My Take on the TechEd message
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.
