Monthly Archives: September 2011

PASS Summit 2011 T minus 1 month

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Finally! The PASS Summit 2011 begins in one month! I’ve been anxiously waiting for the Summit since I registered way back in May. This will be my fist trip to the conference and I want to make the most of my time there. Starting with this post I’m going to document my journey, beginning with my preparations.

I took advantage of booking my hotel when I registered for the Summit, and I’m glad I did since hotels seemed to fill up fast afterwards. I’ll be at the Sheraton, and I chose that hotel because of it’s proximity to the conference center. It’ll be nice being able to just walk back and forth. I also booked my airline reservations about the same time so all I need to do is to get from the airport to the hotel. And that looks to be a snap too. Kendra Little has a great post on using the light rail from the airport to downtown. Sounds perfect (and cheap!).

There’s some great resources for first timers too. First off, there’s three webcasts for first time attendees. Denny Cherry had a webinar last week and the recording is still available here. Rick Heiges has another on September 20th. And Brent Ozar has a third, a week before the summit on October 4th.

Second, there’s a first timers orientation just prior to the welcome event. I’ll be coming into Seattle early enough so I’ll be able to attend. And third, there’s a Big Brother/Sister program that pairs up first timers with Summit veterans. Joe Fleming (Twitter) is my Big Brother and we’ve got a great bunch of first timers. I’m looking forward to finally meeting everyone in person.

There’s quite a few blog post that describe the Summit and what to expect. Here’s just a few I ran across.

PASS Summit 2011 – What you can expect at the Conference – Part 1

PASS 2011 Countdown – 4 Weeks To Go

Plucking Wallflowers

Journey to SQL PASS 2011 series

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer Reference, by Paolo Pialorsi: Microsoft Press

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I recently read Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer Reference, by Paolo Pialorsi. I had two goals when I started. The first was to understand more about what SharePoint could do for me, especially in regards to being part of a Business Intelligence solution. The second was to learn how to program SharePoint. And while this book only partly helped me with my first goal, it’s a great resource for the second. I’m not disappointed in my choice.

The books title clearly says “Developer Reference”. And the author states in the Introduction that the book is aimed at existing .NET developers and not administrators. Nevertheless he still covers some of the basics in Part I, on Getting Started. One of the invaluable chapters here explains the different features available in each edition of SharePoint.

My favorite sections covered the programming aspects and web parts. This book has sections for using LINQ to SharePoint. They’re written in a way that I could understand. I had no problems running any of the code examples I attempted. I’ll admit that I didn’t work through each example but the ones I did helped me understand the concepts better.

Workflows are one of the key concepts in SharePoint, and there’s a whole section devoted to them. One thing I learned here is that SharePoint is still using the older versions of the Workflow Foundation so the book doesn’t cover WF4.  

I highly recommend this book for any experienced programmer looking to develop for SharePoint 2010.