3 hours of SharePoint goodness

Or as someone in the audience called it, SorePoint (but then, they haven’t done it 2007 style yet).

Last nights presentation to the .NET Calgary User Group went well. We had about 40 or so people come out and get some free pizza and swag and spend 3 hours with me rambling on about SharePoint 2007 (yes I know, there is no product called SharePoint 2007). I gave a brief overview of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) but the focus of the presentation was on Windows SharePoint Service 3.0.

We covered the basics, some architecture changes from 2.0, and got into Web Parts, Content Types, Features, Site Columns, Event Receivers, and touched briefly on Master Pages and various other goodies. The first hour was mostly talking and doing some basic stuff in the UI. The second half was mostly code and writing and deploying new features. I still had two code projects I didn’t get to, so I’ll leave that for a future session. All in all, lots to take in and lots of think about.

I used a few tools during the demo and made reference to a couple of web sites for more information so here’s the links:

• Infotech Canada’s Feature Explorer
• Todd Baginski’s Feature Manager
• A brief introduction to Content Types
• Using a Content Type in a List Definition

There were a lot of great questions and some things I’m following up (like sequence of events when receivers are triggered) as well as a way to enumerate through what receivers are attached to what list/library/feature instances (which might result in a feature of itself). Stay tuned for lots more 2007 goodness in the coming weeks.

Note to self (and anyone else listening). I had to recently rebuild my system (and I was smart enough to Ghost it so I don’t spend another day rebuilding it again, Thanks Jenn!) and of course had to re-install a million programs. I use BlogJet as my tool to post to the site and in setting it up, the current version doesn’t support Community Server correctly. The default location that comes up is “/MetaBlog.ashx” but it should be “/blogs/MetaBlog.ashx” to work. Just something to keep in mind when using BlogJet and Community Server.