This is the 1^st of series of interesting articles about SharePoint Development using Visual Studio 2012. Stay tuned for the rest of the articles.

www.sharepoint24x7.com/2013/02/12/article-whats-new-for-sharepoint-development-in-visual-studio-2012-part-i/

I was very fortunate to take part in the 3^rd episode of Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference held on 16^th and 17^th January, 2013 in Singapore. This is the 3^rd time we had this conference and it seemed the region has taken this event very serious and the number of attendees was a proof for the same.

I remember we has around 300 attendees for the 1^st episode of the event back in 2010. And we has around 500 attendees for the 2^nd episode back in 2011. This time we has around 900 attendees and I’m sure we will have more than 1000 for the next year conference.

I delivered a session in the Developer track and the session was “What’s New and Changed for me in Visual Studio 2012 as a SharePoint Developer“. It was very exciting to see a room-full audience and I managed to deliver all what I wanted during the session.

There were a lot of good sessions conducted by famous speakers such as Debbie, Randy, Richard, Pinal, Daniel, Mark, etc… and it was an exciting way to kick start the 2013 year.

Mark Rhodes – Thanks a lot for the pictures.

Joy Speaking @ SEA SPC

This article talks about the Loacal Execution Policy and it’s involvement when running custom Windows PowerShell scripts.

http://www.sharepoint24x7.com/2013/01/07/custom-windows-powershell-scripts-and-local-execution-policy/

We had 2 sessions organized for .NET Forum September 2012. I delivered a session how to get started SharePoint development as an ASP.NET developer.

We foresee lot of opportunities in SharePoint and with the release of SharePoint 15 Preview, lot of organizations are interested and looking to migrate into SharePoint. With that we are very positive that we will grow in SharePoint and Sri Lanka will be a best outsourcing options for US and Europe.

We have seen lot of individual who try to migrate to SharePoint development struggle a lot since they try to apply the same ASP.NET development techniques. That’s the main reason I decided to demonstrate what are the similarities and dissimilarities in ASP.NET and SharePoint development.

We had about 55 participants and it was a very good forum.

.NET Forum September 2012

Me presenting @ .NET Forum September 2012

Me presenting @ .NET Forum September 2012

I have been waiting to present at the SharePoint Forum Sri Lanka and finally I received the invitation to present at the September forum. I did a session sometime back on OOTB Workflows and gave an introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows and that session was very well received. Forum members were requesting an advanced session on SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows and I decided to do that in September forum.

I had more than 1 hour today since the other speaker didn’t make it to the session so I started giving an introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows and covered topics such as List workflows, Site workflows and Reusable workflows. Also I demonstrated and discussed almost every action as part of SharePoint Designer 2010 and also talked about Parallel and Impersonation Steps. Also talked about Initiation form variables and generating an InfoPath Form using SharePoint Designer 2010.

Unfortunately we didn’t have a big crowd today and we had about only 15 members.

Me presenting @ SharePoint Forum Sept 12

Me presenting @ SharePoint Forum Sept 12

Sri Lanka Unites organized a 2 day program for the young generation in Jaffna and Mullaittivu districts to educate them on the opportunities in IT and how they can select IT as a career.

Sri Lanka suffered more than a decade with LTTE terrorism and Jaffna and Mullaittivu were two of districts suffered a lot. Specially the Mullaittivu district was the home for LTTEs and that’s where the people suffered a lot due to war. Sri Lanka Unites along with the help from IT giants in Sri Lanka trying to bring life back to these districts who suffered a lot from war.

I participated one of their events and this was a 3 day event which includes more than a day for travelling. We spend nearly 10 hours to reach Jaffna and on 3^rd Friday, August we addressed more than 60 students in Jaffna. We left Jaffna on 4^th August early morning and reached Mullaittivu noon and addresses more than 50 students.

We had 3 sessions in each city and I talked about how Microsoft technologies such as .NET and SharePoint picking up the industry and how the opportunities are getting created every day. During my 1 ½ hours session I also talked about the industry trends with related to IT and specially how SharePoint and related technologies became so popular and how it helps our day-to-day operations.

It was a hectic travel and stay. We travelled al most 850 KM and specially the road to Mullaittivu through a jungle and it was very tired. However, at the end, we all felt satisfied since they appriciated our visit and know they know that they also have a good future and they know that it’s time to stop moaning about the relatives they lost because of war.

Jaffna Students

Me presenting @ Jaffna

Jaffna Students

Mullaittivu Students

Me presenting @ Mullaittivu

Newly established Department of IT at university of Sabaragamuwa organized a one day workshop/ seminar for newcomers to understand the importance of IT as a career. This university is located in Uva province and it’s about 200 KM from the capital – Colombo. Students find very difficult on getting the right guidance and resources for their education and IT was just introduced into the university.

We were invited to participate and provide guidance from our experience on how they can get the best out of IT. I was responsible for speaking about “.NET and SharePoint” as a career and students found the session was very interesting. There were lot of questions around .NET and SharePoint and most of the questions were around the difficulty of getting into SharePoint technology.

I provided lot of information about the value of .NET and SharePoint, career opportunities in SharePoint, how to get started with .NET and SharePoint development and what will be the career growth in .NET and SharePoint technologies.

Lot of requests came in to visit them regular basis and provide them deep technical sessions and I promised them to have at least 2 sessions every 6 months so that they will consider .NET and SharePoint as one of career option.

Though we had to spend 2 days for this event which includes 1 days for travelling, I feel happy that I was able to help them to understand on the opportunities on .NET and SharePoint.

Faculty of IT @ University of Sabaragamuwa

Me presenting @ University of Sabaragamuwa

SharePoint Forum got cancelled for various reasons for past few months and I got an opportunity speak today.

I decided to deliver a session around BI to make audience interested on all the workloads in SharePoint. I delivered a session on PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and session was mainly around the end-user capabilities on PowerPivot.

I demonstrated on loading data into PowerPivot, preparing data within PowerPivot and creating PivotTable with PowerPivot data. I also demonstrated on slicing and dicing capabilities with large amount of data and finally talked about publishing to SharePoint and using PowerPivot within SharePoint.

May forum addressed an audience who have been waiting for a long time and requesting this topic for a long time. Our Facebook page got filled with lot of requests for a session on WCF.

We decided to start with an introductory session since most of the people attending have no prior experience in developing WCF.

I did a session on introducing what WCF is and also we talked about history, how it is different from XML Web Services, etc…

Finally I did a demo to show them how we can build a WCF Service from the very beginning and also demonstrated the building blocks of a WCF solution.

Virtusa Tech Forum is a monthly deep dive technical discussion targeted only for Architects. Normally this session focuses on a topic related to core development.

After working 1 ½ years at Virtusa and after seeing how many of employees use Excel to slice and dice data I decided to do a session targeting all the employees in the company to showcase the power of PowerPivot. For the 1^st time Virtusa Tech Forum was open for all the employees in Colombo targeting 1400 employees and around 200 participated for the session.

I explained the objective and the key technical things behind the PowerPivot and demonstrated them end-to-end both PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint.

For the 1^st time Virtusa Tech Forum consisted of all different roles – Software Engineers, Project Managers, Architects, QAs and they found session was very useful.

Virtusa Tech Forum – PowerPivot and Business Intelligence

APIIT Student Activity Club organized a Microsoft Workshop for all their students. This event was supported by Microsoft Sri Lanka.

I was invited to deliver a session on the upcoming Visual Studio and .NET Framework release. I delivered a session on Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta and managed to cover most of the key enhancements in both.

There were more than 50 participants and most of them were already into Microsoft technologies and feedback was very positing on the session and they were interested to have a follow-up session on some advanced areas.

Thanks a lot for APIIT Student Activity Club for inviting this event as a speaker.

I have been busy and avoiding number of requests from .NET Forum members. Finally got some time today to invest on the community.

I delivered a session in .NET Forum today targeting about 60 attendees. I decided to talk about HTML 5 hype and that could be a reason why we had lot of attendees.

I talked about what HTML 5 is and how the new markup and JavaScript libraries together bring the light of HTML 5 into web development arena.

I demonstrated the new markup style and some of new tags such as header, footer, datalist and aside.

I was very much privilege to introduce HTML 5 discussions within the .NET Forum and hope to do few more sessions around same.

I have been delivering SharePoint trainings for the past 5+ years through NetAssist International which is the No 1 certified partner for Microsoft learning solutions. I have trained lot of students and most of them have found better opportunities in the country as well as outside the country.

We get massive SharePoint projects every quarter and there is a huge vacuum for good SharePoint resources. We advertise and get lot of resumes but most of them end up in deleted items folder simply because they don’t have the right set of skills which we expect from a good SharePoint consultant. We interview few and reject a lot just because they don’t have skills to articulate their experience during the interviews.

With NetAssist sponsorship, I did a free workshop on 28th Feb targeting all the major universities, ISVs, customers to talk about how to become a 1st class SharePoint consultant.

We had nearly 125 attendees and I managed to demonstrate the value of SharePoint as a 1st class business collaboration platform and discussed few case studies based on my past experience on how to become a 1st class SharePoint consultant.

At the end, I spent few minutes to explain the courses offered by Microsoft for enhancing skills on SharePoint and explained the value of certification and certification path for SharePoint.

Attendees

Attendees

Joy presenting @ the workshop

This is the last SharePoint Forum Sri Lanka gathering for this year. I was fortunate to present a session on BCS. There were lot of sessions around introduction, branding, object model, workflows but LOB system integration is one of the key requirements for every medium to large enterprise customers. I decided to do a session around BCS and I started introducing the BCS, demonstrated on creating an ECT, configuring BCS in Central Administration site, setting security, BCS Actions, etc…

We had more than 35 attendees and I found the topic I choose very interesting based on the number of questions I had to answer at the end of the session.

All of us will have to go through this one and I though it’s always better have this documented so that anyone get stuck on the way can refer to this.

http://www.sharepoint24x7.com/2011/10/configuring-forms-based-authentication-in-sharepoint-2010/

I was fortunate to meet and collaborate with the SharePoint fans in Southeast Asia for the 2^nd time during SharePoint Conference 2011. I have been having a very tough time with my projects and personal life, but I still wanted to go and present @ SEA SharePoint conference this year as well.

I flew 7^th midnight from Colombo to Singapore and reached there just before they start the key note. It was very exciting to see such a big crowd for the 2^nd time in Singapore and I was very happy that I made it to the conference.

I presented 02 sessions and 1 of them in the technical session and the other one is in Voice Of Customer track.

Day 1 Session 1 – Deep Dive on Business Connectivity Services
Level – 300
Track – Developer
This session was targeted for developers who have some experience in using BCS. This session talked about advanced topics such and adding behaviors to ECTs with BCS Actions. This session also demonstrated how to surface LOB data using SharePoint Search and how to make them more meaningful using Profile Pages. Finally this session demonstrated on how to configure User Profile Services to supplement User Profiles with LOB data.

Day 2 Session 2 – Creating Internet-facing Sites Simplified
Level – 200
Track – Voice of Customer
This session was targeted for non-technical audience and this was the 1^st time I was doing a non-technical session on a conference. I demonstrated how Virtusa Pvt. Ltd. simplified the way we build internet-facing sites using a Framework we built with bunch of re-usable components.

As usual our DPE – Wellington Perera requested me to do a session at the 11^th hour. Microsoft and University of Moratuwa has organized a 2 day event for all the students in the Faculty of IT. I did a session today to introduce SharePoint development and it was a very fruitful session for them since most of them were keen on moving into SharePoint technology.

I started the session on comparing ASP.NET web development and SharePoint portal development and then demonstrated some of the cool features in the area of collaboration and communication. Next, I demonstrated few OOTB Web Parts and introduced them the concept of Web Parts. Finally I demonstrated the Web Part development and explained them the key concepts on SharePoint development.

This 1 ½ hour session was targeted to all 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd year students and it was very interesting to see around 100 participants early in the morning.

Microsoft Sri Lanka organized an event-Student CTP today targeting for Students in all the universities in Sri Lanka. Objective of this event was to showcase bleeding edge Microsoft technologies to students and make them aware of those new technologies.

We had few interesting sessions lined up and most of them Wowed the crowd. I did a session on Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 and demonstrated how easy it is to develop data-driven business application without writing code. I had only 30 minutes and couldn’t showcase what I really wanted, and I wish I had more time.

Windows 8 Developer Preview, Virtualization using Windows 8 and Lync were some of the other cool sessions we had in the agenda.

I’m waiting for more and more events like this and talk more about latest technologies and make students aware of them.

After 09 months from the start of the local SharePoint forum, today I got an opportunity to present. I did Part 1 of 02 parts sessions on workflow development. I wanted to fill the vacuum in the area of developing SharePoint based workflows using WF and SharePoint but I wanted to start with the basics so that everyone can get the maximum out of forum sessions and also to make sure I address all different levels in the audience.

In this first part I covered OOTB workflows, Visio workflows and SPD workflows. I also talked about the enhancements in the workflow services and discussed about the enhancements in SPD in the area of developing workflows.

There were nearly 30 attendees and I was not lucky enough to have someone to take pictures. I will be doing the part 2 of this series and please join with me to explore the capabilities in developing workflows with Visual Studio 2010, WF 3.5 and SharePoint 2010.

I was privileged to unveil Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 today in .NET Forum August meet up and we had over 30 attendees to hear/ learn about Visual Studio LightSwitch.

.NET Forum August - LightSwitch Session

.NET Forum August - LightSwitch Session

.NET Forum August - LightSwitch Session

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is Now Available for Download.

Service Pack 1 includes stability, performance, and security enhancements that are a direct result of customer/ partner feedback. Read more about installing Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Language Packs from the SharePoint Team Blog.

SharePoint Team Blog: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=984

Download Service Pack 1: http://technet.microsoft.com/office/ee748587.aspx

SEA SharePoint Conference 2011

I just received the good news about the SEA SharePoint Conference 2011. Plans are underway for SEA SharePoint Conference and I’m very excited to go this year as well.

If you were there last year, I assume you have already decided to come this year and let me help you to book your calendar. Go ahead and book 08^th – 09^th November for the greatest SharePoint Conference in the region. If you didn’t get the chance to be there last year, here you have got another great opportunity. In nutshell, SEA SharePoint Conference is the largest gathering focused for SharePoint Products & Technologies which runs over 02 days to provide great technical/ business sessions delivered by reputed speakers.

Come and join us to know more about what you can do with SharePoint.

Keep your eye on http://www.sharepointconference.asia/ for more details.

When I was participating for the SEA SharePoint Conference in Singapore which was held on October 2010, during speaker dinner, Michael Noel proposed to host a SharePoint Saturday in Sri Lanka. I was thrilled and wanted to really make it true but unfortunately I didn’t have time to invest after I flew back to India.

I relocated back to Sri Lanka in December 2010 and initiated the conversation with our DPE and here I hear that they have already started planning for the same. Wow..! I was surprised and thrilled and finally we hosted our first ever SharePoint Saturday Sri Lanka yesterday with more than 200 attendees.

I presented 01 session for the Special Interest track and the session was all about how to build data-driven applications at the speed of thinking with Access Services feature in SharePoint 2010. There were more than 70 attendees and lots of them were new to the product and I felt the topic was a great selection because Access Services is not very hard to understand.

We had Dux Raymond, Michael Noel, Jey Srikantha, Shakir Majeed and Nalaka Withanage come down specially for this local event and the event was organized by Microsoft and Innovative-e. Also the event was sponsored by Virtusa, Creative, Greenwich, Millennium IT and Sanje Lanka and thanks a lot for all of them for the support extended.

Me presenting Access Services session

Me presenting Access Services session

Ask-the-Expert session

Ask-the-Expert session

Some of the guys behind the scene SPS SL

SharePoint Saturday Sri Lanka

I was in Singapore last year for presenting at SEA SharePoint Conference and I met Michael Noel & Alpesh Nakar and few other members who are part of SharePoint Saturday. We discussed the possibility of having a SharePoint Saturday in Sri Lanka and Michael liked it to have during Mango season.

Finaly we are having our first SharePoint Saturday in Sri Lanka and it’s happening on 11th June. I’m delighted to present a session there even with the very tight schedule I’m having right now. More importantly, I’m delighted to present while my employer – Virtusa Pvt. Ltd. also sponsoring for the event.

What is SharePoint Saturday SL?

SharePoint Saturday SL is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

When is SharePoint Saturday SL?

June 11, 2011 Saturday

Where is SharePoint Saturday SL?

Informatics Institute of Technology,
57, Ramakrishna Road,
Colombo 06,
Sri Lanka.

You can find more information about the event from the official site: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/srilanka/default.aspx also don’t forget to check on the schedule: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/srilanka/Pages/schedule.aspx and the speakers who are presenting: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/srilanka/Pages/speakers.aspx

Here is the 4th article on the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) using SharePoint Designer 2010. Here we create a new External List to surface data coming through the External Content Type (ECT) we created in the 3rd article.

http://www.sharepoint24x7.com/2011/04/article-%e2%80%93-business-connectivity-services-bcs-part-iv-%e2%80%93-creating-an-external-list/