Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a busy guy. He’s a Technical Specialist with Habanero, Systems Architect at Bluekarbon, SharePoint MVP, author, and a TechDays presenter. He’ll be doing the IE9 Turbo Talk on Tuesday and the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for Developers of Microsoft ASP.NET presentation on Wednesday.

If you can’t catch him at TechDays Calgary (taking place this Tuesday and Wednesday), you’re in luck: Yaroslav will be doing a presentation on Tuesday night at Calspug – the Calgary SharePoint User Group. His presentation: Taking Your Existing SharePoint 2010 Solution to the Cloud. Here are the details:

Topic

Taking Your Existing SharePoint 2010 Solution to the Cloud

Audience

SharePoint application/solution developers and architects

Abstract

In the last year – there has been significant interest in hosting SharePoint solutions in the cloud. There are many vendors out there offering SharePoint 2010 hosting in the cloud. This session will focus on understanding key differences that affect solution development for the cloud. Developers will learn how they can leverage their existing tools to create basic and advanced solutions ready for the cloud.

Time, Place and Other Details

• When: Tuesday, December 14, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. (doors open at 5:30)
• Where: Global Knowledge (formerly Nexient) 2nd Floor Training Centre
  144 – 4 Avenue SW, Suite 200
• Cost: Free
• Donations: Calspug is accepting non-perishable food item donation for the Calgary IF Food Bank. Bring something!
• Food and beverages will be provided

Bonus Goodies

Yaroslav will be giving away copies of his book, Top 60 Custom Solutions Built on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

Registration

Registration for this event is free – just sign up on the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

“Want a job? Learn SharePoint!” said the article in O’Reilly Radar last year. The U.S. and Canadian federal governments, banks, businesses and all manner of organizations with lots of people, projects and collaboration love SharePoint and are looking for developers. The natural follow-up to “Want a job? Learn SharePoint!” is Want to learn SharePoint? Come to SharePoint Saturday!

SharePoint Saturday takes place on Saturday, November 13th at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga (1950 Meadowvale Blvd., just off Mississauga Road, just north of Highway 401 and just south of Highway 407). It’s your chance to meet architects, developers, and other professionals who work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and 2007 and learn about it. SharePoint Saturday will be an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint topics. Better still, SharePoint Saturday is FREE (you should register to attend), open to the public and your chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

For more information about SharePoint Saturday, visit the SharePoint Saturday site. To register, visit their registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Today (Wednesday, September 22) Manning’s offering their SharePoint books, in both electronic and dead-tree form, at half price:

• SharePoint 2007 Developer’s Guide to Business Data Catalog
• SharePoint 2010 Site Owner’s Manual
• SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action
• SharePoint 2010 Workflows in Action

Just enter the promo code dotd0922 in the Promotional Code box when you check out at manning.com.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Creative Commons photo by Jason V. Click the photo to see it on its original page.

Don’t forget that this Saturday, September 25th, is the first SharePoint Saturday in Vancouver!

It’s a FREE public event, and it’s a chance for people in the Vancouver area to dive into SharePoint. It promises to be an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics.

For more details, see my earlier blog entry on SharePoint Saturday Vancouver as well as the SharePoint Saturday Vancouver site and the registration page.

Thanks to Yaroslav Pentsarskyy for letting me know about this event!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Today (Thursday, August 5) and today only, Manning’s offering their SharePoint books, in both electronic and dead-tree form, at half price:

• SharePoint 2007 Developer’s Guide to Business Data Catalog
• SharePoint 2010 Site Owner’s Manual
• SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action
• SharePoint 2010 Workflows in Action

Just enter the promo code in the Promotional Code box when you check out at manning.com. I got an email saying the promo code is dotd0805ccb; Bil Simser reports that the site says the promo code is dotd0805. Try them both!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Pictured above is Reza Alirezaei giving a presentation on SharePoint at last year’s TechDays conference in Toronto. Reza’s one of our go-to guys for SharePoint, and I’m pleased to announce that a book he co-authored has just been published by Wrox: Professional SharePoint 2010 Development.

I don’t have the book just yet, but here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Learn to leverage the features of the newest version of SharePoint, in this update to the bestseller

More than simply a portal, SharePoint is Microsoft’s popular content management solution for building intranets and Web sites or hosting wikis and blogs. Offering broad coverage on all aspects of development for the SharePoint platform, this comprehensive book shows you exactly what SharePoint does, how to build solutions, and what features are accessible within SharePoint.

Written by one of the most recognized names in SharePoint development, Professional SharePoint 2010 Development offers an extensive selection of field-tested best practices that shows you how to leverage the vast power of this multi-faceted tool to build custom workflow and content management applications. Plus, you’ll discover how to take advantage of the new features to roll out new SharePoint sites or upgrade existing sites.

• SharePoint guru Tom Rizzo offers broad coverage of the newest version of SharePoint, Microsoft’s popular content management solution
• Addresses how the new version adds enhanced developer support for ASP.NET, Ajax, LINQ, and Silverlight
• Demonstrates how to take advantage of new features, including improvements to offline and mobile client capabilities, social networking additions, and more
• Covers user experience development, platform services, social media features, event handling, the business data catalog, forms and workflow, business intelligence, and more

With this book, you’ll get exhaustive coverage on the many possibilities that exist with SharePoint.

Congratulations, Reza, on the release of the book!

In addition to a professional-level book on SharePoint, Wrox have a beginners’ book due out in June: Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development, which is probably more suited to SharePoint newbies like Yours Truly. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Discover how to take advantage of the many new features in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint provides content management (enterprise content management, Web content management, records management, and more), workflow, and social media features, and the new version boasts enhanced capabilities. This introductory-level book walks you through the process of learning, developing, and deploying SharePoint 2010 solutions.

You’ll leverage your existing skills and tools to grasp the fundamental programming concepts and practices of SharePoint 2010. The author clearly explains how to develop your first application for SharePoint 2010 and guides you through the many aspects of a SharePoint 2010 development project.

• Explains how SharePoint is more than simply a portal and is capable of providing content management, workflow, social media features, and more
• Details the new features and functions of SharePoint 2010 and provides a thorough look at the fundamental programming concepts and practices of SharePoint 2010
• Walks you through how to perform common developer tasks in SharePoint and the tools required to do so
• Reviews building and deploying Web parts, integrating Office applications with SharePoint, interacting with data in SharePoint 2010, developing Web Services for SharePoint, and creating enhanced user experiences for SharePoint

Covering everything from developing applications for SharePoint 2010 to securing those applications, Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development is an ideal introductory resource.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

You can learn about learn about SharePoint 2010 – the upcoming version of Microsoft’s enterprise information portal platform — at the inaugural meeting of the Mississauga SharePoint User Group taking place this Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Microsoft’s Mississauga office. Rob Windsor from ObjectSharp will lead a session covering SharePoint 2010 with a particular focus on what’s new for developers. You’ll learn about the new designers, explorers and templates and overall developer experience. You’ll also see what’s new for your users, including the new ribbon interface, in-place editing and the new page and dialog interface model.

Many details surrounding Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 were announced at last week’s Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. One of SharePoint 2010’s top investments is user experience, from the ribbon UI, which allows users to easily add, modify and interact with content on the site, to mobile device support to its true multilingual user interface. Once you have the language packs installed and you set the appropriate languages on the sites, users will be able to interact with SharePoint in the language of their choice. To find out more, check out Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the Sharepoint conference.

The meeting takes place on Monday, September 26th from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga office (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, at Mississauga Road, just north of the 401). Register for the event – it’s free!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Ryan McMinn – co-founder of the Toronto-based development shops Unspace and M7 Database Services turned Sith Lord with The Empire’s Access Team – co-hosts the newest show on Microsoft’s Channel 9: The Access Show. Ryan hosts The Access Show with Clint Covington and in the first episode, he and Clint talk about Access Services, a part of SharePoint 2010, which you can use to create new databases with forms and reports that run in the browser.

Ryan, on behalf of all of us at Microsoft Canada and the Toronto geek scene, I’d like to congratulate you on an excellent first episode and salute you with a left outer join on a flaming sword!

Go ahead – watch Ryan’s show now!

(At this point, you might be tempted to ask me “Hey, Joey: you seem like the sort of person who’d like to have his own show talking about Microsoft tools and tech. Why don’t you have one?” My response would be simply to say “Wait.”)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As I write this, we’re getting into the final session of TechDays Toronto, which in my track – Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform – features SharePoint guru Reza Alirezaei doing his presentation, Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint.

If you ask me the question “What is SharePoint?”, I’d most likely give you a description that sounds like this:

Here’s a more accurate description of what SharePoint is:

Reza’s session takes a look at another aspect of SharePoint: as a platform on which you can build and deploy custom web services that other clients can call upon.

Once his session’s done, TechDays Toronto will wrap up and then the tear-down process begins.

Next stop: Halifax on November 2nd and 3rd!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In planning this year’s TechDays conference, we made some significant changes to the developer tracks: they were reformulated into:

• A “tools and techniques” track, called Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices, for which my friend and fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe is the track lead
• A “technologies” track, called Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, which I lead.

As the track lead for the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track at TechDays Canada 2009 conference, I thought I’d take the time to talk about it and praise its virtues.

Designing the Track

Each track lead has the responsibility of designing his or her track. We pored over all the sessions from TechEd North America 2009, consulted with developers or IT pros for their opinions on what topic they’d like covered and came up with a selection of 8 sessions for each track.

When choosing my sessions, I kept these philosophies in mind:

• TechDays is about current tools, technologies and techniques. That means talking about stuff you can get your hands on and use in production right now: Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, and so on. Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Azure are fascinating tools and tech, but they’re not yet on the market, so they’re not in TechDays. We made a few exceptions for a couple of things that are coming out right around now: version 3.0 of Silverlight and the Expression suite and Windows 7.
• TechDays is about giving the audience the biggest bang for the buck. It’s more than simply taking the content from the TechEd North America conference (which has a steep registration fee and you have to also factor in the costs of flying to and staying in New Orleans) and bringing it close to home with local speakers and a reasonable price tag. It’s also about choosing the content that best serves an an audience that uses Microsoft tools and tech in their day-to-day work. There’s no point in rehashing presentations that the audience has already seen a dozen times before, and neither does it do any good to cover topics that are interesting but impractical. I tried to strike a balance — in choosing the sessions for my track, I kept this question in mind: What sort of things will this audience be using that they aren’t using yet?
• TechDays is more than just throwing random information at the audience. A track needs to be more than just a collection of sessions simply thrown together. It works best if it’s a set of sessions whose topics fit together to form a cohesive whole, almost as if telling a story. While picking out the track’s sessions and arranging them, I tried to set things up in such a way to best show the possibilities that open up when you develop on the Microsoft-based platform. 

The Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform Track

The Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track breaks down into four topic areas, as shown in the diagram below:

The topic areas are:

1. Day 1 morning: Rich UIs
2. Day 1 afternoon: Client Tech
3. Day 2 morning: ASP.NET MVC
4. Day 2 afternoon: Web Services

They’re explained in greater detail below.

Day 1 – Front End: User Interface and Experience

Day 1 of the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform is about building the front end, that layer of our applications with which the user interacts, and about giving the user the best experience possible.

The morning will be an introduction to the latest version – version 3 – of our rich interface technology Silverlight and our rich interface-building tool, Expression Blend. In the afternoon, we’ll shift the focus to building client technology by looking at the PRISM guidelines for building applications with modular Silverlight- and WPF-based front ends and the API code pack for building .NET applications that take advantage of Windows 7’s new UI features.

The tools and technologies covered on Day 1 are:

• Silverlight 3
• Expression Blend 3
• WPF
• Windows 7
• Windows 7 API Code Pack for the .NET Framework
• Windows Mobile

Day 1 Morning: Rich UIs

Track Introduction
Presented by Joey deVilla
9:00 a.m. – 9:15 a,m.

Session 1: What’s New in Silverlight 3
Presented by Cory Fowler
9:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Rich internet applications just got richer! Silverlight 3 is packed with new features and improvements that your users will notice, from pixel shaders to perspective 3D to animation enhancements to bitmap APIs to HD video. We think you’ll also be impressed by the features for developers, such as the updated style model, data binding improvements, better resource handling, and a tuned-up Web services stack. In this session, we’ll explore new features of Silverlight 3 as we build a Silverlight-based application using Expression Blend 3 and Visual Studio.

Session 2: Expression Blend for Developers
Presented by Barry Gervin
10:50 a.m. = 12:05 a.m.
Not a designer? Overwhelmed by Expression Blend? Not a problem! We’ll show you how to use Expression Blend to create advanced and polished user interfaces for business applications, consumer applications, multimedia projects, games or anything in between. We’ll cover features of Expression Blend from a developer’s perspective and show how it works in tandem with Visual Studio throughout the development process. You’ll learn how to create professional-looking user interfaces and visual elements – even if you don’t think of yourself as an interface designer.

Day One Afternoon: Client Tech

Session 3: Building Modular Applications Using Silverlight and WPF
Presented by Rob Burke
1:10 p.m. – 2:25 p.m.
How do you build extensible and maintainable line-of-business applications in Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)? How do you design and code to handle real-world complexity? Composite Application Guidance (a.k.a. "PRISM") offers guidance, libraries and examples – in small, free-standing, digestible chunks – that you can use to build applications with rich user interfaces that are also easier to maintain and extend. You’ll learn how to compose complex UIs from simpler views, integrate loosely coupled components with "EventAggregator" and "Commands", develop independent modules that can be loaded dynamically, and share code between Silverlight and WPF clients.

Session 4: Optimizing Your Apps for the Windows 7 User Experience
Presented by Anthony Vranic
2:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
This session will show you the Windows 7 APIs that will let your applications – and your users – get the full Windows 7 experience. Learn about new extensibility methods to surface your application’s key tasks. Discover how enhancements to the taskbar, Start Menu, thumbnails, desktop elements, the Scenic Ribbon, Federated Search and Internet Explorer 8 provide new ways for you to delight your users and help make them more productive. If you want to give your users the best Windows 7 experience, this session is for you!

Bonus Session: Taking Your Application on the Road with Windows Mobile^® Software
Presented by Mark Arteaga and Anthony Bartolo
4:20 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

As a developer of .NET-based applications, you can extend your desktop software to the Windows Mobile-based platform using the tools available within Visual Studio®, the Windows Mobile SDK and the .NET Compact Framework. This session will give you an overview of how Windows Mobile lets you use your existing infrastructure, business logic, and desktop code on a mobile device to innovate and help solve business problems. We’ll show you how to use the familiar Microsoft .NET Framework and .NET-based programming languages like Visual C#® development tool. You will also learn about new features in Windows Mobile 6.5 such as the Gesture APIs and the Widget Framework and how to use them appropriately. With the launch of Windows Marketplace for Mobile upon us, this session will help you take the next step for application testing and submission.

Day 2 – Back End: Programming Frameworks and Principles

On Day 2, the track moves to the back end, focusing on server-side programming tools and technologies, and even wandering into the area of technique.

The morning’s sessions concern themselves with the new option for developing web applications using ASP.NET: ASP.NET MVC, the alternative framework based on the Model-View-Controller pattern, in the same spirit of such frameworks as Ruby on Rails, Django and CakePHP. The afternoon will be about writing web services using various Microsoft technologies.

The tools, technologies and techniques covered on Day 2 are:

• ASP.NET MVC
• The SOLID principles of object-oriented design
• WCF
• REST (REpresentational State Transfer)
• SharePoint

Day 2 Morning: ASP.NET MVC

Track Introduction
Presented by Joey deVilla
9:00 a.m. – 9:15 a,m.

Session 1: Introducing ASP.NET MVC
Presented by Colin Bowern
9:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. 
You’ve probably heard the buzz about Model-View-Controller (MVC) web frameworks. They’re all the rage because they combine speed, simplicity, control…and fun. ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft’s MVC web framework, and in this session, we’ll talk about the MVC pattern, explain the ideas behind ASP.NET MVC and walk through the process of building an application using this new web framework. We’ll also cover several techniques to get the most out of ASP.NET MVC and deliver web applications quickly and with style.

Session 2: SOLIDify Your Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Applications
Presented by Bruce Johnson
10:50 a.m. – 12:05 a.m.
Object-oriented programming makes it easier to manage complexity, but only if you do it right. The five SOLID principles of class design (one for each letter) help ensure that you’re writing applications that are flexible, comprehensible and maintainable, and we’ll explain and explore them in this session. We’ll start with a brittle ASP.NET MVC application that’s badly in need of refactoring and fix it by applying the SOLID principles. This session is a good follow-up for Introducing ASP.NET MVC, but it’s also good for developers of ASP.NET MVC looking to improve their code – or even if you’re not planning to use ASP.NET MVC. The SOLID principles apply to programming in any object-oriented language or framework.

Day 2 Afternoon: Web Services

Session 3: Building RESTful Services with WCF
Presented by Bruce Johnson
1:10 p.m. – 2:25 p.m.
REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style for building services, and it’s the architectural style of the web. It’s been popular outside the world of Microsoft development for a long time, but it’s quickly becoming the de facto standard inside as well. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) makes it simple to build RESTful web services, which are easy to use, simple and flexible. In this session, we’ll cover the basics of REST and the show you how to build REST-based, interoperable web services that can be accessed not just by Microsoft-based web and desktop applications, but anything that can communicate via HTTP from an Ajax client to a feed readers to mobile device to applications written using other languages and frameworks such as PHP, Python/Django or Ruby/Rails.

Session 4: Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint
Presented by Reza Alirezaei
2:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
The world gets more service-oriented every day, and with that comes the demand to integrate all kinds of services, including those from SharePoint. This session introduces SharePoint as a developer platform and provides an overview of how you can build and deploy custom services with it. The focus will be on developing ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation services for SharePoint as well as building a Silverlight client to consume them.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

SharePoint has always been a tricky thing to describe, but the opening paragraphs from a recent article in the New York Times, Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession, does a pretty decent job:

Hang around at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters for five or ten minutes and someone dressed in khaki pants and a blue shirt is bound to tell you about the wonders of SharePoint — one of the company’s most successful and increasingly controversial lines of software.

Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.

Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.

SharePoint development seems to be a field rich with opportunity. The Ignite Your Career webcasts that Microsoft Canada had earlier this year suggested that SharePoint developers are in demand. Close to home, I know Toronto-based developers working on SharePoint projects for Bank of Montreal. The New York Times article reports that Ferrari, Viacom and Starbucks use it for a number of tasks, including the creation of their public-facing websites. Friends of mine in Ottawa report that the Canadian federal government makes heavy use of it. A recent article in O’Reilly Radar bears the title Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt; it reports that the U.S. federal government is chock full of SharePoint projects and not enough developers.

Like Office, SharePoint has grown from a collection of productivity applications into a full-fledged platform, and where there’s a platform on which business and governments run, especially a platform whose purpose is to let people work collaboratively, there’s a developer opportunity. Over the next little while, I’m going to post articles about SharePoint and developing for it, using my connections within both The Empire and the developer community (such as my friends at ObjectSharp) to get more information.

If you’re planning on attending TechDays 2009, Microsoft Canada’s cross-country tour of seven cities in which we talk about getting the most out of the Microsoft Platform and sharpening your skills, you might want to check out the session titled Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint. Here’s it’s abstract:

The world gets more service-oriented every day, and with that comes the demand to integrate all kinds of services, including those from SharePoint. This session introduces SharePoint as a developer platform and provides an overview of how you can build and deploy custom services with it. The focus will be on developing ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation services for SharePoint as well as building a Silverlight client to consume them.

Watch this space for more articles about SharePoint and SharePoint development!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

SharePoint Saturdays are free events where you can learn about SharePoint from architects, developers, and other professionals who work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS). Filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & Microsoft MVPs, they’re day-long events covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics.

On Saturday, July 11th, Toronto will have its first SharePoint Saturday at Microsoft Canada Headquarters (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, Mississauga – off Mississauga Road, just north of the 401). The event is free of charge, open to the public and your chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint. The day will start at 9:00 a.m. with a short introductory keynote and sessions will run to 4:30 p.m.. Lunch will be provided and there will be numerous giveaways throughout the day.

There will be three primary content tracks, with each track consisting of five presentations lasting about an hour and ranging from introductory, 100-level content to highly technical, 400-level "expert" sessions. The speakers will represent a broad cross-section of the community and will offer a variety of different perspectives and points of view.

SharePoint Saturday Toronto is a great opportunity to learn, share and network. If you’ve been meaning to learn or expand your knowledge about the SharePoint platform, you should be there!

For more details, visit the SharePoint Saturday Toronto site.