SharePoint Saturday UK 2012

Great event again, it amazes me that such a great place to get info meet people learn about SharePoint attracts 250 people - that is free.  Sure you need to give up your time and it is a long way but more folks involved with SP in the UK should be at these events.

Mark Macrae, Anthony Pounder & Brett Lonsdale set up SharePoint Saturday, it's huge, the speakers are great and give their time.  People who attend are good to speak too.  So my thanks to the speakers, the 3 fellas mentioned above and Rik from BlackMarble (great conversation).

The presentations I saw were with my thoughts:

• Wes Hackett (Bring SP into your Office with Apps for Office), I saw a fair amount of this at SPC but Wes brought some good ideas and presented the topic extremely well.  Apps are really powerful in Office and SP2013 but I'm not sold it's going to work as well as MS are preaching.
• Bill Ayers (Lean-Agile Development with SharePoint), best session I went to.  Had a chat with Chris, Alan (Eardly) & Bill afterwards - really  good stuff, with a topic relevant to my current project.  Unit test and SP are not a great combination in my opinion sure you can using a Mocking framework but I'm not sold, the learning curve for the team is high (effective TDD takes time no matter how many converted devs tell me it's simple), you spend time mocking.  The list goes on and the right projects with the right management buy in 100% I'm behind it I just think it's probably less than 10% of SharePoint projects.   The main take away which I agree with is SCRUM for SP projects is great.  Implementing scrum has challenges but is worth the pain in most scenarios.  Testing is key, you can use Integration tests instead of Unit Tests in VS.  I advocate projects use Code UI testing as with most SP projects you get the most "bang for your buck" (not part of the talk).
• Martin Hatch (Performance and Load Testing using Visual Studio), good overview with demo and walk thru.  It is amazing what VS 2012 ultimate.  You can definitely remove project risk by using these tools and it's no longer in the domain of load runner experts.  VS has firmly tooled dev and teams to monitor performance and determine bottlenecks.
• Marjn Somers (Extending SP with Simple jQuery Solutions), this is a funny guy well at a SP conference the bar is pretty low in the comedy genre.  I felt it was too simple (and i'm a simpleton (not the pattern) - sic) but as a 101 into SP and jQuery excellent.
• Adam Burcher (PowerShell - Let me script that for you!), was well presented.  It was an intro into PS and PS for SP. I didn't get much out of it but it was well presented and the demo of showing SP devs how easy it is to convert a C# event handler's code into PS was extremely effective.

Sessions I missed and would of like to see where Andrew Woodwards on Why you need a SharePoint Centre of Excellence (CoE), Paul Hunts session on Sift thru Search and deliver more, Chris O'Brien Getting to Grips with SP2013 Apps, Mark Macrae's BI talk would of been good to attend also.