SharePoint Conference Las Vegas Day 4

Last day of SharePoint Conference 2009, and the only thing missing from this great event is a SharePoint 2010 Beta. Guess we have to wait until November to try out most of the stuff.

After giving some thought to the content of the conference, one thing is forcing its way to the front of my head, and thats the fact that Steve Ballmer mentioned "Online" more than 25 times in his keynote. This is surely a clear sign that a paradigm shift is on its way, and we all have to prepare for the cloud. By that I mean our design and implementations on the platform should as much as possible be able to run in the cloud just as on premise. SharePoint 2010 seems to be well prepared for this shift with important features like Sandboxed solutions, BCS, PowerShell support and more.

The last day's sessions for me were:

• Load Testing SharePoint 2010 with VSTS: Good and practical information on loadtesting, and made me go "of-course, thats a good point!" several times.
• Architecture guidance for building applications in SharePoint 2010: Also here the speaker had a whole bunch of practical architectural guidelines, and the deck is good for later reference
• Building Rich, Dynamic Websites with SharePoint 2010: This session were a little off from its title, but it anyway pointed out vital improvements in the next release for WCM. That includes branding of sites with both style and RIA such as SilverLight and Rich media web parts, REST and Client Object Model and last but not least all the WCAG and XHTML support.