I’m really looking forward to returning to my favorite city in the US: Boston! Next week Boston hosts SPTechCon, a great SharePoint conference. I’ll be there to present three sessions and I can’t wait to see everyone! Here are my two sessions:

101 - How to be a SharePoint Developer
So you're a developer, you've heard about this SharePoint thing and want to jump on the bandwagon? This is the session for you. Here you'll learn about the various options you have in setting up a SharePoint development environment. Then we'll explore the developer tools and build a few common features. Finally, you'll learn the best places to go to get information and help going forward from books, classes and online forums.

405 - Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions in SharePoint 2010
The Managed Metadata Service application in SharePoint 2010 allows users to create and utilize taxonomies in various ways. Microsoft has included a robust taxonomy API in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged in custom solutions. In this session, we'll explore how you can import taxonomies programmatically and create custom solutions that leverage taxonomies in various ways.

802 - SharePoint Ribbon Customization Deep Dive
SharePoint 2010 introduced a new paradigm in the user experience: the ribbon. This user-friendly control contains all the tools available to users when interacting with SharePoint to get their job done. Developers can customize and extend the ribbon for custom solutions. In this session, we'll examine the different components of the ribbon as well as how to create page components and asynchronous callbacks, and to prompt the user with intuitive dialogs.

Should be a good time. I saw some stuff on Twitter about a SharePint on Friday night… doesn’t make much sense to me to do it after the show. I’m sure we’ll have enough gatherings on Wednesday & Thursday night!