Australian SharePoint Conference 2012, March 20-21, Melbourne

2012 will be the third Australian SharePoint Conference [agenda], and my third time speaking at this fantastic event. In my opinion, the AUSPC conference has some of the world's best speakers (and I gladly exclude myself from that list), exceeding even the Australian Tech-Ed event in terms of breadth and depths of SharePoint content. There are simply no other event this dedicated to SharePoint within Australia.

In the year 2011 we saw tremendous growth in SharePoint, and new techniques with jQuery becoming very popular.

Silverlight is now moving towards a backseat, to my dismay - I argue that it remains a very useful arsenal in providing the tools to extend SharePoint's capabilities, but with the advances in HTML5 and the myriad of devices that our users are now plugging to SharePoint, a different future is fast approaching, and it doesn't look that great for Silverlight.

In the new year 2012, I think there will be stronger focus in using HTML5 and JavaScript going forward, with may be a good sprinkle of Metro, pending Windows 8's release.

I will be presenting an updated version of my talk "Building your own Custom REST services and consuming them with jQuery AJAX". Time permitting, I want to add a tiny section on KnockoutJS. Aside from future SharePoint Saturday events, I'll be posting the entire REST services talk in a series of blog posts in the upcoming months.

Also, consider the sad cancellation of January's Sydney SharePoint User Group, I hope to be able to present a talk on KnockoutJS in a Developer session as early as February, fingers crossed. A previous version of my talk on REST services is still here.

If you thought you've seen everything there is to know about SharePoint, hold on to your seatbelts, because you are about to be blown away! See you soon around Australia, our first stop, in the Australian SharePoint Conference, March 20-21.