Archives

Archives / 2009 / October
  • SharePoint Testing Strategies

    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. Recent versions of LoadRunner do well for building the tests, earlier versions have issues (e.g. with javascript and with scripting against dynamically named / generated file sets). Visual Studio 2010 contains load-testing tools that work great against SharePoint 2010, I'm really looking forward to testing these when beta 2 is released next month. The Developer Dashboard is another great tool for breaking down the load times of each component on your page, the performance of methods in your call stack, and the latency of calls to background services; this will be an indispensible tool for checking performance.

  • Controlling SharePoint 2010 Deployment in VS 2010

    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 restarting services, to whatever your heart and project desires or requires. This is huge and goes far beyond pre and post-build actions we had before. You save your custom Deployment Configuration in the Project Properties panel in a new SharePoint tab.

  • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management

    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.

  • At the SharePoint Conference! (includes keynote announcements)

    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's great tooling for SharePoint development, and I'm proud to say that I was small part of a large group whose ideas will make a lot of lives easier. I was blown away by the product team's responsiveness in solving problems specific to SharePoint development, and in implementing suggestions in ways beyond expectations. I love designing and developing on this platform.