once you can detect on which of the 6 major SharePoint platform versions your code is running, how do you make sure your code will run without error, and without settling for “lowest common denominator” feature set? Of course we’ll want to do it all with a single code base.

    • Platform Detection Mechanisms
      • Object Model
      • Registry
      • File System
      • HTTP Code
    • Multi-platform Code
      • Object Model
      • HTTP Code

Join me for in SharePoint Saturday in Boston, MA on September 25, 2010. This is going to be a great event. If you can’t make it, don’t worry; I’ll write up blog posts on the more popular topics from my session. Leave a comment on which topic you’d like to see a post.