This last Saturday I had the pleasure of spending some time with about 40 folks to talk about Professional SharePoint Development at IndyTechFest. It was a sort of ad-hoc presentation because I forgot to update the title when I updated the abstract. As a result some folks were wanting to see SharePoint Site Lifecycle and others were wanting Professional SharePoint Development.

The Professional SharePoint Development part of the talk was focused around my work on the 10232A course for Microsoft Learning. The course it titled “Designing Applications for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010”. I had recently delivered a train-the-trainer session for MCTs and used that deck as an outline for our conversation. It was a lot of fun talking about the decisions that professional developers need to be aware of. A lot of what we talked about can be found in our work in progress for the Microsoft Patterns and Practices SharePoint Guidance Version 3 (You can find our previous guidance on the Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com/spg.)

I also got to cover some of the SharePoint Site LifeCycle – Creating and Archiving Sites deck that I’ve used at a few conferences. It’s a lot of fun to deliver that deck as well because we get to talk about how workflows can be used to make light work of the challenges of both provisioning and archiving sites. Along the way, I address the need for a replacement site directory since in SharePoint 2010 the site directory has been depreciated.

Overall the event was great with several hundred people and flying boomerangs … If you’re local to Indy you’ll want to make sure that you come next year. It was a great time.