So last Saturday saw the first of what I hope will be the first of many SPRetreats. Andrew Woodward (21stApps) and Ben Robb (Cscape) organised a gathering of SharePoint people down at cScape’s London office. It’s been quite a while since I spent a whole day writing SharePoint code so was looking forward to getting back into the swing.

The days “challenge”

The day was laid out into  five one hour slots each focusing on repeating the same tasks but with better efficiency (muscle reflex memory style).we were split into pairs and rotated every hour. I was looking forward to working with some new acquaintances. Andrew and Ben ran through the challenge which was to produce a ‘cross sell’ webpart which displayed related news to the current page.

The sessions

Session One:

So the day began. Looking at the requirement I had already tens of questions to asks (it’s the Technical Architect training). What was a news article? how many were produced per day? Was it a publishing site ? How was the site structured? etc etc The Architect part of me obviously getting the upper hand over wanting to get my hands dirty with code . So our pair called over the customer (Ben) and we began to ask away. 20 minutes of the 60 minutes later and we were now armed with enough information to make recommendations about a technical solution.

As one should always do, start with the OOB functions, Summary Links and Content Editor were ruled out on the grounds of authoring overhead. CQWP was the next candidate, this seemed promising but its limitation to the current site collection felt like a concern so this was discounted. Next up was search, now this was a possibility, leveraging the core results webpart with custom xsl. Combine this with some custom development and we felt we had our recommendation…. maybe 30seconds before time as well :)

Show and tell was next, each pair spent 3 minutes or so explaining what they had done for the  last hour. I must admit I was quite surprised to see all the other pairs had begun to crank out code solutions – without asking the customer any questions !. Of course, Once we’d been around the room all pairs benefited from the information that we had been gathered.

Session Two:

This session I paired up with a new “buddy”. Based on session one’s info we began with discussing some high level design. So we’d be using search, through a custom webpart and to allow the entire platform  to benefit we decided the managed metadata service should be used for the item categorisation.  (being a typical customer - Andrew threw in the curve ball of cross site collection  querying – after we been going for about an hour and a half !)

We looked at making use of the new SP2010 Fluent UI to improve the usability and editing experience for the authors.

Show and tell revealed that the information my pair had gathered in session one had been put to good use as most pairs had turned their attentions to search based solutions, one even having something to show.

Lunch:

After session 2 it was off to lunch at the local park – which was fine until the local police showed up and started searching the place for drugs ! (not on us I hasten to add !).  We had rolls, meat and cheese and nibbles – al fresco washed down with Pinot Grigio.

After about 45 mins it was back to SPRetreat for sessions 3,4,5.

Session Three:

New partner and implementation began. Rather than jump straight into using the core results webpart custom code solutions were explored. After adding a column to a list we crawled the site and began to look into the search API. Fortunately I remembered how  the ARGO search results control worked so was able to workout how to do the search programmatically.  Most of the other groups struggled at this point as It proved that  how many rehashed blogs there are about the new features of SP2010 (put ‘Search API to query Managed metadata SharePoint 2010’ into Google) but none actually answered the question posed,.

Show and tell revealed one pair had used the core results webpart as a base and already delivered a sound concept.

Session Four:

This session we focused on trying to use the core results webpart.   Put the search code into an inherited version of the core search results webpart.  The show and tell at this point was very short as groups had not made much progress.  I think Ben tweeted that the bugs were spreading at this point !

Session Five:

For the final session we cheated a little by not deleting the previous solution so we spent the time getting the search to work with the search results but with limited success we managed to make some headway but failed to complete in time.

Retrospective:

Going around the room and gathering the feedback from the group. All agreed that the Saturday slot was the way to do it as it really needed the 8 hours to get the full value.  Splitting the SPRetreat into streams Architect and Dev seemed to be a common suggestion as it was felt that this day had been a little unclear as to the focus and those of us who perform non dev roles hadn’t gone the dev route immediately.

Final Thoughts:

I loved it ! It was great to work with people in other organisations, discuss ideas, explore new avenues of thinking and generally spend 8 hours coding. I think the next one will be even better and I look forward to attending. I was hoping to learn more about unit testing in SharePoint context and hope that the next Dev focused event gives me more opportunity.

Thanks again for Andrew and Ben for taking time to organise it and for the other nine SharePoint guys who attended making for a cracking day !

Down for SharePint at the local hostelry after the event.

(Apologies to Wes Hackett for using the same layout !)