Speaking at Ignite and SharePoint Evolutions 2015 Conferences

As you might know if you’re in the SharePoint/Office 365 space, there’s a couple of big conferences around the corner – I’ll be delivering sessions at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in Chicago in May, and also the most excellent SharePoint Evolutions conference before then in April, here in London. It always takes quite a lot of preparation to pull new talks together, but after the conference I’ll be looking forward to writing in more detail about some of the topics I’ve been exploring. Before then, I think both conferences are going to be pretty special, and if you’re going to one of them (or Build, in San Francisco in April) I think you’ll have a great time and learn a lot. Here are the details of my sessions (N.B. there were some updates to these summaries which hadn’t made it to the websites at the time of writing):

Ignite

Dealing with Application Lifecycle Management in Office 365 app development 

Thursday, May 7th, 10:45AM - 12:00AM

For teams who are undertaking cloud-friendly SharePoint or Office 365 development, apps are likely to be a key area of focus - be they Apps for SharePoint or newer Office 365/Azure AD apps. One of the benefits of stepping outside the traditional SharePoint development model is that aspects such as ALM and Continuous Integration become easier - finally, an end to "development is harder because it's SharePoint!". In this session we'll talk about how to do app development the "right" way - with a focus on ASP.NET as the framework and Azure as the hosting platform. We'll cover good practices such as implementing automated builds, take a close look at “continuous deployment” for apps, and also discuss the upgrade/push-to-live process for existing applications. Over several demos, we'll show how Visual Studio Online and Azure are a winning combination, and see how concepts such as "Deployment Slots" in Azure can help.

Transforming Your SharePoint Full Trust Code to the Office App Model (panel discussion)

Tuesday, May 5th - 5:00PM - 6:15PM
Panel – Vesa Juvonen, Frank Marasco, Bob German, Erwin van Hunen, Chris O’Brien

This session is a panel discussion covering examples and patterns for moving SharePoint customizations to the cloud app model - for use either in Office 365 or "cloud-friendly" implementations of on-premises SharePoint. The panel comprises members of the Microsoft OfficeDev Patterns and Practices team and independent MVPs. Both bring their experiences from the field, but different perspectives too. Since the landscape changes when developers must leave behind server-side SharePoint API code and feature framework elements, the discussion will centre around 5 related hot topics - branding, options around remote code (including .NET, JavaScript and PowerShell), provisioning of customized sites, the story with sandbox solutions and finally how the Office 365 APIs fit in with the app model. We promise a lively discussion, examples of code from the field, and time for Q&A!

 

SharePoint Evolutions

Dealing with Application Lifecycle Management in Office 365 app development

Same as Ignite session above

New developer choices - comparing Apps for SharePoint with external Office 365 apps

No sooner have we all learnt how to develop Apps for SharePoint, when Microsoft go and release a new development model. Don’t you just love it when they do that?! In an "external" or "standalone" app, there's no need for the app to be installed to a SharePoint site - and this can provide huge benefits. However, new APIs must be used and the developer must understand how Azure AD fits in. Whilst this model is currently Office 365 only, Microsoft have hinted that this approach may come to on-premises SharePoint soon - so this will become important to all developers. This session is designed to get you up to speed.

Closing notes

I also plan to publish videos of the demos from these sessions. There have been quite a few changes in Azure recently, and my ALM session covers some of the cool things such as Deployment Slots, with a hat tip to other related capabilities such as the “Traffic Routing” feature which can be used for A/B testing and the like.

I’m really looking forward to the panel discussion at Ignite too. Like the other panel members I’ve definitely got some opinions on the topics being discussed :)

Anyway, hope to see you at one of the conferences. Please come and say hello if you’re there!