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The Expert’s Conference (TEC) is coming up fast (April 29th – May 2nd) in San Diego, CA. TEC is unique in that it is specifically geared towards in-depth, 400 level sessions that are all deep dives. No overview sessions, no intro stuff. This is where the rubber-meets-the-road and you find out exactly HOW to do that really cool stuff you’ve previously only seen or heard about. Remember those two slides that were glossed over at the last conference you attended and you thought “WAIT! That’s what I wanted to learn about”. Well, this is the conference to help you truly wrap your head around those in-depth topics.
So, somehow I have fooled the great people at Quest into thinking I’m one of those “expert” types and I have been invited to speak at TEC on… you guessed it… SharePoint & jQuery… I’ve got to figure out a way to get more jQuery “experts” involved so I can speak on other topics. 😉
Anyway, you may be asking yourself what exactly a 400 level jQuery session might look like? Right? I know I was. After all, once you know the basics, the skies the limits? So, after much thought and ear bending of some of my colleagues like Mr. Marc Anderson… I’ve put together what I hope is an insightful and useful session. At first I considered doing a deep dive into Templating, Design Patterns, Fiddler traces, and really esoteric things that would have put me to sleep. However, I always appreciate and get more out of real world examples of what you can actually do with a technology. So, what will you learn if you attend my session? So glad you asked!!
- Quick review of the basics – my biggest complaint about jQuery and JavaScript is the sheer number of options you have as a developer. I’m going to spend 5 or 10 minutes discussing some pros and cons about different options for development, deployment, and debugging as well as elicit opinions from you guys (hey, why shouldn’t I take the opportunity to learn too?)
- How to read list information from multiple SharePoint lists and how to store than information for later use. I’m not going to just be reading list data and dumping it to the screen. We’ll be doing some calculations on SharePoint list data from more than one list to generate some real world reports.
- How to use templating effectively. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one dataset and just send it to different templates to display different reports or graphs? I’ll show you how to achieve this and also introduce you to the concept of design patterns but don’t plan on going to deep into that.
- After we build some useful reports, I’m going to show you how quickly you can apply a couple of third party libraries to easily create a print view of your report and import your report into tools like Excel.
- As time allows I’ll dig into some coolness with the Bing Maps API and we can talk about some more of the visually flashy things you can do with jQuery to ooh and ahh your users.
There you have it. My goal is for you to come out of my session understanding the true potential of jQuery beyond the glitz and buzzing animations and be equipped to use it to solve real world business problems.
So, if you are tired of just scratching the surface and really want to dive deep into your favorite SharePoint subject, this is your chance to do it. Plus, San Diego is pretty sweet if you’ve never been before. You can register for TEC here. If the price is an issue, ping me and I may be able to find a discount code for you. Regardless, it should be a great time and I’m looking forward to learning a lot myself. After all, someday I hope to be an expert. J