Last Tuesday we held another DIWUG meeting. The sponsor for this one was Qurius AS, which meant that the event was hosted at their Rijswijk office and that they arranged food and drinks for all attendees. Thanks again Qurius, the dinner was great!
We had about 70 attendees, and some great discussions before, during and after the presentations. Thanks everyone for being there!

There were two presentations, one by Ton Stegeman (@tonstegeman, SharePoint MVP) and one by Dennis Vroegop (@dvroegop, C# MVP).

Ton Stegeman presented about SharePoint being a platform that you can extend with your own (preferably reusable) building blocks.
Ton showed several building blocks that he built to use in real life scenarios. Most solutions Ton demonstrated were developed for specific customers and turned out to be reusable for others. Very often the goal for Ton was to build and install the building block and for the customer to configure it themselves.
The goal of Ton’s presentation was to inspire the audience to build their own SharePoint building blocks and to show people what pitfalls to look out for.
The solutions that Ton demonstrated included:

• Automatically populate the current user in a person field
• Change the behavior of the close button
• Faceted Search in context search (search “This site”)
• Add navigation and page sets to a SharePoint wiki

Ton’s presentation can be found here.

Dennis Vroegop gave a presentation about Excel Services.It was very cool to hear and see a C# developer’s view on Excel Services. Dennis talked about Excel models that he used to build and that he would have to rebuild using code. The code needed to translate an Excel model was extensive and complex. With Excel Services you can simply use the model created by the business, by the people that actually understand the subject. And there is no need to translate the model into code anymore.
Dennis had a great example of using Excel Services as a calculation engine to help your kids with their homework. The Excel sheet he created multiplied numbers 1 to 10 with an input variable x (in Dutch: de sheet berekende de tafel van x). Next Dennis showed how to access the sheet using web services and use the calculation from the sheet in a Windows application.
To summarize:

• Excel Services is a great calculation engine
• It helps companies to make sure there is only “one version of the truth” instead of many different versions of an Excel sheet
• With Excel Services there is no need for one person to have both in-depth knowledge of the business and the technique (programming language)
• Start playing around with it and discover the powerful possibilities of Excel Services!

Dennis’ presentation can be found here.

Again, thanks all and we hope to see you again next time!