You might be asking yourself what exactly is the SDN Day Mentors’ Hands-On Workshop (or SDNDMHOW for short). Well to answer that question we really have to back up a few months to Sapphire in Orlando. A group of SAP Mentors were sitting around and discussing the TechEd Community Day with Mark Finnern. We wanted to do something special and new for the Community Day this year.
Our discussion quickly turned to ask the question – what is really the most valuable part of the TechEd experience overall? What is it that really sets TechEd apart from any other event throughout the year? Although there is always one jokester in the group that claims the best part of TechEd is the concert/open bar, the consensus was that the truly unique feature of TechEd is the Hands-On Workshops. It is great to be able to hear an expert talk about a subject and maybe even see a demo, but nothing really compares to the value of being able to use the technology yourself and then ask questions that come to mind out of that usage. The only downside is that you can only reserve a maximum of 2 Hands-On sessions during TechEd. That is at most 8 hours of hands-on experience; assuming you pick two, four hour sessions.
And so the SDN Day Mentors' Hands-On Workshop was born. The idea was to take this best aspect of TechEd and let people have the opportunity to engage in 4 extra hours of hands-on materials! There will be four mentors – Rich Heilman of SAP, Ed Herrmann of Colgate, Dan McWeeney of Adobe, and myself – each leading one hour of this 4 hour hands-on session. Each section of the hands-on will be self contained and will cover one major topic. However if you are able to stay for all 4 of the one hour sessions, by the end you will see how all the pieces begin to fit together. In the end you get to pick the brains of 4 SDN mentors and have the software in hand while you do it.
The four of us all have pretty solid ABAP development backgrounds, so that will be the overall focus of this workshop. But we aren’t going to focus on anything old here. In fact the majority of the content in this session will be based upon as yet unreleased new functionality for ABAP developers. We are going to build a basic Sales Order processing transaction – but the technology we are going to explore is going to be anything but basic.
So to breakdown the 4 parts of the workshop:
Persistent and Service Objects – Rich Heilman
- See the latest techniques for build the data access and business logic layers in ABAP
- Preview new ABAP development tools
Adobe Flex Builder – Dan McWeeney
- Install and run Adobe Flex Builder for creating Flex Components
- Learn some tricks and tips for Flex Component Development from someone who is also an ABAP developer
Web Dynpro Islands – Thomas Jung
- With the new Islands functionality in Web Dynpro, you can embed Adobe Flex Components seamlessly into Web Dynpro
- We will take one of the Flex Components that Dan detailed in the previous hour and embed it within Web Dynpro ABAP
Floorplan Manager for Web Dynpro ABAP – Ed Herrmann
- Learn how to use the new Floorplan Manager to create consistent user interfaces
- Take the Web Dynpro components from the previous exercise (which contains the Flex Component from the exercise before that) and wrap them altogether with the business logic from the very first session to create one finished application
As you can see we are going to pack a heck of lot into those four hours. So if you want to give yourself the development edge by being one of the first people to try out new ABAP development techniques like the Floorplan Manager, Islands, and Web Dynpro Drag and Drop – then this is the session for you. And don’t worry if you have already registered for TechEd, but didn’t add on the community day. You can always go back and add the community day into your existing registration. If you are already signed up to attend community day, then you just need to add your name to this wiki page:
https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/Community/SDN+Day+Las+Vegas+2008
Unlike the regular TechEd sessions, we can’t provide laptops for everyone, so this will be a bring your own laptop event. We will be bringing the servers, and the network. You only need to worry about bringing a laptop that has the SAPGUI installed on it. Heck, we will even have a few DVDs with the SAPGUI on it floating around the room just in case. It is really important that you sign up in advance on the WIKI so that we can size the session for the number of interested people. We need to make sure that we have enough room, network connections, server capacity, etc. If only 20 people sign up on the WIKI and then 100 show up the day of the event and want to attend, then there are going to be people who won’t be able to get a logon to the system.
And now before I finish this blog, I have the promised preview of the workshop exercise that we will be building. All the steps that I discussed above spread out over the 4 hours will result in the application that you see in this video.
