Community Blogs

I was going to hold off on posting this until the public beta drops, but anyone preparing for the drop will want to get the right hardware, OS and optionally virtualization in place now. Then when the beta drops I'll write more about specific steps to get SQL, SharePoint and your development tools installed. Hardware and Operating System The "official" hardware or virtualization requirements for running either SharePoint Server 2010 or WSS 4.0 are: a 64-bit dual-core 3 GHz CPU , 4 GB of RAM , an...( read more ) Read More...

First Looks at Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 Presented by Savash Alic , Principal Specialist – SharePoint TSP, Microsoft Canada Join us for a special live meeting on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 where Microsoft Canada’s Savash Alic will present Canada’s first look at Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010. Savash is a loyalist of SharePoint who has been dedicated to the product since its’ very early days in 2001 implementing solutions. Savash has been selling Microsoft SharePoint in a technical...( read more ) Read More...

Someone recently asked about test plans and how to test components during development so you can be comfortable they'll perform well when hosted on large farms. The short answer is that you want to create the best simulation you can, and that means creating a test farm as close to production as possible, and testing scenarios with patterns and data as close to production as possible. With mission-critical apps the test environment should be identical with production, but in most cases it won’t be...( read more ) Read More...

The default experience when you press F5 in Visual Studio 2010 is to Create, Build, Package and Deploy your solution, all at once, automagically, pretty cool. As long as you don't want to control that process. But wait, you can do that too. You can customize exactly what happens when you press F5 to meet your own needs. From copying things into specific locations, to retracting or installing solutions, to calling MS-Build to do something special, to resetting the Application Pool, to stopping and...( read more ) Read More...

Extensibility points Already had: Macros, add-ins and packages New extensions based on MEF VSIX model simplifies distribution and deployment VSIX Package A zip package Contains am .XML manifest Install by double-clicking Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Part of .NET 4.0 An extensible app "imports" functionality An extensible componet "exports" its functionality An application catalog tracks instances of imported component An application is composed by dynamically loading components SharePoint...( read more ) Read More...

Look out TSPUG, there's a new user group in town! Led by Ray Outair, all the pieces are finally in place and the first meeting is: This Monday from 6 to 8:30 at Microsoft Canada's Mississauga office ! An Overview of SharePoint 2010 Presented by Rob Windsor ( ObjectSharp ) SharePoint 2010 is being unveiled this week at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. This session will provide an overview of the product with a particular focus on what’s new for developers. The tools included in Visual Studio 2010...( read more ) Read More...

There are three scenarios or scopes that the team designed for - the library, the document repository and then large scale repositories. The third isn't covered specifically here, but it's basically an architectural strategy that uses many components (e.g. Content Organizer and FAST) to manage millions of files across sites. Other highlights are described in sections below. Team Library A list template Typically 100 to 200 files Used for small projects and teams Performance much improved and few...( read more ) Read More...

Partial trust or "Sandboxed" solutions Runs in a separate process Everything in the WSP is deployed to a special repository managed by Central Administration. There is a new compilation model to support this repository (that you thankfully don't need to learn about, it "just works", though when the decks are released you'll see all the excellent secure detail). PTS should be the preferred method of provisioning solutions Sandboxed solutions are restricted by CAS and the API subset Fully supported...( read more ) Read More...

I'm in Las Vegas this week for the SharePoint Conference , where today marks a new era for everything SharePoint. And with the fantastic rate of growth in the use of SharePoint, that means that today thousands of people will start thinking of new ways to do business . Through the MVP program the Product Team has been exceptionally generous by sharing their vision, listening to our feedback, and using that feedback to build an even better product. This week you'll be hearing about visual Studio 2010...( read more ) Read More...

In my last post I described a strategy for: Planning SharePoint Solution Packages . In this post we'll construct a sample solution template, use that template to construct a real solution, package this as a WSP, and finally (once you have many WSPs) wrap the entire process with a routine to automate the build. You can download the sample code from the WSPSolution project on CodePlex. Let's get started. The strategy uses Visual Studio 2008 to build the assemblies and WSPBuilder to generate SharePoint...( read more ) Read More...