PDC Developer Sessions for Office and SharePoint 2010

Last week’s SharePoint Conference (SPC) was an amazing unveiling of all the investments that the product groups have made in Office and SharePoint 2010. These products, with their Beta version coming out soon, provide a powerful platform for developing business solutions. And as John Durant states, “At SPC, we placed a special "real user value" slide in every presentation slide deck that had to do with Office 2010 client. In each presentation we emphasized what the developer investments in the Office/SharePoint platform mean to real users, users who will never touch a line of code or know what Dim or Using mean in programming syntax.” With both time and budget constraints in organizations, it is critical that development investments will have reduced time to delivery and yet produce the greatest value for both the end user and the organization at large. That’s what makes developing on the Office and SharePoint platform such a great developer investment, you are surfacing in the Office applications (where users spend much of their time, where they’re familiar with the user interface) the types of data, KPI information, process automation capabilities, etc. that helps them to be more productive in their daily tasks. And for developer productivity, the tooling around Office and SharePoint has increased significantly (future bogs to come). I say all that to say this, if you missed SPC, you can still get exposure to the same type of developer-focused sessions at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) ($300 discount still applies until Oct. 30th). Office and SharePoint 2010 will be a highlight at PDC from the keynote by Kurt DelBene, Senior VP in Office, to these great sessions:

• Developing .NET Managed Applications Using the Microsoft Office 2010 Developer Platform
• Document Assembly and Manipulation on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using Word Services and Open XML
• Developing Solutions with Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Integrating and Extending the Microsoft Office Communicator Experience with Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight
• Microsoft Unified Communications: Developer Platform Futures
• Overview of SharePoint 2010 Programmability
• It's All about the Services: Developing Custom Applications for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using Microsoft ASP.NET, WCF, and REST
• Developer Patterns to Integrate Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 with Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Developing Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using the Client Object Model
• SharePoint Is Not Just On-Premise: Developing and Deploying Solutions to Microsoft SharePoint Online
• Developing xRM Solutions Using Windows Azure

To get yourself ready for Office and SharePoint 2010 development, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was announced at SPC as well. And developing for Office and SharePoint with Visual Studio 2010 has never been better – new project templates abound. If you haven’t downloaded and installed it yet, Brian Keller’s blog is a great resource to help you with this.

Lastly, if you love developing for Office, be sure to join the Office Developer’s Guild!

Enjoy, and hope to see you at PDC!