Final day of the conference was filled up with prepping and preparing my job of being a 'demo darling' for Fitz's session on packaging, deploying, upgrading and maintaining SharePoint solutions. It is a very interesting topic that I have researched a lot the last couple of weeks preparing this session and the intend is to write this all down into a new MSDN paper published hopefully before TechEd US. During the session it became clear that Fitz had a lot to say and I had a lot to demo and we weren't going to make it if we pursued each of the options. So I could not demonstrate too much but remember that all of it will finally be put on paper.

A couple of highlights out of the session:

  • Developers should have their own sharepoint dev environment locally - we know it is often a pain to have Windows Server 2003 on your dev machine, or to use VPC, but you will be more productive. Interesting idea that Fitz is trying to push forward is to bring out a 'developer version' of WSS 3.0 that can run on Windows XP or Vista. That would be cool if that came true.
  • The VS.NET Extensions for WSS 3.0 are still a bit shaky since the CTP is not even beta. A beta and a final RTM will arrive in the coming months. For now, try to workaround the problems.
  • Half of the fantastic 40 templates will be delivered as STP files, half as pure site definitions. I demonstrated how to reverse engineer one of them but this will not be necessary anymore.
  • The story about solution deployment is good but there are a number of pitfalls that we have discussed, that I found out during the research and that we will document. One of them, the fact that you have to use embedded resources and cannot copy resx files during the deployment phase will be solved ASAP.

Well, that concluded for me the SharePoint conference. I experienced it as one of the best conferences I participated in. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. And hopefully MS EMEA will repeat this next year for those who missed this one. Or, there is an APAC version scheduled 14th of May in Sydney, so maybe your boss agrees for that one :)

Hey? MOSS gets waxed? Well, I am so happy today because my favorite girlfriend MOSS got waxed at Madam Tussauds in London. When is the next gig in London?