Last week I spent a few days in Las Vegas, at the SharePoint conference. First a disclaimer: it’s a tough job, but someone had to do it. Now, back on topic. There’s a lot already been said about it, I want to add some more, from my point of view.
- It was a BIG conference (7000 attendees). My biggest ever. (On my way to a session, I was sure I was not going to find my back). And it went without a hitch. Kudos for MS and the organizers.
- So much positive energy! There was a lot of excitement, just from being there. And then people got excited from the content. It was really cool to see all this, well, excitement.
- Oh, and I was carrying a camera, so I took some pictures and videos.
- I got to meet people I’ve been talking to offline in person, like Andrew Woodward and Jeremy Thake (thanks for the shirt, Jeremy!). I also met a bunch more new guys, plus hang around the MS pavilion, and met some more great people as well. People are very open about the good but also about where they can improve.
- MS is doing a lot of things to diminish pains. And it’s doing it by automation, without changing the experience. For example, when you debug, VS automatically retracts the old deployment, cleans up and deploys, before running the app. It then goes into regular debug mode. Simple, but man, people loved it.
- Last, but not least, the “SharePoint 2010 best practices” presentation featured a demonstration of unit testing SharePoint webpart with Isolator. This was very cool to see, and if you manage to take a look at that session, you’ll be impressed as well. Chris Keyser the presenter showed an integration test compared to a unit test, and cut down the run length by 80%. See how much time you’re wasting?
I can tell you more, but hey, whatever happens in Vegas, stays on Twitter.
