Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

Having previously been an avid Skype user I decided to reinstall on my Vista ultimate 64bit laptop build.   Download and software installation (version 3.6) went without issue, but making a Skype test call I could hardly hear myself.   I made various changes to the settings including boosting the input without success. 

I eventually found this blog post that had a solution way down at the bottom of the page.  Change your recording quality from the default DVD/CD quality down to something like Dictation or Tape Recorder and HEY PRESTO (to quote the blog post) it works.

Lawrence has syndicated so feeds to help people as he says ‘get the Buzz at SPC’

Go here for details http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/02/29/join-the-sharepoint-conference-buzzstream.aspx

If you want to follow the buzzstream with your feedreader or syndicate it to your website, you can subscribe to the following feeds:

• Blogstream (via Technorati): http://feeds.technorati.com/search/SPC2008?authority=a4&language=en
• Photostream (via Flickr): http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=SPC2008&lang=en-us&format=atom
• Videostream (via MSN Soapbox): http://soapbox.msn.com/rss.aspx?searchTerm=SPC2008

Tomorrow I will be heading out to the SharePoint Conference 2008 ,  this is my first to Seattle and I’m looking forward to a great week.  There will be a plane load of people flying from the UK – some in business class and others like me in the cattle crates at the back!

If your travelling from the UK there are a few sites that you should check out:

SUGUK – http://suguk.org/forums/thread/7678.aspx 

Mark Harrison has started a Groove workspace http://markharrison.co.uk/blog/2008/01/uk-sharepoint-community-us-conference.htm

I heard there was UK dinner on Monday 3rd 6pm – midnight http://garagebilliards.com/directions.htm   (Thanks to Mark Harrison for the info)

For those of you that think you can hold you beer,  SPC2008 After Hours Event is the place to be on Wednesday the 5th.  See Bob’s post or Andrew Connell’s for details.

and the Point is?   – Do you really need to ask

In my quest for knowledge I had subscribed to numerous blog feeds, spent many hours in the SharePoint forums, and  subscribe to some very useful but verbose email distribution lists.  What I have found is that after a two week break at Christmas and the installation of Vista 64bit (nice clean install) I didn’t pickup my old habits – to the point that for the whole of January I had not read any of my blog feeds and spent little or no time in the forums.   This weekend I decided I need to stream line my information fix so that I could keep on top of all of the wonderful things that are happening in the world.  

So where do I start?   – I have a NewsGator account and was very happy using before I reinstalled my machine so I downloaded the latest version and signed in….  

Now I really was drowning,  thousands of unread posts.   Do I mark them all as read and wait for stuff to roll in?  The I spotted the Panic button!

<some may say 429 thats not many,  but that was 4 hours AFTER I hit the panic button >

This allowed me to just get rid of old stuff, and as the message said.  This is not email – you don’t have to read everything.

FeedDemon is a great tool that I would recommend to anyone,  I have also now added my forum watching to it thanks to a tip from another MVP.   Best of all the NewGator Go is now free so I’m signed up to get my fix even when away from my laptop…   2008 is going to be a good year I can sense it

Many of you will have downloaded (or plan to download) the VPC image for Search Server 2008 Express and will be keen to get going with the Federated Searching that is the cool new things in MSS (see my other posts).

If you plan to use Shared Networking for Internet access from your VPC you will probably want to take a look at this post by the VPC guy who has an invaluable tip to ensure Windows 2003 does not start rejecting incoming packets

Just set your DNS in the VPC to 192.168.131.254.

Silverlight 1.1

Much less push on the SilverLight front.   Even when it was presented we could not get anyone to commit to the things that are coming in in the next release or the timeframe.   So the lack of even a simple Silverlight TextBox means unless your really up for developing code that you will scrap I would look to avoid anything other than ‘just for fun’ projects.  Patrick did demo the use of Ajax and Silverlight in SharePoint and we can expect something to show up in the SmartPart space fairly soon.   

SharePoint Developer Story

To quote Ted Pattison ‘the developer story is pretty poor right now’ and this is not going to improve much from a tooling perspective for some time.   Patrick did announce there would be some books out on best practice,  although I’m not sure we’re going to see any new ideas – just a bringing together of what people are doing right now.   Away from the SharePoint world I did attend some great sessions on Unit Testing, Continuous Integration and Team System.   This is an area that I am planning to invest some quality time in prior to Christmas so hopefully you will see some blog posts around this.    Ignoring the tooling we really should be aiming to develop our solutions using the best of the .Net development techniques.

I was also disappointed to not see a much bigger show by the Microsoft developer team,  I know they are heads down on vNext and this week clashed with Vegas,  but a poor show none the less.   Probably down to the lack of any real announcements in this area with the one exception (see below).

Microsoft Sync Framework

This was new to me, see my last post, although having sat in on a couple of sessions I am not sure it is right for the SharePoint space.   The sync technology is not the same as Groove so large file sync’s will not, at least not today, do delta based syncs.   I am holding out for some improvements in the next release of Groove to add some real value around the offline SharePoint story.   If you do have a need for a custom sync solution then you should at least look at this space and there are some pretty clever guys working on this.

Visual Studio 2008

Biggest thing here is you can target multiple versions of the .Net framework,  which means that you can now upgrade you developer tools to the latest and greatest whilst developing your current code base.    

LINQ

Nothing really new in this space but what I did see was the amount of effort that has been put into making the LINQ to SQL conversions really slick,  they quality of the SQL statements were stunning so you can use the .Skip(10).Take(10) with confidence.   If you want LINQ to SharePoint then you need to be looking at the CodePlex project that will take LINQ and create CAML on the fly.

Big Announcement

Microsoft Search Server 2008 (MSS) and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (MSSX)

The introduction of Search federation extends the reach and capability of search significantly.   I plan to do something on this over the next few weeks (unless someone beats me to it at which point I will be doing a bit of link love). 

One thing to be aware of is the MSS/MSSX products will NOT work with existing MOSS 2007 installations in their current form.  For an upgrade to MOSS 2007 you will need to wait until next year around the release time frame.

Overall

Overall it was a good week.   The opportunity to network was fantastic as were the chances to consume the odd glass of wine or beer    – Those in Barcelona will know what I’m talking about!

I was a little disappointed that there was not any more big announcements,  but that’s probably down to the timing of the event.   Looking forward to the next bog SharePoint conference in Seattle next year when I am sure we will see some cool new features.

Some areas from the Key Note that may have an impact on SharePoint in the future.

Microsoft Sync Framework - CTP available at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/bb821992.aspx

Will this integrate into SharePoint?   talking SharePoint content offline – merge conflict, version control?   Will this become part of the core system,  how will it compare to products like Colligio or Syntergy?   Will Microsoft leave the Sync Provider  and Sync Agents for SharePoint to the ISVs?

SharePoint was demo’d 

SharePoint was used to demo the KPIs and workflow based on the Contoso foods sample.  Not really talked about as a development platform but reinforcing its value to the developer community.

True Development Story - a lot was talked about how Microsoft ’Dog fooded’  the VS2008 development and this has improved the tools specifically around the Visual Studio Team System offering and the planned  (see “Rosario” for more information http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb725993.aspx).   Now the killer question here is will we get the tools we need to make SharePoint development a first class citizen in Visual Studio?    The SharePoint MVP community is very vocal with Microsoft on this.

VS Extensibility -  World of War Craft development environment built in 4 man weeks (2 devs, 2 weeks).   How long will it take to do this for SharePoint?  (see note above).

Overall a fair Keynote.   Most of announcements were sort of known about.

I’m really looking forward to some of the demo’s on LINQ,  this is an area that will impact SharePoint.   It was also intersting to see less push for Silverlight which was the case at Mix 07.

Flights and accommodation booked in August, taxi to the airport was left late but part form paying more for the taxi ride from home to the airport nothing too much to concern me.

Early start on Sunday 4th,  taxi was picking me up at 4.30am, so I do the sensible thing and go to bed at 1am after enjoying a nice bottle of Margaux that would really not keep for my return

Sunday morning taxi arrives on time at my house near Oswestry, and we head north to Liverpool.  The taxi ride took just over the hour and was without incident although patchy fog did get thicker as we approached and crossed Runcorn Bridge,  nothing more was said or thought.

Checked in,  quick shop for duty free – only to be told you can’t have that as your staying in the EU!,   leave duty free shop empty handed.   Through security,  glad I paid the extra for priority boarding.   EasyJet don’t do traveler plus but for £2.50 each way you get the pick of the seats.   Normal preflight checks go as planned,  announcement by the Pilot that there is going to be a slight delay due to fog and the restriction on flights when visibility is below 125yards. 

Time to catch some well earned sleep;  and with leg room to spare, unlike 90% of the people on the plane, this proved easy.   Woke with a start,  ‘Are we there already?  was I that tired!”  alas no, we were still in the same place.   Partake in a bacon sandwich and some coffee and continue to wait,   2 more hours pass.   I should have been at the hotel by now for a siesta,  further words of encouragement that the fog will clear.   Allowed to use mobiles at this point so I started to work on Plan B.   Phone Ellie and get her to start looking for alternative flights – this fog is not moving!

4.30 after boarding the plane we are officially informed the airport is closed and we will the flight is canceled.   More hurried calls to Ellie – nothing found yet but she’s doing her best.   Starting to plan my exit from the airport,  need to grab my luggage and head for the taxi’s.  Do I head for the station and try a London airport?   Can there be one from Manchester?   if there is it will be filling up fast as this nothing is moving from Liverpool today.

Eventually get my bag after helping passengers to remove the Ryanair bags that seems to be filling up the carousel with no passengers to claim as their own.

Call from Ellie there may be a flight from Manchester on Monach leaving at 3.40pm,    it’s before 12 noon I should make it!   Run out of the airport into the first cab and demand Manchester Airport,  and step on it!   – bit dramatic that more like how long to Manchester airport (less effect here).   Taxi takes an hour and add’s another £55 to the travel costs,  Ellie gets my seat booked and  through the wonders of Push Email I get the travel details a few seconds later.   I’m still going to TechEd, another £150 extra for the late one way flight.   but going to TechEd I am.

Now where in this damn supposedly International Airport can I get a wireless signal.

 Hopefully my next blog post will be from the comfort of my Hotel room!.  

[Update]  finally made it to my hotel at 7.45pm,   and in time to meet up with fellow SharePoint MVPs for a quite Sunday evening beer.

Finally I am able to build and test my 64bit MOSS deployments on a 32bit Laptop

This is solution was brought to you on by

Lenovo T61p – UK Spec (T7500, 4GB Ram)

Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit Host

VMWare Workstation 6 Ace Edition

Windows Server 2003 64bit Enterprise Edition

If you need any more specifics please post a comment and I will be only to happy to help.   The only downside is the Vista 32bit only recognizing 3GB,  the bios picks up 4GB so when the drivers become available and stable I will look at upgrading.

Intel Virtualization Technology needs to be enabled, it’s disabled by default.

Everyone involved in SharePoint is aware of the demand for resources, but who would have thought that in the early days of SharePoint 2001 it would be on it’s way to becoming a $1billion product.

…the company reported that its Microsoft^® Office SharePoint^® Server business generated revenue of more than $800 million in fiscal year 2007..

Press release   re-posted from Mike Harrison’s Blog