Oct 302009

SharePoint SPSource bonnet open

If you have been using SPSource to reverse engineer Content Types, Site Columns, Module (files), List Templates etc. please take some time to provide some feedback over at CodePlex. I have the bonnet up on the source this weekend fixing some loose ends.

SP… what?

If you haven’t used SPSource…why not? ;-) Seriously check out the webcast (list template demo) to get an idea of what this can do for your Development Lifecycle.

#SP2010

I’ll be upgrading this tool so that it works with SP2010. I will also be looking at cool ways to integrate it with VS2010 as well and also with WSPBuilder 2010 too.

Feature Requests

Get your feature requests in now if you have anything you want the tool to do around reverse engineering it currently doesn’t do.

Volunteers

If anyone is keen to hop on board and help build this tool feel free to contact me. @richfinn started this project and it has saved many an hour for me alone and so I figured I’d give back by adding the List Template reverse engineer bits.

Thanks!

Thanks to @grumpywookie, @gvaro, @richfinn, dalefrancis, aaroh, cdog, zioj, SharePointRadi for your feedback!

Published: 10/30/2009 3:23 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Oct 282009

SharePoint 2010 is one greedy beast…and will block adoption

So I saw the Setting Up a Development environment for SharePoint 2010 was posted on MSDN. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this:

“In any development environment, you should use a computer with an x64-capable CPU, and at least 2 gigabytes (GB) and preferably 4 GB of RAM for SharePoint Foundation, and 6 to 8 GB of RAM for SharePoint Server.”

I think it’s great that Microsoft have been so honest and realistic with these figures, as MOSS2007 recommended RAM was 1Gb, which was a load of tripe!

To give some history on this, I currently battle daily with customers to set up SharePoint Developers with the required environments and have found that the SharePointDevWiki.com “Building a SharePoint Development Environment” page is the most hit on that site.

The current battle

The reason I battle with customers is because most organisations don’t treat Developers properly and give them a workstation the same as every Joe Bloggs who works there. This is probably plausible for running Visual Studio and firing up Cassini web server for ASP.NET development and even running SQL Server 2008 on it.

Then if you want to install MOSS2007 or WSS3.0 you’re adding a whole layer of complexity on top that requires more grunt and usually some isolation that leads to Virtual Machines. This leads to needing at least 2Gb RAM for a guest VM and some left over for the host …so you’re looking at 3-4Gb RAM in a workstation. This is a big push for some Organisations now!

Greedy beast

Step into the SP2010 arena where 64-bit is REQUIRED and now with the statement that at least 2Gb, which I’ve heard just doesn’t cut it if you are working it in every day and you’re looking at a powerful workstation for each Developer! Realistically you’re looking at either using Boot-VHD to jump into a controlled VHD environment to develop and use your whole 4Gb RAM or buying a beast of a new workstation to run it as a guest and still have your host OS available.

You can’t “go dark” to do SharePoint Development

One reason for wanting your host OS available is that you will still want to check e-mails in Outlook, surf the web, use other office apps, iTunes (whatever), Twitter client etc. You get my point, you don’t want to set up these everyday things in each Development environment and you don’t want to have to “go dark” everytime you do SharePoint Development.

Sandboxed Solutions is the answer…

Yes you can use Sandboxed Solutions to have one Development environment and isolate client work but there are limitations to this approach e.g. not being able to use SPLimitedWebPart manager or certain Event Receivers or Job Timers. So it’s not true isolation.

Adoption Issues

I honestly believe that this could become the stumbling block for Organisations moving forward if they can’t commit to purchasing adequate hardware for SharePoint Developers/Customizers. People were saying the 64-bit was going to hurt infrastructure guys, but I can see the RAM in virtualised and physical infrastructure being the big costs here. It’s already an issue where you have to fight for an extra Gb RAM on existing servers.

A Possible Solution

I can see more and more Organisations using a cloud approach for this and hosting SharePoint 2010 environments off-site and just logging into them. This way the workstations they use don’t need 8Gb RAM in them to run SPS2010 and they just pay a monthly fee and remote desktop into them.

I just priced up a new laptop (i7 Core, 8Gb RAM, 256Gb SSD) and it came to over AUD$4500! Now think about the push from Microsoft to get ASP.NET developers across to SharePoint Development. Can you really see them having to spend that much money just to get on board? Not to mention the up skilling to be able to develop on the platform.

I am going to be very interested to see whether being able to install SPF2010 (and SPS2010 ?) on Windows 7 will not require as much power. Although this will clearly have limitations too on what services are running etc.

Please check out my other post on The 12 factors to turn ASP.NET developers to SharePoint 2010 if you found this interesting.

Published: 10/28/2009 4:03 AM | 4 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Oct 262009

The 12 factors to turn ASP.NET developers to SharePoint 2010

I’ve already posted a webcast and created a wiki page that has caused a lot of discussion on the wiki on “How ASP.NET developers can leverage the SharePoint 2007 Platform”. This post will reflect on the SharePoint 2010 conference last week and to nominate 12 factors that will hopefully be the tipping point for ASP.NET developers to start leveraging the SharePoint 2010 platform.

I will be using my ASP.NET Readify colleagues as a good bench mark on how successful the adoption of development in SharePoint 2010 platform is because these guys are classed as the elite of Australia.
One thing to note about SharePoint development is that it leverages the .NET Framework, specifically ASP.NET and all the other web technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, XSLT. To become a good SharePoint Developer you not only need to have a base understanding of these technologies, but also the SharePoint platform.

The 12 Factors

Factor 1: Visual Studio 2010 Toolset

In SharePoint 2007, the toolset (VSeWSS 1.3) was used less than the community toolset called WSPBuilder due to its limitations

All developers love new tools and my ASP.NET colleagues at Readify would have all downloaded Visual Studio 2010 Beta on Monday 19th to check out how it’s tracking from their perspective. Of course, most of these guys will be unaware that the SharePoint toolset is included in this offering, this is the first score on the scoreboard for the SharePoint product team.

The VS2010 SharePoint toolset has come along way since VSeWSS (thank god!) and the most compelling feature is the “F5 experience” of firing up a SharePoint page and being able to hit breakpoints in your code as you debug web parts, application pages, workflows etc.

More will be at @SPDevWiki VS2010 page.

Factor 2: Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 integration

In SharePoint 2007, the toolset (VSeWSS 1.3) did not support source control in an "straight forward" way

ANY web development should include at least source control if not a more mature Application Life Cycle Management tool such as TFS. With the release of TFS 2010 in Q1 2010, the SharePoint toolset will integrate 100% with it.

With TFS 2010 Basic being “free” to use and including source control but none of the data warehouse reporting or SharePoint integration. It will encourage even the smallest of teams to get their SharePoint products into TFS.

More will be at @SPDevWiki TFS integration page.

Factor 3: Windows 7/Vista workstation host

In SharePoint 2007, developers who wanted to debug realistically needed their own server environment deployed

With the announcement that SharePoint 2010 would be capable of being installed on Windows 7/Vista, the SharePoint Product Team thought they had cracked the biggest hurdle…there weren’t that many cheers from the crowd when they mentioned this….I think they were expecting this to be huge.

Of course this is going to be great for organisations who can’t provision server environments for each developer, or who do not have the virtualisation software or hardware to run one up locally on their workstation or on central infrastructure. I still need to get confirmation on what hardware is required to even run this from a RAM perspective.

To play devils advocate, Bamboo posted a solution for this in SharePoint 2007, how many Developers actually use this approach…and if not why not? Do these reasons change in SharePoint 2010?

More will be at @SPDevWiki Building a SharePoint 2010 Development machine page.

Factor 4: Sandboxed Solutions

In SharePoint 2007, managed code was deployed to Production to find that under load it brought the web servers to a grinding halt

The Windows 7/Vista story is great, but most developers will have multiple customers and this typically meant having multiple environments. With the ability to isolate Solution Package Deployment in one environment and execution into Sandboxed Solutions, this has resolved this little issue.
Not only will it isolate Solution Packages for Developers, but it has allowed Administrators to do the same thing. Administrators can take these Solution Packages and put them into their environment wrapped in cotton wool and allow it to be executed with some defined controls to ensure it doesn’t bring the server to a grinding halt.

More will be at @SPDevWiki Sandboxed Solutions page.

Factor 5: Developer Dashboard

In SharePoint 2007, the feedback a developer got basically came from page load times, CPU/RAM performance reports and ranting business users in Production

As with any development platform, a lot of developers do not like calling framework API’s because they are not sure what they are doing in the background. The introduction of the Developer Dashboard will give Developers immediate feedback as they test their functionality on their workstation.

More will be at @SPDevWiki Developer Dashboard page.

Factor 6: Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility

In SharePoint 2007, the VSeWSS 1.3 were not easily extendable and that is why a lot of Developers moved to WSPBuilder

Visual Studio 2010 provides a rich set of project templates and tools that Developers can use to build SharePoint Solution Packages. Often there is a need to create new or extend existing ones, with this release there are hooks into: various events to do with packaging; to add and extend nodes in the Server Explorer (think SharePoint Manager 2007) and even create new designers.

Factor 7: Accessibility

Accessibility and SharePoint 2007 didn’t really go in the same sentence without the phrase “not compliant” in it

The Product Team has invested a lot of time in ensuring that SharePoint 2010 is WCAG AA compliant. I have yet to test this and to ensure that all areas are compliant or whether it is just the end rendering areas. For example, is the InfoPath and Visio Web interfaces compliant, the Content Authoring screens etc.

I watched Sara Ford talk heavily about the focus of Visual Studio and Accessibility, but is InfoPath and the Microsoft Office products accessible too? Areas not really discussed at the Conference either.

More will be at @SPDevWiki Accessibility page.

Factor 8: Export to WSP

In SharePoint 2007, the divide between SharePoint Designer 2007 and UI customisations and Visual Studio Development was an ocean

The ability to export to a Solution Package customisations implemented in both SharePoint Designer and the UI gives the ability for Business Users and Designers to be part of the Application Lifecycle in terms of prototyping functionality. The ability to re-use work already done by these guys early on in the process and then to make enhancements in Visual Studio programmatically which weren’t possible declaratively is going to be a compelling story!

The limitations of this Export to WSP aren’t quite known yet, but I will endeavour to explore this as the SPSource tool that myself and Rich Finn wrote currently fill this void in SharePoint 2007 with Lists, Content Types, Site Columns and Module files.

More will be at @SPDevWiki Import WSP page.

Factor 9: Client Object Model (OM)

In SharePoint 2007, interfacing from the client was limited to Web Services and involved a lot of knowledge of jQuery

The introduction of the Client OM in SharePoint 2010 is going to empower client Web Developers with mad JavaScript skills and Silverlight Developers the ability to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s).

I was slightly disappointed with the 101 demos shown on this at SPC09 and also what is available in SharePoint 2010 out of the box. I thought a lot more of the interface would take advantage of this but obviously not.

More will be at @SPDevWiki Client OM page.

Factor 10: Application Services

In SharePoint 2007, the Shared Services Provider (SSP) had various issues around restoring in new environments as well as scaling within the farm

The introduction to the Application Services component into SharePoint 2010 and deprecation of the SSP will have a huge effect on how things are developed in SharePoint.

The main advantage I see is the ability to allow a SharePoint Farm to run an Application Service and other Farms to consume this. This gives the ability for Organisations to host Application Services in the cloud and other internal Farms to consume this.

More will be at @SPDevWiki Application Services page.

Factor 11: Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

In SharePoint 2007, the BDC was limited to Read and the tools available to generate the connections were limited

Forget about the BDC, Microsoft did…they hardly mentioned the existing BDC functionality in SharePoint 2007 when they talked about BCS and what it could do at SPC09. BCS is extremely powerful with both read and write capability. Not only will this be able to be surfaced up into a BCS web part, but also as an “external list” in a Site and then directly into Office Client applications. It can also be implemented in SharePoint Designer now as well as Visual Studio 2010.

An amazing example was an external list of contact information being pulled from a SQL table and then surfaced up as an Outlook Contact list that could be edited and pushed all the way back to SQL.

More will be at @SPDevWiki BCS page.

Factor 12: Platform Extensibility

In SharePoint 2007, there were various areas that you simply couldn’t extend leaving dead ends where hacks were the only approach

The Product Team has focused on extensibility in this release to get around Developers having to hack away at the out of the box files so much. There have been a lot of changes to the User Interface to make it more extensible and also in the underlying framework with Event Receivers, Application Services, Solution Package Deployment Model etc.

Some areas were just playing catch up such as event hooks for Site Collection Adds/Deletes which really should have been there in 2007, it was such an obvious architectural need as they had it at List level.

The Ugly Truth

Backwards Compatibility

SharePoint 2007 is going to be around for a LONG time, I’m flying back to Perth from Las Vegas today and about to jump on a 2003 migration to 2007! The fact that Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint toolset does not support SharePoint 2007 is very very disappointing. Effectively it means although it’s great that we can install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7, we are still going to be having heaps of SharePoint 2007 environments with Visual Studio 2008 and VSeWSS if we play by the Microsoft rulebook.
The solution? Use Visual Studio 2010 with WSPBuilder for SharePoint 2007 stuff…the downfall for Microsoft is that people will start using it for SharePoint 2010 rather than having to learn two different toolsets…

Deactivate, Retract, Delete, Add, Deploy, Activate

One of the SharePointDevWiki.com shirt slogans was “Deactivate, Retract, Delete, Add, Deploy, Activate”…”SharePoint Dedication”. There’s no doubt you need patience to be a SharePoint Developer that’s for sure! This story really hasn’t changed and we saw plenty of pauses whilst the “F5 experience” was kicked in during presentations this week. Sure it’s all in VS2010 now and it is a press of a key, but the speed in which it spun up hasn’t changed much, it’s no Cassini web server.

No .NET Framework 4.0 support

As much as all the existing SharePoint Developers can’t wait to get their hands on SharePoint 2010, the ASP.NET Developers can’t wait to get their hands on .NET Framework 4.0. So turning around and telling them they are stuck with ASP.NET 2.0 framework and Workflow 3.5 framework will certainly cause some grumbles. I can completely sympathise with the SharePoint product teams decision as the .NET 4.0 framework isn’t out of beta and having this dependency to go live would have been tough. I spoke to Paul Andrew and he said at this stage it isn’t even publically confirmed for SP1.

Workstation requirements

So it now works on Windows 7/Vista, but it still requires 64-bit hardware and realistically 4Gb RAM minimum. Not everyone is lucky enough to have this, of course all the Readify guys pretty much carry 8Gb RAM i7’s already so this won’t be a problem for them, but for governments who were struggling to host SharePoint 2007 32-bit 2Gb RAM development environments, there’s going to be a few problems.

Unit Testing

One of the SharePointDevWiki.com shirt slogans was “I dream of ISPWeb”…”Legalise SharePoint Unit Testing”, I did this in jest as ISPWeb interface didn’t exist in SharePoint 2007 and I guessed it’d be put into SharePoint 2010 framework as there is a lot demand for unit testing in the Developer community.
The good news is that there is a solution, and it’s the same pain staking solution for SharePoint 2007 that I have created a web cast for on the SharePointDevWiki.com.

Versioning

In my most popular posts on Leveraging the SharePoint Platform I discuss the issues around deploying a list template with associated content types, creating an instance from it, but then wanted to change the schema of this list instance. This topic still didn’t come up last week which I was disappointed. I am aware it was discussed heavily at the MVP Summit, but didn’t make it onto any presentations I’ve seen or anyone else I asked.

Documentation

The MSDN documentation is already up for Beta 2 and I was extremely disappointed with the death by GhostDoc approach to the documentation. Plenty of people gave feedback that having API framework driven documentation is not how Developers want to work. They can find this stuff out for themselves with Reflector! What Developers need is scenario based solutions for EACH functional area of the platform. Areas such as BCS, InfoPath, Excel Services never got this focus in SharePoint 2007, and from reading the focus so far it’ll be the same in 2010.

One key message at the conference was around “Best Practices” and that they won’t be available until at least SP1 time frame because this comes with the maturity of using the platform.

Certification

It is well known in the community that the MCTS exams are very poor and don’t really test enough to guarantee the skill set of a SharePoint Developer or Administrator. There was hardly that much of a push in the questions around Solution Packages that was really mandatory in SharePoint 2007 to enforce quality.

The certifications are still being discussed and will definitely not be ready for April 2010 from speaking to a few at the conference. This is somewhat disappointing for me as I try to evangelise on the platform and encourage adoption. There are plenty of other courses such as the Ignite courses (non in Australia) and a bunch of courses by various vendors that will be available at RTM.

Disposing

SPDisposeChecker is alive and well with SharePoint 2010 as demonstrated by various presenters at SPC09. This has not gone away and will continue to bite Developers hard!

The Sandboxed Solutions will definitely help this out though, I can see it now…Administrators running around with print outs of Solution Packages that have gone higher than their point limits and pushing the blame straight to the source. Lets hope they have enough emotional intelligence to deal with this is a decent way ;-)

In Conclusion

Some feedback on Conference

So looking at the list of factors all of these apart from Windows 7/Vista and Application Services were well known via the Sneak Peek videos. Microsoft didn’t really hold much back in my opinion, and in SharePointPodShow podcast it was quoted that only 10% had been talked about. Clearly from a SharePoint Developer perspective this wasn’t the case.

A step forward

The SharePoint Product Team has taken a well needed step forward with the development tools, but don’t forget that the community has had a decent toolset (WSPBuilder), source control integration (it worked in WSPBuilder), a developer dashboard (via ISV product), “install on Vista” via Bamboo, accessibility (by drawing blood from a stone for a long time), export to WSP (SPSource), a client OM (jQuery to RPC/Web Services) and a Server Explorer client (SharePoint Manager 2007).

In my mind, the Product Team have basically played catch up with an official answer. This will make the job of developers in Organisations who don’t want anything but Microsoft products in there easier.

I’ve always been pretty hard on toolset in the past and I will continue to give my feedback as I know they listen, I’ve been told they do (so hello product team!).

The community will save the day

The blogging community, forums, podcasts, webcasts and wikis out there saved the SharePoint 2007 community and it will continue to save them in 2010. I was a bit disappointed in the keynote that they thanked the Product Team, Partners, and Customers, but not the community for their support with SharePoint. Without the community there is no way Microsoft Support would have been able to cope with all of the issues.

I’m hoping that the SharePointDevWiki.com will become a central collaboration resource for not only Developers, but Administrators also with lots of scenario based, recommended approaches content.

I finally got to meet some of my SharePoint heroes,one being Carsten Keutmann and he said he’d have a release of WSPBuilder with the public SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 available on November 16th. I’ve promised to help him release documentation and webcasts on this. I am also hoping to have SPSource ready not long after that as this gap has not been filled in full either.

There will be plenty of new voids to fill, such as a nice wizard to build all the plumbing that is needed for an Application Service. For sample: XSLTs for SharePoint views, jQuery calls to the Client OM, and lots lots more.

Published: 10/26/2009 8:48 PM | 4 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Oct 262009

Thoughts on SharePoint Conference 2009

So I’m sitting at San Francisco airport, terrible international area by the way *sigh*. Anyways, thought I would start to write my thoughts on #SPC09.

The Keynote

It was very exciting to see Steve Ballmer start the keynote off with so much energy and knowledge of the platform, but it slowly went from him being very business focused to the other guys coming on and jumping directly into a technical extravaganza.

Internet Facing Sites

Steve managed to shock me by stating that “MOSS2007 was never built for Internet Facing sites”…even though MCMS2003 was migrated into that product which was for Internet Facing sites. It was as if they were throwing out their garbage and stating not to use MOSS2007 for WCM and to wait for SP2010. I feel sorry for integrators currently rolling one out and having to explain themselves.

Sneak Peek

To be completely honest I was a bit disappointed that there didn’t seem to be that much more than what was shown in the Sneak Peek videos and site in the keynote. There was plenty of new content in other sessions that dived deep into what was there.
I will spend more time on “what’s new”/”what’s changed” shortly on my blog and the SharePointDevWiki.com.

The Sessions

I wasn’t that happy with some of the sessions, the presenters clearly didn’t prepare their demos very well as there were a lot that just didn’t work. I appreciate that Beta 2 was fairly new, but they had had it at least a week before and should have run through them at least five times each to ensure smooth live presentations. I didn’t spend $1400 and travel half way around the world to watch people who were under prepared…there would’ve been plenty of others who would have happily took their place! Including me!

Some of the levels for the sessions weren’t exactly spot on with 101 talks on Silverlight consuming 30 minutes of a 75 minute presentation on Silverlight and SharePoint. Or others not delving into Visual Studio 2010 until around 45 minutes in.

Networking

Personally I had a great time, it was awesome to meet so many of the people that I either watch their contributions on SharePointDevWiki.com, read their blogs, read their tweets, listen to their podcasts, vote for their answers in forums or admire their products.

Having the personal meeting makes such a big difference no matter how much you connect by other mediums. I met my SharePoint Developer hero @waldekm which was awesome:

The SharePointDevWiki.com T-Shirts

The SharePointDevWiki.com t-shirts went down an absolute treat and I managed to hand out pretty much all of them before the keynote at the registration event on Sunday night.

This was a great way for people to recognise tweeps from the community and certainly made me stand out in the crowd. It was great to have people running up to me and saying how much they love what I do in the community on Twitter, on my blog and facilitating the SharePointDevWiki.com. A big thanks to Vizit SP (Atalasoft) and SharePoint Delivery for sponsoring this batch of t-shirts, more info on the sponsorship here.

Twitter

During this conference I wondered how it used to work before Twitter. It was a great medium to track other peoples thought in real-time during a session as they sat listening to the presenter. The session code hash tags that I published on SharePointDevWiki.com really helped everyone to scope their tweets based on where they were. This allowed me to have search columns set up to filter just to that sessions discussions.

It was a shame that the conference guys weren’t that switched on with this like at Australia Tech Ed where presenters promoted the Twitter hash tags before each session to encourage it.

Time difference

I really never got used to the time difference and that was probably the worst thing about the week as I felt tired the whole time and my body never really felt settled. Las Vegas is an interesting place and I can’t wait to be in the fresh air of Perth on the beach and out of the air conditioned conference centre and casinos that I have spent the last week in!

Nightlife

Las Vegas is different, very different…unique! I had some great nights out with the SharePoint community and have definitely made some friends for life out of the experience!

Would I come back to Vegas for a holiday? No. It’s not my cup of tea at all…I like being outdoors on the beach with a more relaxed laid back speed of leisure. It was a great venue for a conference and some of the night life was excellent like Pure at Caesars palace (thanks @givenscj). I’m not much of a gambler and was disappointed that I hardly saw any ice hockey games being played AT ALL, Vegas is a football town.

Conference Party

The party at the Mandalay Beach on Tuesday night was amazing, 7000+ people all fanatical about SharePoint was awesome! It was great to see everyone let their hair down and enjoy themselves! Huey Lewis and the News were ok, but they weren’t on stage for that long. I really don’t remember being interviewed by Dux either!

Did I stick to my rules?

Midnight curfew

Well I did better than Australia Tech Ed where I was out every night until at least 3am. This time I went out Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday night and was home mostly by 2am. I would have probably gone out every night if it hadn’t been for jet lag ;-)

Networking

I had a list of 50 people I wanted to meet and I managed to get round and introduce myself to all of them and more! Which was great! I’m sure I missed a few people, but I was more prepared this time.

Photos

I took lots of photos of Vegas on the combination of iPhone 3GS and my Canon IXUS. But Peter Sullivan (also from Readify) has taken some awesome photos of me with guys in SPDevWiki shirts etc. They’re all over the place…Facebook, Flickr, Blogs and more! I’m going to try and consolidate them all on Flickr.
I still don’t think I got enough pictures and never got one of a big group in SPDevWiki shirts *sigh* next time!

Lessons Learnt

Focus even more on networking

I think Rob Bogue’s approach to conferences was great, he said that you can consume the sessions whenever you like but you can’t connect to vendors, the community, to Microsoft people and everyone else who eats, breaths, sleeps SharePoint any other time. So, next time I’ll definitely concentrate on networking more with Vendors and Microsoft and pick a few sessions of people I’d like to see present. Andrew Connell was certainly the best session in my opinion on Application Services which was the last session of the conference.

Take more t-shirts!

The t-shirts were a big hit and next time I plan to have a lot more t-shirts to give out as 80 went very very quickly and I spent the whole week apologising to people for not having any left.

Data Roaming

So being from Australia caused some issues with having access to the Internet which proved difficult as all the Americans were communicating and organising social events via Twitter! So the best thing to do was to tag along! There was free wifi at the conference, but the hotel internet was USD$15 a day which was an expense I could have done without!

International Phone Calls

After the first day I ended up by Skype Out credit to call back to Australia via the Internet. I had Skype on my iPhone and laptop which gave me the ability to call international numbers extremely cheaply!

Published: 10/26/2009 4:33 AM | 3 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Oct 162009

Does JavaScript/jQuery Enhancements to SharePoint Count as Development?

I had a great twitter discussion today with @bsimser & @sympmarc about SharePoint and jQuery which was triggered by an End User SharePoint post by @sympmarc. I pointed them to my “jQuery: The SharePoint band aid” and @bsimser came back with well does jQuery enhancements in SharePoint count as development? So here’s my opinion on this:

Are jQuery enhancements development? YES!

jQuery is a JavaScript library which is executed on runtime within the client browser. People may say that because it isn’t compiled code, such as C#/VB.NET, that it is not development. Well that is not true, JavaScript is a programming language and can be debugged using tools such as Visual Studio 2008 or Firebug.

People may compare JavaScript to XHTML markup because they can write it in SharePoint Designer with no hassles or even worse straight into a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP). There is a huge difference between XTHML and JavaScript because XTHML is a declarative language whereas JavaScript is a programmatic langauge. It is like comparing CAML markup (declarative) to SharePoint API calls (programmatic).

Should we be letting or even encouraging “End Users” (or as Microsoft tags them “Information Workers”)? I do not think so. One of the big things I raised back in the original article was that JavaScript can be used to manipulate the user interface, but this relies on the user interface XTHML markup staying the same.
Well guess what? #SP2010 is just around the corner and there’s a big fat ribbon and “accessible” markup coming…which means that anything the “enhancements” currently manipulate won’t exist in the new one. This means that all those “quick fixes” will all break and migration to #SP2010 will be a…well…absolute bloody nightmare! And it serves them all right!

Most of the “enhancements” can be done via Solution Packages and the ones that can’t shouldn’t be done at all for that sole reason of upgradeability. In an uncontrolled environment you can’t use JavaScript because lots of Organisations disable JavaScript so even investing the time in this approach may mean that it doesn’t work.

To finish my point…I’ll put a beer on the fact that anyone “End User” that has used JavaScript in their SharePoint environments at some point has hit a brick wall and guess what they did…they went and got help from a developer who knows what they’re doing. Case closed.

Published: 10/16/2009 1:43 AM | 1 Comment | 0 Links to this post

Oct 132009

MySPC 09 schedule

So I’ve spent a while coming up with my schedule. My main criteria was to stay development track focussed and as many Level 400’s as possible, I can watch the Level 200’s at 4x later ;-) There were some tough calls, but have to stay focused on the dev tools over specific features. Also going to be busy in the evenings too, but that’s the way I like it!

No plans for Friday yet, was thinking maybe Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam if anyone is keen?

Published: 10/13/2009 4:09 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Oct 122009

#SPC09 Sessions for #SP2010 conference!

I’ve quickly taken screen shots of the sessions in the schedule builder for SPC09. Full credit to them in producing a usable Session Builder unlike the interface provided for Australia Tech.ED this year which was terrible!

There’s a lot of sessions with only 8 level 400 Developer sessions and 35 Level 300 ones. I’m guessing they’ve been a bit more honest with the levels as this was another thing that deceived people at #AuTechEd too.

Now I’ve got to start filtering my selections down to one per time slot!?!?!

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Published: 10/12/2009 9:52 PM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Oct 092009

SharePoint 2010: The Enterprise Platform

I’m repeatedly cornered to discuss SharePoint and a common discussion that occurs is the wide spread usage of SharePoint as an “Enterprise Platform” or “Enterprise Portal”.

SharePoint in Organisations (state and local government, private enterprises, etc.) are moving towards a Microsoft Platform in droves and migrating their SAP, Oracle, BEA, IBM, OpenText and EMC enterprise stacks. I’m exaggerating slightly as this is the Organisations I’m exposed to, but hear me out.

How did this happen?

Well, I don’t even think Microsoft knew this was going to happen before releasing MOSS 2007. They made all the right moves, hearing the noise that the other vendors were making around “Enterprise Content Management” with the different areas: Document Management, Records Management, Web Content Management, Business Intelligence, Digital Asset Management etc.

Microsoft looked at their current technology stack and figured that they could start playing in this field more aggressively. With a combination of SharePoint 2003, Microsoft Content Management Server 2003, SQL 2005 and client tools like Office 2003 and InfoPath 2003 they created the Office Platform.

In my opinion and a lot of others SharePoint is “a jack of all trades and a master of none”, much like most of the other vendors who played the same card. SharePoint is extremely strong in the collaboration area from an End User perspective, but is weak for example in Records Management, Business Intelligence and Digital Asset Management.

The days of purchasing a product for a specific area have clearly gone which is a shame because you pick one of the Enterprise Platforms and suffer in the weaker areas. Much like my 6 part series on Leveraging the SharePoint Platform, I will be writing an update for “Leveraging the SharePoint 4.0/2010 Platform” shortly.

What should we expect from 2010?

Well, don’t expect Microsoft to just polish what’s already there. No Organisation is going to pay the licensing for a polished version of what they’ve already purchased…”that should be a service pack”. They’ve had to grab more areas of the Enterprise Platform space to encourage people to upgrade or jump on the platform.

They’ll be plenty of areas that will be new and most of which would have come from the sales teams getting requests from major clients raising gaps in the product. They’ll be plenty of areas that will be there to tie in more of the Microsoft technology stack and encourage upgrading other products such as moving to Office 2010 and Windows 7.

On the SharePointDevWiki.com I’ve created two areas to cover the new areas WSS 4.0 and SharePoint 2010.

What have they improved?

But remember, whilst you’re either at SPC09 or consuming the content that although all the new features are going to be very exciting, there are serious issues and feature gaps in current functionality.

Just today I’ve been working with Quota Templates. Until very recently, when the Administration Toolkit was available (nearly 2 years after MOSS 2007 was released) it was not possible to push out a change to all Site Collections using a Quota Template that you had modified. It’s functionality like this that seriously needs polishing up! I could go on…

On the SharePointDevWiki.com I have started some “Have they improved” wiki pages and when the NDA drops I’ll open up that wiki space for everyone to contribute too.

I’ve also created what has changed in WSS 4.0 and SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint does “everything”

Often I will say tongue in cheek that “SharePoint cures cancer”, sometimes I see people thinking with this amount of confidence that they can do anything in it!

They’ll be some serious back steps on areas where they’ve pushed too hard and will allow room for other vendors to play in that space. Microsoft seriously can’t expect to build SharePoint all on itself, it’s a platform and they should leave areas for ISV’s to fill.

I’m a bit flabbergasted about SharePoint Workspace stepping on Colligio’s toes and the new BCS editor in SharePoint Designer taking on BDC Meta Man. Great work from both vendors for raising the bar again before they even get to a release, for instance with the web version of BDC Meta Man!

The MOSS 2007 horror stories

As I said earlier, I don’t think Microsoft expected the growth they had. There are so many cogs in the platform and so many ways to change them that it can turn into a nightmare to keep operational.

I’ve spent a major part of the last two years clearing up SharePoint environments that have been poorly implemented by internal teams and integrators. I don’t necessarily think it’s all their fault, mainly because the guidance didn’t come out until nearly a year after the product was shipped and still isn’t adequate in my opinion. Microsoft themselves didn’t really know what the best approach was.

I’m hoping that with this major release, documentation and guidance is treated more seriously so we don’t see the same mess again at the end of 2010! When people start to ask me on whether they should jump to 2010 at RTM or wait for SP1, I think the maturity of the documentation is going to make a big inroad into this decision.

I love SharePoint anyway

No matter what client I go on, I always end up having to pause to think “actually, what is SharePoint going to do”. Yes it has plenty of flaws, but it keeps me busy and challenges me everyday.

Most of the time there’s a way to get it to do what you want, some of the time there is no way but “the dirty” unsupported way. I’m hoping Microsoft have reduced the amount of “dirtiness” we require to get it rocking how we want.

SharePoint can consume a lot of hours getting it to do what you want or what you “expect” of it. Sometimes you’ll wonder why you work with the platform and other times you’ll be thanking the stars you stuck with it!

Collaborate on SharePointDevWiki.com

I encourage you all to get on the SharePointDevWiki.com after the SPC09 keynote and start to collaborate on the wiki in those areas, commenting on new and existing features. Have a think about what things you’d like to see improved…what burns your hours and turns your hair gray!

Published: 10/9/2009 5:59 AM | 4 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Oct 052009

How to manage the noise of #SPC09

So the more I speak to people on NDA e.g. MVP’s,people on the TAP etc. the more I get concerned about how much content is going to burst at the seams after the NDA is released on SharePoint 2010.

So here is my advice on how to manage this information once the gun goes off on the starting line!

Just like “SharePoint Designer is free!” syndrome, there's going to be a lot of this going on on Twitter, RSS and other social media sites! My advice would be as follows:

Twitter Noise

Searching on the term ‘#SPC09’ over the coming weeks is going to be CRAZY!

The best way to avoid this is to use a tool such as Topsy which will group common tweeted links to the top. I use the SharePoint search regularly to see what’s popular for the hour, day, week, month etc.

RSS Noise

Again, there’s going to be plenty of bloggers just blogging “SharePoint Designer is free!” in their blogs which is going to add noise to your RSS feeds. PostRank will highlight the most popular Posts based on social network referrals and other metrics.

OK OK, so what are you promoting here?

So the SharePointDevWiki.com new SP2010 dashboard hopes to eliminate all this noise. As you can see from the current structure, I have formulated it in a way that many people want to discover information about SP2010.

How can I help?

If you have detailed posts on SP2010 that you are releasing, please log into the SharePointDevWiki.com and add your links to the relevant pages.

VEGAS BABY!

I look forward to meeting everyone at #SPC09 and for those contributing their opinions on the wiki. Really interested to see what features excite people or are compelling reasons to jump from 2007 to 2010.

Published: 10/5/2009 5:18 AM | 1 Comment | 1 Links to this post

Whitepapers

NBSP

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

Webcasts

Podcasts

Archives

Links

Tag Cloud

SP… what?

#SP2010

Feature Requests

Volunteers

Thanks!

The current battle

Greedy beast

You can’t “go dark” to do SharePoint Development

Sandboxed Solutions is the answer…

Adoption Issues

A Possible Solution

The 12 Factors

Factor 1: Visual Studio 2010 Toolset

Factor 2: Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 integration

Factor 3: Windows 7/Vista workstation host

Factor 4: Sandboxed Solutions

Factor 5: Developer Dashboard

Factor 6: Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility

Factor 7: Accessibility

Factor 8: Export to WSP

Factor 9: Client Object Model (OM)

Factor 10: Application Services

Factor 11: Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

Factor 12: Platform Extensibility

The Ugly Truth

Backwards Compatibility

Deactivate, Retract, Delete, Add, Deploy, Activate

No .NET Framework 4.0 support

Workstation requirements

Unit Testing

Versioning

Documentation

Certification

Disposing

In Conclusion

Some feedback on Conference

A step forward

The community will save the day

The Keynote

Internet Facing Sites

Sneak Peek

The Sessions

Networking

The SharePointDevWiki.com T-Shirts

Twitter

Time difference

Nightlife

Conference Party

Did I stick to my rules?

Midnight curfew

Networking

Photos

Lessons Learnt

Focus even more on networking

Take more t-shirts!

Data Roaming

International Phone Calls

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

How did this happen?

What should we expect from 2010?

What have they improved?

SharePoint does “everything”

The MOSS 2007 horror stories

I love SharePoint anyway

Collaborate on SharePointDevWiki.com

Twitter Noise

RSS Noise

OK OK, so what are you promoting here?