Summary of the day: "Here is my feedback from the SharePoint Retreat meeting on Saturday 14th of May 2011. 9 people were at the retreat. We did 5 hours work and were really pushed for time - the day covered too many areas and needed more time to use the SPRetreat format properly. Venue was good - not exactly central but definately happy with the venue. I thought my presentation went well - only 1 other guy had used LINQ to SP in practice so a good topic choice, the practice exercise went well with everyone sharing however, we ran out of the time and Ashraf was left about an hour to present which he did very well on Info Path 2010 - a lot of the guys knew Infopath 2007 and I think they got a lot out of Ash's session.
My general feeling was the attendees were all glad they came and I believe we all walked away with good information. I think all the guys want to have more of these on a Saturday and guys are volunteering to do sessions. I like the coding katas format but it takes a long time and the day should only address 1 topic. All the guys that attended liked having 1 practice session per topic and the retrospective is great. Doing 2 topics worked well for 5 odd hours which allowed us all to only use up our day to lunch time. But i guess it really depends how in depth one goes on each topic.
I'm going to open up a dialog with all the attendees and look to do another event in July."
Please post comments on your thoughts of the day - pls suggest topics, format for a July day. thanks
paul
The videos I recorded came out very poorly, try get better light and equipement next time.
Video of the slides explaining LINQ to SharePoint on YouTube
5 comments:
I really enjoyed it! I like the fact that it was a Saturday morning, meaning we had time after lunch to do some social stuff (drink beer). I wouldn't repeat dev tasks when doing peer programming, would prefer more topics and rotate after each topic.
I really enjoyed the session, it was nice to get out of London.
The format was pretty good though a little rushed, I agree that maybe we should try and focus on a smaller part of a topic. However, that makes it less inclusive as you then may need a certain amount of experience. One option could be to have SPRetreat sessions with different difficulty levels (like the conference 101, 400 ratings).
I liked the 1 dev topic and another more discussion type topic, sharing war stories is also always very interesting.
I love the knowledge share (always learn something new!) and meeting fellow SharePoint bods. Both things happen more easily when you have a smaller group of people like this.
It would be good to get an area setup where people can suggest topics.
Once again thanks to Paul and Ash for the expertise and organisational skills.
Cheers
Simon
Great work by Paul and Ash - big thanks for setting it up.
I like the format:
Presentation
Base solution / Setup
Pair programming
Demos
I would like that format to repeat during the day - including more complex elements of the topic. And switching pairs throughout the day.
Future topics I would like to cover:
Unity and SharePoint - what does IoC and DI mean to a SharePoint developer.
Thanks Paul and Ash,
Like the venue, nice to get outside London :)
Presentations were good, got a lot of war story discussion value during both. To be honest I'm never that fussed doing the actual coding, for me the techie code bits isn't part of my day job. Like to do it but the rinse and repeat for every topic might be overkill.
Future topics,
More info path please, liked Ash's pptx but wanted to get dirty with some myself.
Love to discuss some common development requests and build out reference approaches.
Cheers,
Wes
I would like to say thanks to all the attendees for making my generally lazy Saturday a brilliant one.
Learned few new things which always make me happy.
Special thanks to Paul for putting all the effort to organise it.
I quite like the idea of peer programming along with open discussions. Hoping to see more of those kind of sessions.
Small group of knowledgeable professionals certainly helped the cause in great effect.
Topics for July(suggestion):
- Performance Point
- SharePoint Best Practices (Architecture)
- SharePoint Online
Cheers
Ash
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