The conference continues to inform and inspire...  Today I started off with Eric Shupps’ session on Custom Site Definitions, very entertaining but also very informative, he took us through packaging up our site definitions, the pros and cons of SPD and even some places where it is good – rapid prototyping of a master page before building it for real into a solution, so often internally we tend to only use it for DVWPs.

Next up was Maurice Prather with Secure Coding for The Administrator, it’s amazing the ongoing banter between dev’s and admins . We took a look at Secure Code, what does it mean?

·         The practice of writing code that can withstand malicious attacks

·         Secure code is Robust Code

Maurice expanded on this and then took us through the extra protection that SharePoint puts in place for us, stopping code from doing what it shouldn’t, but also the cases where Full trust can creep in and prevent these safeguards from working. Watch out for changes to PageParserPaths settings in your web.config files.

Neil Hodgkinson on Patching SharePoint – I thought I would know most of the content of this session, how wrong could I be? Neil gave us a really thorough tour of Hotfixes, Cumulative Updates and Service Packs. I hadn’t realised that the Revision number in a build number, e.g. the 1000 part of 12.0.6219.1000, had any meaning beyond just an arbitrary number, but it does:

1000 – Service Pack

30xx – Private build – you really should not be running these in production

5000 – Hotfix or CU

500x – COD Build

He also clarified the differences between Microsoft’s minimum supported build, recommended build and the latest and greatest build and how these affect the type of response you will get from PSS.

Building High Performance Solutions on Moss 2007 or should that be how do I cut down the bandwidth that Moss eats when we use it for Internet facing websites? Andrew Connell gave us some good solutions touching on your site topology for location of secured items, “customised” pages came up once again, reducing the page payload, how to speed up the CQWP and instant improvements with the art of IIS HTTP compression. A  slip on who should be in the kitchen, whilst explaining that you should just crank up the compression level to start with, will his wife hear about it though, did it make it to twitter?

The final session I sat in on was the IW Open mike session, and heard my favourite quote for the day, in answer to a question about the size of content DBs Rob Foster said “if you let content DBs grow bigger than 100GB then you run out of hours in the day to do the daily backups” to which the reply came “That’ll be a limitation of the solar system then!”.

I can’t believe it’s the final day tomorrow, it’s gone very quick and no sign of flagging. Just need to choose where to eat tonight...