Ever Wondered how big Tech Ed was? Here’s the dinning hall? It was filled at one point and not everyone eats at the same time.

Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) Development 2: ASP.NET, Web Parts, Master Pages, Field Types, and More

This session went over the low level architecture of SharePoint version 3. It’s predecessor was built almost as a hack around the ASP.NET runtime and that resulted in many issues. Now SharePoint is built on top of the ASP.NET 2.0 runtime using best practices that have developed.

The base of all SharePoint site is based on Master pages. By changing the default template you can change all of the SharePoint sites.

The presenter gave an analogy of SharePoint development that equated site based modifications by the user or SharePoint Designer as the mussel system of the body. Here you can make changes but those changes exist only on that one site. SharePoint designer can only make changes to the content database and knows nothing about the actual file system. Visual Studio is the tool to modify the skeleton structure. Changes here can be done to the SharePoint base templates. These changes are propagates to every site and its where most of the custom development opportunities exist.

Aggregation of site information in a site collection is possible though the SPSiteDataQuery() method. This can’t be used to do aggregation across site collections. You are also limited to searching one site list at a time i.e. you have to know what list you want to search (by ID). 

UserControl based web parts for v2 (using SmartPart) are no longer being supported. However, there is a directory that user controls can be placed and a simple ASP.NET Web Part shim can be wrapped around the user control.

Typed DataSets, Data Binding, and the SQL CLR: Harmonic Convergence

SQL CLR is the ability to write database functions, stored procedures and triggers using the .NET language. The highlight of this session would have been short talk on when to use CLR vs. T-SQL. Basically, if you are going to do a simple select or just retrieve data from the database, it’s best to use T-SQL and the Sql Analyzer to optimize your queries. However, the benefit of the CLR is that it allows you to transverse the data before you return it. In doing so you can perform logical operations to only return some rows or columns based on conditions or the ability to do some sort of aggregation or computational operations on the data. The benefit of doing these operations in the CLR is that it allows you to still return a datareader for use in your code but just with a subset of the database information or with computations that would be much more complex or costly to write using database cursors.

Managing and Deploying your SQL Server schemas with Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals

This session was the first to introduce the new flavor of Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals. It was somewhat of a basic introduction as it focused on the new project type for Visual Studio along with the source control features, schema comparison, data comparison, and refactoring features. Database version control would be a great addition to our development workflow.

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services: Advanced Report Design

This session was interesting to learn some neat tips and tricks for better reports such as initially laying out the Report in ReportBuilder. This provides a better way to lay out the report with less effort than is required in BIDS. Once that is done you can enhance the report using BIDS. But the biggest interesting thing to learn was that whatever version the presenter was using seemed much more advanced than the version I had when building my last report, I’m going to have to make sure I have the right version installed and this addresses a few of my concerns with ReportBuilder.