SharePoint 2010 Developer Training – Great week
Disclaimer: I don’t work for Mindsharp or Combined Knowledge, but I do guest teach the developer course.
Had a great week attending Combined Knowledge’s first public beta of the SharePoint 2010 developer course, in fact it was the first running of this course anywhere in the world!
The course was held in what I think is a great venue, the board room in Ullesthorpe – I really like teaching here as this is a permanent setup so you know you have everything you need including lots of white boards << these are essential. This week was slightly different on the food front as they were into the December Xmas menu, no longer did we get the famous ‘Rice and Chips’ that Todd Bleeker is so keen on – instead we got a full choice from the bar menu, I recommend the chicken and warm bacon salad starter.
Back to the course; you might be asking ‘Why this course and not the Ignite Training?’
I have to say I am very impressed with Microsoft in the amount of information and training being provided this early in the delivery cycle, if you compare this to what we had for 2007 and even worse what we didn’t have in 2003 you will know that they have really put the effort in.
So why did I not do the Ignite Training? – Simple answer could be I missed the boat; and this is not untrue (double negative to make it sound better :S), but the real answer is that I am planning to guest teach this course for Combined Knowledge and it is a great way for me to feedback on what does/doesn’t work from an attendee’s perspective and help shape the course that people will get over the coming years (the 2003 course is still being taught, so anything fixed now has a long time to live).
The course was being taught by Gary Yeoman, long time trainer with Combined Knowledge and real world consultant when not training. Attending the course were myself, James Fisk, Adrian, David, Ian, Stephan (from Switzerland), Rehan and Ruth – plus we had the honour of having Todd Bleeker (the course author) taking a very active role throughout the week.
Big Topic or Lots of Topics
SharePoint in 2007 was a big product, sure Windows SharePoint Services (WSS V3) wasn’t quite as big as MOSS but from a developers perspective there was a lot to cover. Things in 2010 just get bigger. To quote Todd (and it may not have been word for word)
Custom Field types were probably the hardest thing you had to do in SharePoint 2007. In 2010 there are lots of things that are more complicated. however the great tools in Visual Studio 2010 help here a lot!
What I’m trying to say is we had a lot to cover and Gary was adopting a JIT based approach to some of the slides 
If you skip the sleeping!
There are 24hours in a day (8 for work, 8 for sleep and 8 for yourself). Based on this schedule there really is no way that there would be a beta SharePoint 2010 developer course with the depth of information and labs that people expect of a Combined Knowledge course for people to attend. So how was this solved?
Well if your Todd Bleeker you make the call that you can adopt the following pattern 6 x 1/2 hour sleep and 21 hours work (per day, everyday)! Yes Todd has been doing the Uberman sleep pattern (a form of polyphasic sleep) for the past 17 weeks – and he is amazingly still sane and took a very active role during the week. Although on one occasion we returned after a break to see a pair of feet sticking out from under a desk which were attached to Todd fitting in one of his 1/2 hour sleeps!
It was suggested at the start of the course that every student should also adopt this if they were to be able to get through the content we wanted to cover, thankfully other attendees like to have some ‘down’ time to recuperate.
‘Down’ time == ‘SharePint’
The Course
Being a beta course, and the first real proper teach ever, and based on the Beta 2 release that only dropped a few weeks ago it was expected that the labs would be a little rough and ready. This couldn’t have been more wrong! The new format adopted with microlabs,improved consistency and the result of many hour of hard work has paid off in droves.
We were all experienced SharePoint 2007 developers so we could skip any of the usual ‘What’s an SPWeb’ type discussion and head straight into some deep dives.
The course covered a lot of detail including
- - Powershell and how to extend it
- - A tour of VS2010 and the new SharePoint tools
- - Extending VS2010
- - Event Models – with focus on what’s new and improved
- - Deployment scenarios
- - Sandboxed and Farm Solutions
- - Workflow
- - SharePoint Designer << YES SharePoint Designer is really a useful dev tool in 2010
- - Developer Dashboard
- - and many many more
What stood out?
In truth SharePoint 2010 was the real star, including the great new tools in VS2010 (although the very poor story around Unit Testing is tainting my views here).
What I did get at the end of the course was a feeling that I just want to get out and start teaching it, to start sharing the great new things that caused me so many long days in the past.
I am looking forward to when I can run my first class and spend time working through your ideas, problems and solutions.
I’m excited about developing for SharePoint 2010.
If I can offer one tip for now, ‘always start with a Sandboxed solution first’
