Inside the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference

I am currently attending the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London. So far I have attended several of the sessions on the developer track and have been surprised by the quality of both the presenters and the quality of advice on offer.

The web part development session, hosted by Todd Bleeker served as a good reminder of the topics covered in his course (which I took last year), but also he covered off some new issues and points of best practice.

The SharePoint Cowboy (Eric Shupps) and Andrew Connell have also given fascinating and insightful sessions on Custom Site Definitions and Field Controls/Web Parts respectively, both highlighting do's and dont's and areas that are likely to trip you up.

The 'rose tinted' views of the presenting MVPs and experts is one thing, but to actually get to share issues and problems with others dealing with the realities of trying to develop and deploy custom applications in SharePoint is much more revealing and insightful.

So far this has been an enjoyable experience. I hope to post more detail later, but for now its fair to say I am suitably impressed. Obviously the free beer and casino last night helped! Hats off to Steve and the guys at Combined Knowledge for stepping up and organising this to ensure that the UK has a decent SharePoint conference which delivers great value for money.

Follow the updates from the conference on twitter by tracking the #spbpc hashtag.