Advanced Creation of Web Parts for SPS Session

I attended a session the other night at Microsoft titled
Advanced Creation of Web Parts for SPS Session . It was presented by Matthew Cosier who is currently an intern at Microsoft, and compared to the previous sessions I have seen on SharePoint it actually did contain a bit of worthwhile content.
The turn out was relatively low i.e. approx 20 people, I'm not sure if that was due to the timing just before Easter or if it is representative of the amount of SharePoint developers in the community.
I felt that Matthew did a pretty good job explaining all the topics, especially considering he is quite new to the developer community and it was great to see a bunch of live demo's.
Also another highlight was when Craig who is the lead architect on SmartLibrary, a product that also takes up a lot of my development time while I'm still @ OBS got called up on stage to talk a bit about event handlers and as always he did a great job.
I think the biggest disappointment of the night was the lack of quality of the other developers attending. There were quite a few questions and general looks of confusion which indicated that most of the room really weren't ready for what was titled an advanced session.
Even those that I know have worked with SharePoint asked a few basic questions so the question is were they just being nice to the presenter or did they really not know that information already?
I guess I forget how much SharePoint knowledge I actually have, both Craig and I had previously discussed that we thought the content to be presented was quite light on for an advanced session, but based on the reaction I think it could of even been a bit too complicated for the audience.
I figured by now a lot more of the developer community would of been already across all those topics, but I guess not (or perhaps that explains the poor turnout).
It will be interesting to see whether there are more sessions around SharePoint in the works and also whether SharePoint knowledge helps or hinders when it comes around to developing ASP 2.0 web parts.

MDNUG Meeting

Attended MDNUG last night, the session included two presentations.
The first was from Chris Hewitt of Redify and was titled "What use are the CLR features of SQL Server 2005 anyhow?".
This session was a great example of what user groups are all about, rather than it just being a guy presenting a slide deck provided by Microsoft it was an organic discussion about the topic with some great opinions being raised. Personally I hadn't really considered the implications and possibilities of creating custom types in sql2005, but after the session that is definitely on the list of things to have a look at.
The second session was all about the Masters course that I am doing, based on all the people that asked me questions about the course afterwards sounds like it was a big success (as was the university wine and cheese). Especially if you already have or are thinking about doing your MCSD I would recommend checking the masters out. One of the great things is not only do you have to pass all the MCSD subjects but you also have to do a industry project subject where you put all that you have learnt into practice on a group project (I'm doing mine now, more on that later).
So far I have learnt a bunch doing the other university subjects as well, all of which has been relevant to my job at the moment. In fact thanks to the project management subject I even finally know how to use Microsoft Project :)

Next months MDNUG should something a little different as well, one of my fellow csu students Damian Edwards and a colleague of his are talking about a real application they have been working on for the last year. One of them is a c# programmer the other vb.net and the project even includes an oracle dB., should be good to talk about an actual real life application rather than something theoretical for a change.

Team System Finally :)

Finally managed to get visual studio team system up and running across a series of three virtual PC images. The setup was pretty simple to do by following the article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?URL=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/vstsinstallguide.asp?frame=true it is just time consuming.
One thing to note though is that the project creation stuff only works if the locale on the machines is GMT rather than GMT +10.
Also had to make a few permissions tweaks and a quick dB , modification to get it running, but finally it is all there. First impressions are that it looks pretty good I really like the idea of having all the work items integrated into visual studio. Also the auto creation of a source safe branch and team site are a good bonus.
Ran out of time to play with it but I'll hopefully get to have a bit more of a play with it in the next few weeks.
My masters project is continuing into the coding phase which is exciting as it is all using vs2005. So far I have been absolutely blown away with the distributed system designer and class designer, can't wait to find out what other goodies are in there.
Next step is to get some unit tests coded and then to dive into some dB and win app code.

Announcing a New Job

I've just accepted a position over at SDM
part of me is sad that my time at OBS nearing an end as I've worked on some really great stuff over the past 18months, but I'm also really excited about making the move.

One of the reasons being that I already know a bunch of the guys over at SDM, as 3 of them used to work at Wijojo (my previous employer), so it will be great to work with them again. Not only are they great people but they are also very good at what they do. Particurily looking forward to working and borrowing music of my good friend Andy again.

I've still got 6 weeks left with OBS, and I'm hoping that I'll still keep in touch with a bunch of the OBSers despite joining the enemy :)