So after quite a break, we had our first London meeting of the SUGUK for sometime. We were at the Mostyn Hotel, location and food kindly supplied by Steve Smith of Combined Knowledge who use this location regularly for their training courses.
Unfortunately, Microsoft have decided to withdraw support for the community in the form of using their meeting rooms at Victoria place. Personally I think this is very short sighted as the community is really what drives the adoption of Microsoft products in the long run, however in the current financial circumstances I can understand the cost cutting measures.
So, after a minor rant, back to lasts nights sessions. First up was Japp Vossers (twitter @jvossers) presenting for the first time to the SUGUK on using JQuery with SharePoint 2010. This was a nice dev focussed session, showing quick and easy uses of JQuery in a SharePoint environment.
My favourite item was the list monitor. This JQuery script sat and monitored lists for changes, polling the SharePoint Lists web service every few seconds and forcing List view Web parts to update if it detected changes to those targeting lists. I’d be wary of using this in high traffic sites, although as Jaap pointed out, if people are pressing F5 less often, then overall traffic would be reduced. This would need to be tailored to your environment and needs I guess.
Just before the buffet during the break, Japp very kindly provided 5 copies of the ‘JQuery in Action’ book to be raffled amongst the attendees, He recommends this book for people learning JQuery for the first time.
The second session was present by Martin Hatch, someone I’ve come across in the community quite often at various events such as SPRetreat and a very talented SharePoint developer. Someone to watch out for methinks in the coming year.
Martin presented on Sandboxed solutions, the How the where and more importantly the why you would use them. He also took the very brave step of coding live on the night, a move often fraught with failure, but luckily most of Martin’s examples worked very well. (Bar a couple of problems)
The audience were pretty rapt during presentation, even if there were a few IT Pros in the audience who started to glaze over once Visual Studio came out..
Finally, we were blessed with the presence of Eric Schupps as he was in town, For those of you who don’t know Eric, he’s the SharePoint cowboy, a well respected SharePoint developer from the States, a member of the Pattern and Practices advisory group and proud owner of an awesome cowboy hat. With Eric in town and other key MVP’s such as Andrew Woodward and Chris O’Brien, we couldn’t help but have an impromptu Ask the experts session. This was well received and we had some great questions.
Finally, as always we ended up at SharePint, the obligatory round up for the night at a local pub before heading for the last trains out of London!
Paul.
