A SharePoint Christmas Surprise

Today I received a real treat in the mail. I'll give you a hint. It's about SharePoint and Chapter One is entitled: "Collaborative Application Markup Language." Got your attention?

One of life's few certainties has been this sequence of events: I'll be talking or writing about SharePoint customization -- to a user group, on the newsgroups or with a coworker -- and I'll answer a question. The follow-up up question "how can I learn more about this?" comes up. And I answer, "You can't, it's not documented, you'll just have to dig through the /60/ folder like everyone else. Maybe catch a WebCast. Were you at the packaging and deployment talk at TechEd? It was marvellous, and remains undocumented unless you dug into the conference DVDs and then e-mailed the presenter for the files that didn't make it to the DVD."

Chapter Two: Databases, Web Services and Protocols. It has a list of all the columns in the Docs table, each with a description! It contains a Working With Lists section that doesn't once mention Sorting and Filtering! Nope, this one has phrases like "it is fairly straightforward to write SQL queries directly against the content database that return meaningful data sets." Now this is the book I've been waiting for.

The book was written by Scot P. Hillier and it's called Advanced SharePoint Service Solutions and it is scheduled for January 30 release according to Amazon, though the press release says January 3. It will cost $59.99, but of course you can preorder it today for $37.79USD.

I'll explore more in the days ahead, a rundown of chapters follows. And no, you can't have mine.

Chapter 1: Collaborative Application Markup Language
Chapter 2: Databases, Web Services and Protocols
Chapter 3: Advanced Web Part Techniques
Chapter 4: Advanced SharePoint Portal Server Solutions
Chapter 5: The Information Bridge Framework
Chapter 6: The Business Scorecards Accelerator
Chapter 7: SharePoint and BizTalk Server 2004
Chapter 8: SharePoint and Microsoft Content Management Server