Sharepoint with Dave McMahon

Dave McMahon from Ridgian (and also nxtgenug founder) stopped by last night.

Now Dave knows his Sharepoint stuff, which is good because he was our main speaker last night and was talking about, well Sharepoint. I can see why people get confused with it as from what I saw it is a pretty involved beast with some very confusingly named aspects (for example, Windows Sharepoint Services as opposed to Windows Sharepoint Server).

From creating simple user editable web sites and Intranets to complex multi tiered servers for document storage across a large corporate network it is obvious that Sharepoint can handle it but I'd question the need for smaller sites (such as this) because of it's complexity. If I had to do anything serious with Sharepoint I'd definitely call Dave (did I mention he is a Sharepoint MVP too?). He also covered customisation of the server and creating your own themes.

Joe Collins delivered a very witty nugget on testing and code generation with PEX, the Microsoft Research project that analyses your code and helps build unit tests around the possible paths through it. Joe tells me that the laptop he was using was rescued from a skip, excellent stuff!

We gave away over $1400 worth of software too with licences for Telerik and Resharper, so it's obviously worth turning up for!