SUGUK London Meeting.

Well last night saw what was possibly the busiest August SUGUK meeting i’ve ever seen, so much so that they ran out of Pizza!! (Nick, this is a crime that can never be repeated!!!)

Two very good sessions, the first by Eric (www.sharepointcowboy.com) Shupps (I think I spelled that right..) and the second from our very own Matt Groves of SUGUK forum fame.

Eric covered off the subject of performance in your code, with a neat display of the differences between iterating through a collection of items using a for statement, and then doing the same using the SPListItemCollection and a CAML query. I’m pleased to say that I’ve been doing the more efficient methods for sometime now, so I feel suitably pleased with myself.. The results that Eric showed on the timings for a 250 item library were quite shocking.

The second sessions from Matt Groves talked about publishing SharePoint Extranets through Microsoft’s ISA server. Now I must admit, my own experience of ISA is from many years ago with the ISA 2000 version and it wasn’t pleasant. We put it in place for a Government client that required excessive filtering of content using ISA plugins and performance and configuration was a nightmare. From what I saw of ISA last night, It looks like there have been marked improvements and Matt built a bridged SSL published application in just 22 minutes. (And this included creating the web collection!)

Out of Eric’s session, one comment he made for me caused me to prick up my ears, and that is, if you declare the SPSite object inside a using statement, and then declare the SPWeb object from that, you DON’T need to declare the SPWeb inside a using statement as the previous using statement WILL dispose of the SPWeb for you. This saved a few lines of code and possibly a little bit of performance?

Then finally out of Matt’s session, I was hoping to ask Matt about using ISA with Microsoft NLB on your webfarm. One of the problems that I’ve had with NLB in the past is the way that NLB uses the source IP as the decision maker on the load balancing. In theory if all the extranet traffic comes from a single source IP (In this case the ISA) then the load balancing won’t do anything and all traffic will go to a single host.

Once my internet connection lets me get back onto the SugUk site, I’ll post that question up in the admin section for Matt to answer..

Reg.

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