Well it was a great night last night. We had a really good turn out (around the 90 mark I think in the end) and it was a cracking dev-focused session.
Firstly, hats off to Jaap Vossers (@jvossers / blog.vossers.com) who stepped up for his first community event and gave a really good presentation on jQuery and SharePoint.
My personal favourites were the Developer Dashboard Visualiser (which created a graphical time-line of how long each page component took to load, which you could drill-into) and the Site Settings snap-in (which allowed you to drop in the "Site Settings" page for the current site by pressing Ctrl-S from any page!). Lots of content in there, including using Web Services and utilising some of the Client Object Model.
Finally Jaap ran a prize draw giving away 5 free copies of a jQuery development book! Good stuff!
My turn came next, presenting on SharePoint 2010 Sandbox Development. For those of you who follow me on Twitter (@MartinHatch) you will know that I accidentally deleted my virtual machines last week so had to rebuild my farm and re-code all my examples.
Well .. not one to try making things easier for myself I decided to code all of them from scratch (Sandbox Web Part, Full Trust Proxy and a Solution Validator).
The only one which didn't work was the Full Trust Proxy (I then found out I had a note in my slide deck on the "demo" slide which read - "make sure you re-start the Sandbox Service after you install the full-trust proxy" .. I have updated my slide deck now to include that VERY important line!) but overall I think it went very well and muchos thanks to all the feedback on Twitter (make sure you use the #SUGUK hashtag!)
My own slide decks and code samples can all be found on my Sky Drive account here:
http://cid-60f12a60288e5607.skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?resid=60F12A60288E5607!621
Finally we had an impromtu "Ask the Experts Session" .. with the awesome team of Eric Shupps, Chris O'Brien, Andrew Woodward, Steve Smith, Jaap Vossers and myself!
The evening ended up with a SharePint (although I had to head off to get the last train out into the sussex wilderness I call home!).
If you were there .. hope you enjoyed it (all feedback welcome!). If not ... I hope to see you at the next SUGUK meeting! :)