Speaking at TechDays 2009, Me

TechDays, the all-Canadian all-knowing all-seeing Microsoft conference is kicking off in a couple of weeks in Vancouver. To the disappointment of the street walkers of Gastown, I won’t be there. I will however be in Calgary in November. Here are the two talks I’m giving:

Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint

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.

Versioning and Upgrade of SharePoint-based Solutions

Now that you've deployed your first SharePoint application, you will probably get a long list of enhancement requests and maybe some bugs to fix. However it is not at all obvious how to update various site elements. For example, adding a field to a content type, requires a completely different process than updating Web Part pages.  In this you will learn how to update these and other elements including workflows, Web Parts, and list item event handlers based upon best practices .  Thorny problems abound when it comes to making a change.  Learn what strategies to apply and what behaviours to expect for different types of artifacts in SharePoint.  In this session you'll see what the Patterns & Practices team put into their guidance for SharePoint-- and why.

TechDays is a great conference for us Canadians. It’s two days of fun-filled talks on all sorts of Microsoft Evil Doings. Make sure you get the early bird special as it’s $299 (that’s *Canadian* dollarinos, none of the this American crap) for a limited time (then you get to pay through the nose and shell out $599, and really, is it worth listening to me speak for that amount of money?).

Have you got a TechDays badger yet? If not, drop by here to see them then slap that cap, err… badger onto your website somewhere inconspicuous (like right at the top over your blog logo). If you’re looking for the individual badger rather than the full logo sheet, then go here (I was confused at first until I actually read the page). I went for the hanging badger just because the maple leaf seemed *too* Canadian and the stickman, well, let me tell you about stickmen!

If I had some time tonight, I would make my very own customized Justice Gray stickman badger, but alas I have work to do. I’m sure D’Arcy or someone will come up with something creative.

Should be a blast so hopefully you’ll drop by and see how much Sesame Street content a guy can stuff into two presentations on SharePoint.

This blog post was brought you by the letters “S”, “P”, and the number “2010” which won’t be making an appearance at TechDays 2009 but we still like Microsoft anyways.

P.S. The website lists 200+ level sessions. I’ve lost track of what level I try to present at so let’s just kick this puppy up a bit and crank the SharePoint sessions up to 1100, k?