Slide deck from my deployment talk at Best Practices Conference

Had a great time presenting at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference last week. I've been trying to put my finger on what made it such a good conference and I'm actually not sure, but I notice that other speakers and attendees have also been full of praise, so it's not just me. The event itself was extremely well-organized with excellent content, and Steve Smith and his team did a great job of looking after us speakers.

Highlights for me on the dev track were sessions from AC, Todd Bleeker, Eric (or "Uncle Eric" as I like to think of him, with his wise words on high-performance coding :-)) and Andrew Woody, but whenever I did stray from developer content I seemed to run into a great session like Mike Watson's on SQL Server in relation to SharePoint. Similarly I heard good things about speakers like Dan McPherson doing innovative sessions on the Information Worker track which I was disappointed to miss. [UPDATE: Here's a gratuitous shot of me in my session:]

Another highlight was being on the two dev panel sessions we did, and having an interesting debate in one of them with Todd on approaches for provisioning - declarative (Features) vs. programmatic (code/PowerShell etc.). This was probably a good lead-in to my talk the next day, and some folks came up to say they really liked this conversation and that we covered it from angles they hadn't considered, which was good to hear. [UPDATE: Photo below of the second session, chaired by AC and with (from left to right) Todd Bleeker, Stacy Draper, Maurice Prather, Andrew Woodward, Ben Robb, Brett Lonsdale, me (with the mic) and Eric Shupps:]

So all in all, a top conference, and fantastic to catch up with so many friends. Here's the link for my deck:

Slide deck - Approaches and best practices for deploying SharePoint sites through multiple environments (dev, QA, UAT, production)