My head feels as if had single-handedly emptied the Sal Cafe's wine cellar... But other than the after effects I'm currently experiencing I had a great time at the Tech Ed Country Drink for Belgians and Luxemburgers.
Workflow in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007
This session on workflow was supposed to be level 400 but I found it to be more of a level 200 session. There's always a trade off you need to make for presentations and demo's but for level 400 one should assume the audience already has the basic knowledge.
Presentation was delivered by Ted Pattison and code monkey David Gristwood. Very solid and entertaining.
ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint including Microsoft Silverlight and Popfly
My fellow countrymen -->Patrick Tisseghem --> and Jan Tielens gave some nice demo's on ASP.NET Ajax integration into SharePoint, discussing the specifics of getting it to work (web.config additions, adding the ScriptManager and more), and Silverlight and Popfly integration.
The more I see of Silverlight (they demoed both 1.0 and 1.1) the more impressed I am by it. Now I'm not a designer but there's a lot of potential in bringing your data in a fancier way.
The Popfly integration is really easy. Since Popfly always lives on the http://www.popfly.ms web site, it is just a matter of displaying the info in an iframe. Couldn't be easier !
SharePoint - the How's, Why's, When's and What's for Successful Development and Deployment (Q&A)
The session was a continuation of the Q&A round yesterday but there were a lot of improvements to the presentation (like microphones). This time there was an entire panel of specialists ready to answer the audience's questions. The panel consisted of Ted Pattison, -->Patrick Tisseghem -->, Jan Tielens, Joris Poelmans, Wouter van Vugt and Katrien De Graeve.
I'm glad I got to ask my question which had me bothered for some time now...
Building Solutions with the Business Data Catalog and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Nick Swan, definitely an expert on the BDC, delivers a really cool session with some interesting demos. I really feel I could have done some of my projects using the BDC.
He shows a nice way to update the back-end system by implementing Generic Invoker methods. Now you still need to write the update logic of course, but it opens up a lot of opportunities. I'm not quite sure if you can do it for all systems without going into some unsupported state.
Day 1: 5th November 2007
Day 2: 6th November 2007
Day 3: 7th November 2007
Day 4: 8th November 2007