SPC 2008 Day 3

We'll today was chock full of activities. It started with an excellent keynote from Greg Lemond. His story was extremely interesting. And finishedwith a crazy night of XBox games.

The sessions were not as great today (which doesn't mean they were not good, it means I didn't learn as much as I did on day 2).

The Branding sessions from Heather Solomon opened my eyes to the fact that there are no short cuts in learning to brand SharePoint. Takes a lot of time and patience to dig through the CSS. At least I know where to start digging.

Steve Peschka presented some some really interesting LINQ code that works with SharePoint. The demo was really interesting, but I have some concerns about performance. Hopefully MSFT is working on a LINQ provider for SharePoint. What I saw would work for some situations, but CAML is still the preferred query language. Steve also showed a demo that hooks AJAX into SharePoint. I actually saw a similar demo on Monday. Let's just say MSFT has a big opporutinity to make AJAX (and Silverlight) easier to integrate with SharePoint.

Ted Pattison talked about SharePoint deployments with Solutions. He did a great job covering the basics. He also showed everyone a new tool (STSDEV) that greatly reduces the amount of time needed to create a SharePoint solution.