Today the first Belgian community day organized by five user groups was held in Keerbergen. What a day to get to the destination! Keerbergen is a village located next to Werchter where the yearly Rock Werchter festival takes place.
And today was the first day of the festival so there were a lot of cars stuck in the small roads leading to the festival. But I was lucky because most of the traffic jams were in the opposite direction.
And then again not so lucky because I don't have tickets to the festival ;-)

So now back to the event, it was a good opportunity to network with peers and learn something new in one of the technical sessions.

First session: SharePoint Community tools (BIWUG)
Joris Poelmans presented a general overview of development tools that can be used to help on SharePoint and WSS development. A few of the tools I already use and are listed in my Resources page. The new ones I did not yet know were:

• AppPool recycler for SharePoint Devs: a little tool that sits in the windows tray and lets you choose an IIS application pool to recycle without having to go via IIS or doing an IISRESET.
• WSPBuilder: a Visual Studio project template that builds your manifest.xml, ddf and cabinet file ollowing a 12 hive directory structure.
• U2U CAML Query Builder feature: a SharePoint feature that adds action to build a CAML query via the interface and then saves the query to a document library. The query is then available for use in your custom developments. This is a feature developed by CAML Girl who was present in the audience!

Second session: Visual Studio Team System software lifecycle (VISUG)
Pieter Gheysen presented Visual Studio Team system in the new Visual Studio 2008 (using the Orcas VPC). Nice overview of the functionalities.

After that there was a nice dinner and time to network and get in contact with new people.
Thanks to the organizers!