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.

But on to what you really want to hear - what's in it. Let the taps flow...

News from Steve Ballmer's Keynote

  • Public beta in November! SharePoint Server, SharePoint Workspace (the evolution of Groove)
  • RTM will be in the first half of 2010
  • Access Services for SharePoint will let someone develop solutions in Acess for publishing to SP
  • LINQ everywhere supplants CAML (though CAML is still under the covers)
  • A new Client object model
  • "Sandboxed" solutions
  • Standards support for XHTML, WCAG, REST, and more!
  • Windows 7 and Vista become SharePoint development platforms, now this is cool. My next post will be a quick "how to build a development machine," post; check it out for hardware and OS requirements.
  • Visual Studio 2010 downloads start on MSDN today
  • SharePoint Designer gets the Ribbon
  • SharePoint gets the Ribbon - this makes the menus waaaay easier, just wait until you try it

Notes from Thom Rizzo's Keynote

  • External Lists make data available inside SharePoint, including for update and delete
  • You can map data into apps like Outlook, which can synch with SharePoint, which allows a scenario like connecting to a client database in SQL, exposing this as an External List in SharePoint, and connecting the list to Outlook. After that you can update your client database from your Outlook Contacts page, like any other Contact.
  • Visual web part design (though not as a server control, it still wraps an ascx under the covers)
  • Build, Package, and Deploy right from Visual Studio
  • Developer Dashboard is a fantastic debugging tool that provides information about the callstack, how long queries took, whether the page included service calls (and how long they took)
  • Sandboxed Solutions allow you to target a site collection to isolate code and other SharePoint
  • SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio both read and write the same WSPs, so you can create a site or any element in SharePoint Designer, package it as a WSP, and open it for deeper development in Visual Studio. This is killer for turning SharePoint Designer into a legitimate tool, especially for workflow development.
  • Silverlight is everywhere in SharePoint 2010
  • The Ribbon provides the Office 2007 / 2010 editing experience right inside SharePoint

Steve Ballmer on SharePoint Online

  • Sandboxed solutions make cloud development a reality, whether with a hosted ISP, or with cloud-like hosting within the enterprise. This is a great alternative to the traditional internal hosting model, and encourages loosely-coupled, modular design
  • Eli note: The development spec for SharePoint Online is one of the best sets of development guidelines for writing good SharePoint Applications, and I'll provide a link to it as soon as possible
  • Kraft consolidated over 200 websites onto SharePoint to save over $2M per year in hosting.
  • Volvo deploys SharePoint for 70 markets and 36 languages [and the multi-lingual story gets better in 2010 too!]

And SteveB is back and on to questions. It's going to be an exciting week!

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