Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

Walkthrough of creating a SharePoint 2010 external list using Visual Studio 2010 Beta

sptblog — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:49:17 GMT

There are a bunch of SharePoint features in Visual Studio 2010 Beta. You may have already heard about them from reading the blog Short Overview of SharePoint Features in Visual Studio 2010 or by other means. Today I want to introduce one of them, Business Data Connectivity (BDC) designer, which is available in the project template Business Data Connectivity Model. If BDC is new to you, here is a short description. BDC is one of two most important architectural components of Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) which enables users to read and write data from external systems—through Web and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services, databases, and Microsoft .NET Framework assemblies—from within Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 applications. This MSDN webpage Business Data Connectivity (BDC) Service has a more descriptive version.

Visual Studio 2010 helps a SharePoint developer to develop, debug and deploy .NET assemblies as external data sources to SharePoint. In the following paragraphs, I will walkthrough with you how to create your first SharePoint external list using Visual Studio 2010. In order to make this walkthrough work on your machine, you need to install SharePoint 2010 Public Beta^* and Visual Studio 2010 Beta2^#.

*: Please read Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server before the installation. If you are using SharePoint Foundation 2010 you will need to create a Feature Event Receiver to enable the import of BDC models. How to create a Feature Event Receiver will be covered in a future blog post.

#: Please make sure Microsoft SharePoint Development Tools component is selected when installing. It is chosen by default if you choose Full installation.

Let’s start the journey.

1. Create a new BDC Model project. (Main menu: File -> New -> Project…). In the left column of the New Project dialog, you are able to find node 2010 under tree view Visual C# -> SharePoint. Similarly you can find same node under Visual Basic -> SharePoint. In the middle column of the dialog, you should be able to see Business Data Connectivity Model listed as one of the project templates. See the screenshot as follows. Here I am creating BDC Model project in Visual C#. You are able to do the same things in Visual Basic.

2. After clicking [OK] button in the New Project dialog, the SharePoint Customization Wizard dialog will be displayed. In this dialog you can customize the local site you want to target and trust level for the SharePoint solution. Since a BDC model is deployed to a farm, a collection of one or more SharePoint servers and one or more SQL servers, only “Deploy as a farm solution” option is enabled. Here is the screenshot of the dialog.

3. When you click [Finish] button in the SharePoint Customization Wizard dialog, the BDC Model project will be created. There are four main UI panes that help you manage the BDC model visually. They are the BDC Designer Surface, BDC Method Details Pane, BDC Explorer, and Properties Browser.

a. The BDC Designer Surface allows editing entities, identifiers, methods, and associations between entities. And you can do that either from toolbox or context menus.

b. The BDC Method Details pane, where its name is already self-explanatory, lets you edit everything related to a method, from the method itself, its parameters to its parameters’ type descriptors, from method instances to filter descriptors, etc.

c. BDC Explorer lists and organizes metadata objects in the BDC model in a tree view. It lets you to browse and search metadata objects in a graphical way and allows you to copy/cut/paste type descriptors between different parameters or type descriptors.

d. Properties Browser gives you a familiar way of editing components and attributes of BDC Models. We use it to supplement the functions offered by the other three panes and list all the attributes for a particular metadata object for editing. Here is a typical layout of a BDC Model project as described above.

4. If you notice, there is already a default entity generated for you when the project is created. This default entity also has an identifier and two methods ReadItem and ReadList created. One is a Finder method that is to return a collection of data. The other is a Specific Finder method that is to return a specific entry based on the input parameter(s).

5. Now let’s deploy to the SharePoint server. You can either click the deploy menu item in main menu (Build -> Deploy Solution), or in the context menu of the project or the solution. In the output you will see several activities happening including packaging, solution retraction/addition, deployment, etc.

6. Let’s open the target site and see if our model has been successfully deployed. Open the target site with any browser supported by SharePoint, like Internet Explorer 8. Create an external list based on the model we just deployed. Here are the steps to create an external list in case you are new to it.

a. In main menu: Click Site Actions -> More Options…

b. On the Create dialog, select External List, click [Create] button in the right column

c. On the next external list create form, type a name for the list. Check ‘Yes’ to display the list on the Quick Launch for easy access. Then click to select the model we just deployed in the External Content Type Picker form. Click [Create] on the external list create form. Now the Hello World list is displayed.

In the main menu under List Tools -> Items, you may find only “View Item” option is enabled. Guess why? Yes, it is because the default entity only has a Finder method to view the entire list and a Specific Finder method to view a specific item. In our next blog in this series, we will show you how to add more functions like Add, Update and Delete to the list as well as pull data from external data sources.

Beta Language Packs for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta and SharePoint Server 2010 Beta are now available for download

sptblog — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:01:23 GMT

Several beta language packs for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta and SharePoint Server 2010 Beta are now available through the Download Center. Installing one or more language pack will allow you to evaluate the new Multi User Interface (MUI) features of SharePoint 2010.

The following language packs are available:

German
English
Spanish
French
Japanese
Russian
Chinese (simplified)

SharePoint Foundation 2010 Language Packs

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0956787e-210d-4d78-9e4e-a9cdef0e8495&displayLang=en

SharePoint Server 2010 Language Packs

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=a0c7c05d-8fca-4391-bc70-b62c9af91123&displaylang=en

Please follow the instructions on the download page to install language packs. For further reading, please refer to TechNet articles: Deploy language packs (SharePoint Foundation 2010) and Deploy language packs (SharePoint Server 2010).

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 List View Blog Series: Part 1 – Introduction to the new List View

sptblog — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:40:29 GMT

Hello. This is Greg Chan, a Program Manager on the SharePoint team. I am excited to kick-off a new blog series that will cover a wide spectrum of topics related to the new List View in SharePoint 2010.

What is a List View again?

Put simply, a List View is a view for displaying SharePoint list data. The concept of List View has been around since SharePoint v2. While there are other technologies being used for visualizing list data in different scenarios (e.g. Content Query Web Part), List View remains the default component for displaying list data in SharePoint 2010.

List Views can be spotted everywhere in SharePoint. They are used to display information such as your announcements, tasks and calendar schedules.

Examples of List Views

What’s the big change with List Views in 2010?

In 2010, we are introducing a component called the XSLT List View Web Part (XLV) that serves as the new default technology for displaying list data. This honor used to belong to the List View Web Part (LVWP), which was the default from SharePoint v2 to 2007. (Note: LVWPs are still supported in SharePoint 2010, but just not as widely used as the new XLV.)

The new XLV brings a ton of improvements to the SharePoint platform. This blog series aim to cover most of these areas.

What are the key benefits to the new List Views (XLV)?

Replacing the default technology for List Views required fundamental changes to the SharePoint platform. So why did we do it? Let me call out the high level benefits of the XLV compared against LVWP from 2007:

More Designer Friendly
- Rich customization support through SharePoint Designer (SPD) while preserving browser UI experience
  - In SharePoint 2007, two of the main web parts for displaying list data were LVWP and the DataFormWebPart (DFWP). Both had their own advantages and disadvantages. The LVWPs were fully integrated into the browser with in-browser editing support, but lacked rich customization experience as they were not fully customizable inside SharePoint Designer 2007. The DFWPs had a much richer customization story as they were fully editable inside SharePoint Designer, but lacked the in-browser editing capabilities that LVWPs had. With the new XLV, SharePoint combined the best aspects of these two technologies and now allow you to richly customize your XLVs in SPD and also provide the in-browser editing experience. It is important to note that XLV will preserve both SPD customizations and in-browser modifications, and not blow any of that away.
- Extensible and shareable custom styles
  - A custom view style that you designed in SPD can now be easily shared with other designers across your site collection.
- Popular designer features such as Conditional Formatting.
  - Similar to the Conditional Formatting feature in Excel, designer can now set conditions on when to format items in a list view (e.g. KPIs.)
More Developer Friendly
- Uses standards-based XSLT instead of CAML
  - Much better documentation of XSLT than CAML. (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt)
- Easily extensible
  - Developers no longer have to include large blobs of CAML to define views in their List definitions. Take advantage of shared XSLT used to define out-of-box views and only define custom XSL for the sections you want.
More End-User Friendly
- Enhanced user experience including Ribbon UI and new multi-selection model.
  - Bulk editing and deletion are now supported.
- Inline editing support
  - Edit fields in your list view without being directed to another page or dialog.
More Robust Ways to Access Data
- Display enterprise data through Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
  - End users can now interact with business data similar to how they interact with regular SharePoint list data.
- Cross-web list views displaying data from another web
- Display list data joined from different lists

What’s coming up in the blog series?

Many people from different teams in the SharePoint family contributed to the new List View in SharePoint 2010. In this blog series, you’ll get a chance to hear from some of those area experts covering key List View topics.

Here are the topics that will be covered:

Introduction to the new List View (you are reading it! J)
List View – New User Experience
List View Architecture
List View Customization
External Lists
Conditional Formatting
How to Share Your Custom List View Styles
How to Create Custom Fields for the new List View
Related Item View
How to Create Views Displaying Cross-Web and Joined List Data

The order in which these topics will be published may change. We may also add or modify topics on this list. If there is any areas regarding List Views that you’d like to learn about and isn’t on this list, feel free to suggest them here.

Thanks for reading. I hope everyone is excited about the new List Views. Stayed tuned for more!

Installation notice for the SharePoint Server Public Beta on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows 7

sptblog — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:58:00 GMT

If you will be installing the SharePoint Server 2010 Public Beta on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 or Microsoft Windows 7, then you will need to download and install an update from http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806 to resolve an issue that occurs in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 when provisioning Service Applications or when accessing pages that make service calls. Without the hotfix, these operations will result in an error "System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive. (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\<Service Area>\client.config line <Line Number>)".

If you have already installed Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on a server running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 or Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 does not need to be reinstalled when the update becomes available; however, Service Applications that have been successfully provisioned without the update installed may need to be removed and re-provisioned once the update has been successfully applied.

Update Center is now live

sptblog — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:05:25 GMT

The Update Center for Microsoft Office, Office Servers, and Related Products went live today, which will enable customers to find an up-to-date list of all of our Service Pack, Public Update, and Cumulative Update releases in one location. While the SharePoint team blog has posted Cumulative Update package information in the past, this will be available on the Update Center moving forward.

A few Update Center highlights:

Latest Updates Table

See the latest updates for your version of Office

List of all releases in a year

Find information about past releases

RSS Feed

Subscribe to our feed and get updated as new releases become available

Path to User Profile Synchronization success in SharePoint 2010 Beta

sptblog — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:52:00 GMT

[Note: Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 WCF hotfix is now available and this post has been updated.]

Before we get into the deep details, I want to share a high-level checklist to setup User Profile syncing ~~on Windows Server 2008~~. ~~Once the WCF hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available, this guidance will work on R2.~~ This checklist is for beta only - we plan to improve how this works by RTM.

- Check that your system meets minimum requirements: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.14).aspx
- Start with a clean OS install
- Check that the WCF hotfix is installed
Windows Server 2008 WCF hotfix http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkID=160770
Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 WCF hotfix http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806
- Check that you have done a "Complete" install of SharePoint Server 2010
- Check that the setup/farm admin account has "Replicating directory changes" in your test domain
- Use the farm configuration wizard to setup all the service applications and successfully create a site collection
- Check that statistics (i.e. Number of User Profiles, etc.) appear on the User Profile Service Application page
- Start the User Profile Synchronization Service and status changes to "Started" - this can take some time and this will configure and start the Forefront Identity services for you (do not try to manually set the logon credentials and start the service)
- Setup an Active Directory Connection
- Start a full Profile import

Now onto the full details to setup the User Profile synching...

When using SharePoint 2010 Beta, if you need to synchronize bulk users and groups with AD or LDAP, you’d likely be using the user profile synchronization functionality in SharePoint. This functionality is the backbone to turning the profile store into a ‘person’ store with interesting information from AD/LDAP or BDC sources, including hierarchy and group information that can be used to drive functionality such as audiences or hierarchy driven business processes.

We’ve done an overhaul of this feature in 2010, which is also leading to some growing pains for us through the Beta. We’ve a set of steps that you can follow to successfully bring users and groups into the profile store, and despite the fun and temptation of playing, we highly recommend you follow these steps.

For brevity, I am going to list the steps for AD only. In place of reading these steps as you go along, please give this a full read and then follow the steps. Note that quite a few of these steps are because of known issues in the Beta and we are working towards fixing them for RTM.

Prepping for Provisioning the User Profile Synchronization Service

1. After provisioning the User Profile Service Application, ensure that the service is running by going to the Manage Services on Server page in central admin, and if the User Profile service does not show as started, click start on User Profile Service. Do not try to start the User Profile “Synchronization” Service at this time (it’s listed right underneath the User Profile Service).

2. Permissions (for the account you are logged in as, when provisioning or configuring the user profile synchronization service)

a. In order to run the User Profile Synchronization service, you must be a farm admin. Running the user profile synchronization service requires a farm topology decision (where to run it and when), which is a farm admin operation across the SharePoint services platform.

b. Ensure that the farm admin running the farm timer job (typically the account you specified during install unless explicitly changed after install) is a local admin on the box where you are going to run the sync service.

c. This account should also be added to the user profile administrators with full control privileges.

d. While rare, please ensure that this account is not excluded by policy from being able to logon-locally on the machine where sync will be provisioned and run.

Provisioning the User Profile Synchronization Service

3. Now, start the User Profile Synchronization Service, by going to the Manage Services on Server page in central admin and clicking start on the User Profile “Synchronization” service. When you hit start, service will ask you to associate a User Profile Service Application with it, select the User Profile Service Application you created earlier and hit OK.

4. Wait a few minutes to allow for provisioning, verify that the User Profile Synchronization Service shows Started on the Manage Services on Server page, and then check the following items on the machine where the sync service is running

a. Run services.msc and check if the windows services “Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service” and “Forefront Identity Manager Service” are running. Do not start them here manually.

b. Check the folder %Programfiles%\Microsoft Office Servers \14.0\Synchronization Service\MaData to see if there are two subfolders \ILMMA and \MOSS-XYZ (where XYZ is the name of your user profile service application). These folders will be empty at this time.

5. Issue an IISReset on the machine where user profile sync service was provisioned.

Prepping for Connection Creation

6. Before you proceed with creating connections to bring data in, it’s good to pause and spec out what containers you’d be selecting for your connection, where the users are, where the groups are etc. It’s important to get the connections right, before kicking-off sync. We highly recommend that you spec one connection per forest and do not create multiple connections to the same forest.

7. In order to be able to sync with AD, you need to have an account that can be used to call AD and identify what has changed since a given time (in other words, an account that is capable of reading the AD change log). This right is called “Replicate Directory Changes” in AD lingo. This right does not allow for writing or modification of AD objects. You’d need this account name and password when you create a connection. This account can be the same or different than the farm or UPA admin account. Please do not proceed without having an account with these rights, even if you don’t plan to do incremental synchronization. This AD right is required for both full and incremental sync.

Creating a Connection

8. To create a connection with your AD source, you must logon locally on the central admin box. User the Configure Synchronization Connections link in the user profile service central admin page for connection creation.

9. Majority of the items on the connection creation page are intuitive. Specify the fully qualified domain name for the forest, and specify the DC. Ensure that both the forest and the DC are directly reachable from the machine where you provisioned the user profile sync service.

10. You’d likely leave the Authentication provider type to “Windows Auth”.

11. Right below the authentication provider fields, you’d see the account name and password fields for the AD account you procured in step 7.

12. Select Populate Containers and carefully chose the right containers for your connection. For example, find out which containers have the users, if you don’t want to bring in anything else. We have some trouble with this control in IE8, so press F12, and select IE7 in the dev tools window that pops up.

13. If you had additional connections to create, create them all now.

Configure Users or Users and Groups

14. Based on the numbers of users and groups in your system, it can take much longer to sync users and groups, then syncing users only. So to get you started, we’ve provided for a Users-only option under Configure Synchronization Settings link. Select Users-only for the first full run.

Additional Settings

15. We don’t cover the details in this blog, but you can setup additional property mappings and filters at this time, if absolutely needed. If you can live without filtering out data or mapping specific custom properties, it might be best to proceed without them.

Running Sync

16. At this point, you can go to Start Profile Synchronization, select Start Full Synchronization and click ok. Depending upon the number of objects, the first full sync can take many hours to complete. We expect the performance to improve with RTM but after the first full sync, the incremental syncs should be much faster.

What to Expect Next

17. We have bunch of kinks to work out in the status that you see on the right side of the user profile service admin page. For example, if you see the number in the status going down, that means the sync run has just moved from one stage of synchronization to another and are now showing the number for that stage. We are also working on a tool to let you stop a bad run, but in the meantime, it’s not recommended that you stop a sync run brute force. This can get you in a tough state that requires special database-level steps to recover from.

18. If you are running sync for the first time, and you already have the User profile service live, for example users can use their MySites and Profiles, they might see changing organization charts as users come in and managers get attached. This should all clear up once the sync run is complete.

19. Along with the user number shown in the status, you can also search for a known profile or accounts that start with a known domain name in Manage User Profiles page. Note that you are going to not see any users listed here, but they are there, you just have to search for them.

Running Incremental Sync

20. Once the full sync step is complete, you can flip the “Users only” setting to “Users and Groups” and run an incremental sync (or schedule an incremental job).

SharePoint 2010 Public Beta is now available for download

sptblog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:33:09 GMT

Today we are announcing the general availability of the public beta of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps for our customers and partners. Millions of people can download the beta at http://www.microsoft.com/2010.

Office Mobile 2010 has also reached the public beta milestone and is now available on the Windows Mobile Marketplace for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

As part of the beta, we are unveiling several new capabilities, including:

The Outlook Social Connector, a new feature which brings communications history, business and social networking feeds into the Outlook experience.
- At beta, the Outlook Social Connector will support SharePoint social networking and support Windows Live at launch.
- We are also announcing that LinkedIn will be the first social networking site to provide a connector for the Outlook Social Connector.
- We are also releasing the Outlook Social Connector SDK for developers to build connectors to third party social networks.
Technology and design advancements including deeper integration between Office 2010 and Office Web Apps, improved navigation, visual design and icon updates, a new Office logo and increased performance and stability.

We’re also announcing our plan to deliver Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP which will expand the long standing Duet partnership. The joint solution from SAP and Microsoft will enable interoperability between SAP applications and SharePoint 2010 and provide complete flexibility and extensibility to compose solutions that blend the worlds of process and collaboration. Duet Enterprise is built on top of the new Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010. The solution is planned to be released in the second half of calendar year 2010.

SharePoint Public Beta Resources

General information about SharePoint 2010: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx
Resources for Developers on MSDN: http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com
Resources for IT Pros on TechNet: http://www.mssharepointitpro.com
Have a SharePoint 2010 question? Ask it in the SharePoint 2010 forums

Where can I download SharePoint 2010 public beta?
You can download SharePoint and Office 2010 public beta from http://www.microsoft.com/2010

Is the SharePoint public beta supported?
The SharePoint public beta is not supported. However, we recommend looking at our resources listed above and asking questions in the SharePoint 2010 forums.

When is the final release of SharePoint and Office 2010?
We are planning to release SharePoint and Office 2010 in the first half of calendar year 2010.

Will there be a migration path from SharePoint public beta to final release?
We do not plan to support a SharePoint 2010 public beta to release bits migration path. The SharePoint 2010 public beta should be used for evaluation and feedback purposes only.

If I’m on SharePoint 2007, how do I get ready for SharePoint 2010?
Take a look here for getting ready guidance.

Is there a downloadable SharePoint 2010 VHD?
We plan to make a VHD available for download sometime in the future. We will announce its availability on our team blog.

How do I get trained on SharePoint 2010?
Please review the Getting Started page, the IT Professional learning guide , the Developer learning guide , and the End User resources to ramp up on SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 List View Blog Series

sptblog — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:29:51 GMT

The Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog kicked off a blog series today that will cover a wide spectrum of topics related to the new List View in SharePoint 2010. Today’s topic, as Part 1 of the series, covered Introduction to the new List View.

The other topics that will be covered in the series are:

List View – New User Experience
List View Architecture
List View Customization
External Lists
Conditional Formatting
How to Share Your Custom List View Styles
How to Create Custom Fields for the new List View
Related Item View
How to Create Views Displaying Cross-Web and Joined List Data

October 2009 Cumulative Update Packages for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

sptblog — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:38:27 GMT

The server-packages of October 2009 Cumulative Update for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are ready for download. October 2009 Cumulative Updates introduce more rules on Pre-Upgrade Checker, which can help customers to prepare the upgrade of their SharePoint farm to SharePoint 2010.

Download Information

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=974989

Office SharePoint Server 2007 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=974988

Detail Description

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974989 (link may not be live yet)

Description of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 October 2009 cumulative update package
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974988 (link may not be live yet)

Installation Recommendation for a fresh SharePoint Server

To keep all files in a SharePoint installation up-to-date, the following sequence is recommended.

Please note: Start from April 2009 Cumulative Update, the packages will no longer install on a farm without a service pack installed. You must have installed either Service Pack 1 (SP1) or SP2 prior to the installation of the cumulative updates.

After applying the preceding updates, run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard or “psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait” in command line. This needs to be done on every server in the farm with SharePoint installed.

The version of content databases should be 12.0.6520.5000 after successfully applying these updates.

You can also refer to April Cumulative Update post for deployment guides, slipstream how-to links and FAQs.

Jie Li

Technical Product Manager, SharePoint

Short Overview of SharePoint Features in Visual Studio 2010

sptblog — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:06:20 GMT

As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 was announced last week and it contains a lot of great features and project templates for SharePoint developers. Below is a short overview for some of the SharePoint development related features and project templates.

Configurable deployment

With all new SharePoint project templates you can leverage new configurable deployment feature which lets you configure the way you want to deploy or retract your project. Besides using provided, out of the box deployment steps (Run Pre-Deployment Command, Run Post-Deployment Command, Recycle IIS Application Pool, Retract Solution, Add Solution, and Activate Features) you can use SharePoint extensibility to create your own, custom deployment steps and deployment configurations.

Sandboxed and farm solutions

Some SharePoint projects can be deployed either as sandboxed or farm solutions. Sandboxed solutions run in a secure and monitored process that has limited resource access and with farm solutions user must have SharePoint administrator privileges to run or deploy the solution. You can read more about SharePoint sandboxed solution here.

Extending SharePoint Tools

Even though Visual Studio 2010 contains a set of project templates you can also extend them. You can create extensions for projects, project items, define your own project item types and create deployment extensions. You can read more about extending SharePoint tools on MSDN.

Feature and Package Designer

Feature and package designers give you the ability to customize features in your solution and with packaging designer you can customize which features are getting deployed and how. More about feature and package designer is here.

SharePoint Explorer

SharePoint Explorer is a new tool window that gives you a view into your SharePoint server. You can get a hierarchical view of lists, sites and workflows on your SharePoint server.

SharePoint Project and Project Item Templates

The following SharePoint specific project templates and project item templates are available in Visual Studio 2010:

Project Templates

· Empty SharePoint project

· Visual Web Part project

· Sequential and State Machine Workflow

· Business Data Connectivity Model

· Event Receiver

· List Definition

· Content Type

· Module Project

· Site Definition

Project Item Templates

· Empty Element

· Web Part

· User Control

· Application Page

· Association Form

· Initiation Form

· Business Data Connectivity Resource Item

· List Instance

· List Definition From Content Type

· Global Resources File

Besides above mentioned project templates, there are two import project templates for importing .WSP file contents and importing reusable workflows:

· Import Reusable Workflow

· Import SharePoint Solution Package

How to download, install and get started

If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download Visual Studio 2010 from here. Download will be available to everyone on October 21st.

If you want to know how to download and install Visual Studio 2010 watch Channel9 video.

To get you started, head over to MSDN and read some of the walkthroughs on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010.

Peter Jausovec
(http://blogs.msdn.com/vssharepointtoolsblog/)

SharePoint 2010 Resources

sptblog — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:02:49 GMT

As Steve Ballmer announced this morning at the SharePoint Conference, and Jeff Teper notes below in his post, the public beta of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will be available in November.

For more resources, take a look at:

- SharePoint 2010 Website - to view SharePoint 2010 in action

- SharePoint 2010 forum- for SharePoint 2010 questions

- SharePoint 2010 PressPass- for the SPC 2009 keynote video, a Q&A with Jeff Teper, and more

- SharePoint 2010 Developer Center - for developer info

- http://www.mssharepointitpro.com - for IT Pro info

- http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint - for more SharePoint information

SharePoint 2010 Developer Center

sptblog — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:34:34 GMT

The SharePoint 2010 Developer Center is now live on MSDN. This new sub-site includes Getting Started modules, as well as a Beta version of the SharePoint 2010 SDK.

To read more, take a look at the SharePoint developer documentation team blog, or head straight to the SharePoint 2010 Developer Center to see detailed, public technical information and instruction around both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010.

SharePoint 2010

sptblog — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

This is my third and final post as part of our disclosure of SharePoint 2010 today. The previous posts covered the SharePoint History and how we Engineer SharePoint. This morning, Steve Ballmer and I are kicking off the SharePoint Conference so it is time to talk about SharePoint 2010! It is incredibly fun and rewarding to unveil this release driven input from you and innovative ideas from the team. As Steve announced, we will release the Beta of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in November and look forward to your feedback as we finalization the product and documentation for release in the first half of next year.

Describing SharePoint 2010 in 1 Sentence, 8 Categories and 40 Feature Areas

SharePoint is a broad solution so we often get asked how we would describe it in a sentence. For SharePoint 2010, we settled on “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web”. A few words are worth explaining. We decided “Collaboration” was broad enough to cover the spectrum of publishing, sharing, finding, analyzing and managing information that SharePoint enables. We chose “Platform” not only because custom solutions are a major focus of the 2010 release but also "platform" conveyed a solid base for all the out-of-box usage that never requires a developer. Finally, we want to call out “the Web” to highlight both internet scenarios reaching customers and partners and the cloud-based delivery of SharePoint Online. For SharePoint 2007, we used a pie diagram chart to describe the major SharePoint categories such as “Enterprise Content Management”. This release, we picked words we thought were both simpler and gave us more freedom to innovate beyond traditional category boundaries. We settled on Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and Composites as the new category names. Within each of these plus Administration and Development, I will highlight 5 major feature areas for a total of 40. At the next level down are hundreds of exciting new features which will be covered on www.microsoft.com\sharepoint and subsequent posts from the team. Needless to say, this is the biggest release of SharePoint yet and we hope you find it as exciting as we do!

Sites

In 2007, we expanded SharePoint to a single platform for intranet, extranet and internet sites. For SharePoint 2010, we improved the experience for this range of sites spanning browsers, Microsoft Office and mobile devices. The top five investment areas here are:

1. SharePoint Web Experience – We updated the SharePoint UI to make it simpler to access a growing range of tools. Highlights include incorporating the Office ribbon, in place web editing, AJAX responsiveness and richer navigation. We also expanded the reach of SharePoint sites through multi-lingual support, improved accessibility including WCAG 2.0 support and cross-browser support built on XHTML compliance.

2. Office Client – We continue to support previous versions of Microsoft Office working against SharePoint 2010. Office 2010 enhances this with features like offline editing with asynchronous saves as well as exposing SharePoint features through the new Office Backstage UI. Via the Backstage, you can access the context around the document including tags, related tagging and people.

3. SharePoint Workspace – In this release, we evolved and renamed Groove as SharePoint Workspace which provides great local and offline read-write access to SharePoint lists and libraries. SharePoint Workspace has a consistent experience with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 including the Office ribbon. It supports advanced features like bringing external business data offline and is smart about synching changes and not entire files.

4. Office Web Apps – We made SharePoint 2010 a great place to host the new Office Web Apps so you can view and update content from within a browser and include Office content as part of your web site (e.g. an Excel spreadsheet as part of “Sales Metrics Portal"). The Office Web Apps provide a familiar user experience, high fidelity viewing and essential editing without loss of data or formatting. They include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The OneNote client and Web App support is one of the coolest features of the release to enable multiple people to collaborate on a rich canvas online or offline. In addition to the Office Web Apps, we updated InfoPath Forms Services and Excel Services and added, new for 2010, Visio and Access Services.

5. SharePoint Mobile Access – We both improved the experience for mobile web browsers and are introducing a new SharePoint Workspace Mobile client so you can take Office content from SharePoint offline on a Windows Mobile device. These clients let you navigate lists and libraries, search content and people and even view and edit Office content within the Office Web App experience running on a mobile browser.

Communities

In the first post, I talked about breaking down organization and technology silos as key driver of our vision. Since then we have tried to make SharePoint the ultimate Swiss army knife for collaboration with smart connections across people and teams. You told us you want to embrace new Web 2.0 approaches within a unified experience which we included in SharePoint 2007. For SharePoint 2010, we expanded and enhanced the set of collaboration and social networking tools for both organic and managed communities across your organization. The top five investment areas:

1. Collaborative Content – Building on the new SharePoint user experience, we made it much easier to create and find content in SharePoint sites. This includes not only improved blogs and wikis (both simple and enterprise) but also calendars, discussions, tasks, contacts, pictures, video, presence and much more. With Office 2010, multiple people can simultaneously author content on a SharePoint site.

2. Social Feedback and Organization – With SharePoint 2010, we are introducing a consistent experience for organizing, finding and staying connected to information and people including bookmarks, tagging and ratings. We have taken a holistic approach across search, navigation, profiles, feeds and more. We are bringing together informal social tagging with formal taxonomy described below so you can choose the right approach for a given set of content. We have been using these features internally for a while and I think you will find the not only useful but fun.

3. User Profiles – We enhanced user profiles to reflect colleagues, interests, expertise – either via explicit tagging or recommendations based on Outlook and Office Communicator. The model is opt-in so users can manage what information is shared publically. They decide when an interest is something they want to share or be asked about by others in the organization.

4. MySites – We significantly enhanced MySites in SharePoint 2010 building on the updated SharePoint UI and user profile. We streamlined MySites to give you quick access to your content, profile and social network while continuing to let you customize, target and personalize pages to the needs of different roles and users in your organization. The enhanced newsfeed helps track interests and colleagues.

5. People Connections – In SharePoint 2003, we introduced a universal person hyperlink and presence icon so you can always navigate to a user’s MySite, send them mail, start an IM, call, etc. In this release, we enhanced this UI in conjunction with Outlook and Office Communicator as well as greatly improved the colleague tracking and people search features with new algorithms and user experience leveraging expertise, social data and more. MySites also include a new interactive organization browser built using Silverlight to give you another way to navigate the organization. In larger companies, org. chart browsing via the address book is one of the most popular features in Outlook and we think this takes that experience to the next level.

Content

SharePoint 2007 brought together document management, records management and web content management with a consistent user experience, architecture and platform. We built a common platform for metadata, security, workflow, etc. SharePoint 2010 adds scale and depth in these areas as well advancing the user experience. The top five investment areas:

1. Large Lists and Libraries – We made architecture and user experience investments so you have much larger document libraries with metadata driven navigation to help users go quickly to the content that is most important to them. Libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. This is a key investment for high-end document and records management but also helps organizations with lots of smaller sites. We enhanced the workflow capabilities and tools in SharePoint Designer.

2. Enterprise Metadata – We are addressing your feedback to support content types and taxonomies across not only across sites but also server farms. We have made applying this metadata easy (and valuable to users) in both the SharePoint and Office client user experience. The top-down taxonomy and bottoms-up social tagging (sometimes called folksonomy) combine to help improve search, navigation and people connections.

3. Document Sets – We are introducing a way to manage a collection of documents as a single object for workflow, metadata, etc. within SharePoint and Office so experience more closely models your work product (e.g. a proposal that may contain a presentation, budget, contract, etc.).

4. Web Publishing including Digital Asset Management – We made a number of key improvements to make it easier to publish rich sites on the intranet or internet. We used the new browser ribbon and editor experience to speed site customization, content authoring and publishing tasks. We added digital asset management features like thumbnails, metadata and ratings for images as well as video streaming from SharePoint. Finally, we improved content deployment robustness from authoring to production for larger scale sites.

5. Governance and Records Management – Compliance is an increasingly important requirement for organizations. We enhanced the Records Managements features in 2010 building on the scalable storage and enterprise metadata support described above. We improved the sophistication and flexibility of our governance tools. Just a few new features include location-based file plans, multi-stage dispositions, in-place records and e-discovery.

Search

As discussed in my first post, enterprise search is a big investment area for Microsoft from Search Server Express to SharePoint’s standard search to the new FAST Search for SharePoint. We added depth at all levels in 2010. While many customers will be fine with the base SharePoint search capabilities, FAST Search for SharePoint will meet the most sophisticated needs. FAST Search for SharePoint supersets the base SharePoint user experience, APIs and connectors. This is the first step, but a big one, and we will add more consistency and enhancements across our tiers of search in the future. We will continue to sell and enhance FAST ESP standalone as well. The top five investment areas here:

1. Interactive Search Experience – We built a richer search experience providing flexible navigation, refinement and related searches. Both Standard and FAST Search for SharePoint get query completion, spell checking, wild cards and more. FAST enhances this experience enabling feature content for common queries and providing more flexible navigation and document thumbnails and previews including in slide navigation of PowerPoint presentations which is a common end user scenario.

2. Relevance – We improved the out-of-box ranking and expanded the relevance factors including social data such as tagging and usage (clicks). FAST Search adds more configurable set of relevance inputs for custom applications and specialized corpuses.

3. People Search – We greatly improved people finding based on social networking and expertise algorithms and tailored user experience for people including getting views of authored content. As users frequently do not know or recall the spelling of people’s names, we built a new phonetic search algorithm that works much better than previous approaches to spell checking for names. In testing, we had a lot of fun coming up with crazy ways to misspell each others' names to see if we could stump it.

4. Connectivity – We know lots of data lives outside SharePoint so expanded and improved our connectors to index web sites, file servers, SharePoint, Exchange, Lotus Notes, Documentum and FileNet. The updated Business Connectivity Services (previously the BDC) described below makes it much easier to index an arbitrary source such as a custom database. You can create this search connection without code using the new SharePoint Designer.

5. Scale and Platform Flexibility – We made significant performance and scalability improvements through our search technology. Optimizing for 64-bit helped but we also introduce partitioned indices and scale-out query servers in SharePoint search this release. FAST scales-out even further and has significantly more pipeline extensibility to handle the largest collections and most complex value-added processing and search applications. We think both end users and IT will be immediately excited about the new capabilities supporting hundreds of millions of documents with great index freshness and query latency.

Insights

Historically, business intelligence has been a specialized toolset used by a small set of users with little ad-hoc interactivity. Our approach is to unlock data and enable collaboration on the analysis to help everyone in the organization get richer insights. Excel Services is one of the popular features of SharePoint 2007 as people like the ease of creating models in Excel and publishing them to server for broad access while maintaining central control and one version of the truth. We are expanding on this SharePoint 2010 with new visualization, navigation and BI features. The top five investment areas:

1. Excel Services – Excel rendering and interactivity in SharePoint gets better with richer pivoting, slicing and visualizations like heatmaps and sparklines. New REST support makes it easier to add server-based calculations and charts to web pages and mash-ups.

2. Performance Point Services – We enhanced scorecards, dashboard, key performance indicator and navigation features such as decomposition trees in SharePoint Server 2010 for the most sophisticated BI portals.

3. SQL Server – The SharePoint and SQL Server teams have worked together so SQL Server capabilities like Analysis Services and Reporting Services are easier to access from within SharePoint and Excel. We are exposing these interfaces and working with other BI vendors so they can plug in their solutions as well.

4. “Gemini” – “Gemini” is the name for a powerful new in memory database technology that lets Excel and Excel Services users navigate massive amounts of information without having to create or edit an OLAP cube. Imagine an Excel spreadsheet rendered (in the client or browser) with 100 million rows and you get the idea. Today at the SharePoint Conference, we announced the official name for “Gemini” is SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint.

5. Visio Services – As with Excel, users love the flexibility of creating rich diagrams in Visio. In 2010, we have added web rendering with interactivity and data binding including mashups from SharePoint with support for rendering Visio diagrams in a browser. We also added SharePoint workflow design support in Visio.

Composites

The single biggest area we increased our investment from SharePoint 2007 was making it easier for everyone – users, IT, partners, etc. – to build custom solutions on SharePoint that automate processes and connect disparate information. Some of the scenarios are more IT driven. Analysts often call them “Composite Applications”. Others are more end user centric or “Mash-Ups”. We thought “Composites” was a good short word to describe the breadth of solutions built with SharePoint. The top five investment areas:

1. SharePoint Designer – We revamped the SharePoint Designer experience to focus on the building blocks of a SharePoint solution vs. HTML source code. The user experience gets easier including the Office Ribbon and new tools for building workflows and connecting to external data. We have made SharePoint Designer customizations safe out-of-box in 2010 so IT can let users customize sites without risk. SharePoint Designer is also a great tool for mashing-up SharePoint (which now exposes REST) and external data.

2. InfoPath Forms Service – InfoPath is the best way to have a common form definition render in the browser as well as in a rich and offline client. For 2010, we improved the design environment to make it easier to build rich forms declaratively with little to no code and more client-side validation. We have also made it straightforward to use InfoPath forms as native SharePoint forms both on the web and when offline from within the SharePoint Workspace client.

3. Access Services - Users have long loved the ability to create database applications quickly with forms and views. Access Services lets you publish new Access solutions to a SharePoint site where they can be managed centrally and accessed (necessary pun) from a web browser.

4. Sandbox Solutions – In SharePoint 2007, custom code requires the farm administrator to trust the code running on the server. In SharePoint 2010 we are introducing a new SharePoint custom code sandbox with isolation and resource limitations (memory, SQL, CPU) that allows administrators to let others safely add and consume custom solutions without impacting overall farm performance and stability. While it does not cover the full SharePoint object model it addresses key scenarios like custom web parts and event receivers. We will use this and the client side object model described later to support custom SharePoint solutions in SharePoint Online as well.

5. Business Connectivity Services – We expanded the read-only Business Data Catalog from SharePoint 2007 to support create, read, update, delete, search and offline access to line-of-business (LOB) data. This data, such as a customer record from a database, web services, etc. is called an External List in SharePoint 2010 and it is mapped to an External Content Type so this data looks and behaves like native SharePoint lists. You can not only update this data from within SharePoint but can take it offline from SharePoint Workspace and, where it makes sense like contacts, in Outlook with offline editing. There is great support for BCS in SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio 2010. This perhaps our biggest “Wow, how did you do that?” demo. We will be building on the BCS for future LOB connectivity solutions.

Administration

We understand the most critical capability for you to introduce these features to your users is making it easier to manage. We have gotten a lot of great feedback in this area and made big investments for SharePoint 2010. As I have mentioned in previous posts, our experience with our CAT team, running SharePoint Online with SharePoint 2007 and targets for higher scale informed the design of SharePoint 2010. You have the choice of Server, Online or a mix. Even if you run SharePoint yourself, you benefit from our design and experience with Online. Beyond the fundamentals of scalability and reliability which got a lot of focus, the top five investment areas:

1. Improved Upgrade – We changed the model for SharePoint 2010 vs. the previous release. We will get your existing sites up and running with the existing SharePoint 2007 user interface including your customizations. You can preview and switch to the new UI at your convenience. With SP2 of SharePoint 2007, we released an upgrade checker tool that reports any potential issues. There are two key things to think about in planning the migration. First, as we announced a while ago, SharePoint 2010 is 64-bit only. Second, thin about places where you may have invested in custom code than can be replaced with out-of-box features such as the new enterprise metadata features described above.

2. Throttling, Health Monitoring, Analytics – Performance and reliability was a big focus for this release to address the scale of the largest organizations, web sites and the SharePoint Online service. We invested in optimizing the SharePoint, Windows Server and SQL Server architecture for scale and availability. We introduced more resource governors throughout SharePoint to prevent bulk operations or asynchronous jobs from slowing down the server. We built in proactive and extensible health reporting, monitoring and resolution in SharePoint 2010 based on analyzing a wide range of deployments. We will enhance this based on your feedback and our experience during the Beta and beyond. We are introducing a new usage analytics logging and reporting and are publishing the SQL schema for this analytics database so you can create your own reports.

3. Web and PowerShell Admin – We improved the web based administration interface for SharePoint 2010 and put it through the level of usability testing we had previously focused on for end user features. However, the biggest thing we heard from you was an improved scripting interface for SharePoint for simplified administration of farms. With the release of PowerShell, we were able to switch over all our administration to that framework and will ship with hundreds of commandlets you can use, edit and enhance. The administration framework is built on a new multi-tenant model we are be using on SharePoint Online but know is also of interest to 3^rd-party hosters and large organizations looking to do server consolidation.

4. Scalability and Availability – We made the shared services and federation model much more flexible to support richer scale out as you add services, sites and applications to SharePoint. We reduced the downtime for SharePoint 2010 with improved patching and SQL Server configuration, backup-restore, log shipping support and more.

5. Identity Management and Security – We have introduced more flexibility identity lifecycle management including updates between SharePoint with identity sources like Active Directory, LDAP servers and HR applications.

Development

I covered the higher-level solutions features under “Composites” above. Many of these enable building solutions with much less code than possible before. We also invested in a number of lower level development features as well for hard core developers. The top give investment areas:

1. New SharePoint APIs – This bullet is a blog post itself! The new UI framework has more extensibility in the ribbon and natively uses XSLT DataViews in lists vs. previous CAML views. There are new APIs for AJAX and Silverlight applications that make it make it much easier to access SharePoint data with less code and better performance. We significantly improved list access and programmability with REST, ATOM, JSON and LINQ including richer data relationship, validation, joins and projections over SharePoint lists which as described above can now reach far higher scale points.

2. Application Lifecycle – We have converged and improved on WSP as the packaging and deployment format for SharePoint solutions. You can save as WSP in SPD and bring that into Visual Studio 2010.

3. Visual Studio 2010 Support – SharePoint 2010 is a first class target for Visual Studio 2010. This includes F5 deployment and debugging (applause welcome …) as well as designers for various SharePoint project types, web parts, workflow, business connectivity services and integration with the VS Server Explorer. The early feedback on this has been so great, we decided to highlight it in Steve Ballmer's keynote at the SharePoint Conference.

4. Developer Dashboard View – If you have the rights, you can turn on a mode for a SharePoint page which will render at the bottom to show full trace and latency through the SharePoint, .NET and SQL layers. You can use our reporting tools described earlier to identify any slow pages in your site and then turn on this view to see a custom web part has bogged down the page by making repeated expensive SharePoint object model calls.

5. Development on Windows 7 – We now support development on Windows 7 and Vista client machines. Although it isn’t a supported configuration for production, we heard you that you want to use it as a development environment.

Summing Up

I hope this was a helpful overview. There will be many more details shared on www.microsoft.com\sharepoint and this blog in the coming days. We will follow the Conference, Blog and Forum traffic to update the answers to common questions and feedback and get the documentation ready for RTM. I thought I’d address two big questions quickly:

· Timeline – As Steve Ballmer announced today, Office and SharePoint Server 2010 will be available for broad Beta in November. The release is on track for the first half of 2010 as we have said for a while. We are upgrading all of Microsoft after having used earlier builds in production for thousands of users for the last year. While we have some tuning to do on the way to release, expect the Beta to be feature complete. We encourage and welcome all your feedback for this release, the documentation and beyond. We are committed to making this a solid release so your data will help tell us exactly when we are ready to ship in the first half of next calendar year.

· Packaging – We incorporated your feedback as we simplified packaging and naming this round. Here is the quick tour. The Server family includes SharePoint Foundation (simpler new name for “WSS”) and SharePoint Server (simpler name for “MOSS”). SharePoint Server continues to have Standard and Enterprise CAL tiers of features. We are enhancing our free basic search offering in Search Server Express 2010. The FAST Search capabilities will be available via the FAST Search for SharePoint add-on server for customers with the Enterprise CAL. For internet access by customers, we are enhancing the existing per server licensed SharePoint for Internet Sites and introducing a lower priced “Standard Version” for small to medium sites. As we announced a while back, SharePoint Designer is free. We think this combined with enhanced usability, designers and safety in SharePoint Designer 2010 client will expand the number and robustness of custom solutions. SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove) is included in Office Professional Plus. We will announce updates to the SharePoint Online offerings closer to release. We will post additional details on this blog as we get closer to release.

Thanks again for reading the posts. I hope to see you at the SharePoint Conference. We look forward to your feedback and seeing your great sites and solutions on SharePoint 2010!

Jeff

Jeff Teper – Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server, Microsoft

Engineering SharePoint

sptblog — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:10:00 GMT

This is the second post in the run up to the SharePoint Conference on October 19th. Last time, I covered the history of SharePoint. This time, I will talk about how the broader Microsoft Office team designs and builds SharePoint highlighting improvements for the 2010 cycle. This is our fourth release of SharePoint plus several releases of Office before that. There has been continuous learning and improvement in our product design and development approach, particularly as we have expanded to servers and services during the last decade. For additional perspective, check out the Office 2010 Engineering Blog.

Process as a Reflection of the Product

You told us you wanted easy, comprehensive, flexible and reliable productivity tools and infrastructure and as a result we have continually evolved our team and process to reflect that mission. There are three key areas we focus where we differentiate our development approach - shared vision, innovative ecosystem and holistic quality.

First, a shared vision is the foundation of everything we do. SharePoint is a large and integrated product serving a broad set of customers. We have learned from discussions, research and instrumented builds, that organizations and users do a broad range of tasks to get work done. There’s ad-hoc brainstorming, statistical research, scheduling and project management, metrics calculation and analysis, internal and external communications and more. However, these activities should not be silos. Just as you told us you want your word processor and spreadsheet to be consistent and work together, you asked for simplicity spanning team collaboration sites to reporting portals. Hence, we always start with a shared vision, design, development and release process bringing together the teams building Office and SharePoint.

Second, we know you need SharePoint to be adaptable to specific industries, organizations and individuals. Building a healthy and innovative ecosystem on our platforms has always been a priority at Microsoft and we increased our investment in the SharePoint team for the 2010 release. We made big bets on customization, programmability, interoperability and upgradability that I will cover in the next post. While we have been working with a range of customers and partners for quite a while on 2010, we will ramp the broader ecosystem education and feedback cycle at the SharePoint Conference next week.

Finally, the most important driver of our engineering process is to meet your mission critical needs for the holistic quality of Office and SharePoint. We know this extends beyond the software to documentation, support, training and skills across the industry. We have the largest quality assurance investment (people, schedule, industry testing) in the industry and made a number of key improvements for 2010 to deliver SharePoint as a server and service. I will highlight some of these below. As I covered in the previous post, we do a few things out-of-band including value-added innovation spanning Microsoft, 3^rd-parties partners and the open source community but we make tradeoffs in our core engineering approach towards a well-designed, integrated and reliable wave of productivity solutions.

The Team

SharePoint is built by the Office group which includes approximately 40 teams and thousands of people. The core teams are in Redmond, Washington, but we have teams around the world with some of the larger sites in Silicon Valley, Boise, Boston, Ireland, Norway, India, China and Japan. These teams provide diverse experiences and perspectives and are a great test bed for our global collaboration tools. We often get asked about our development culture. I think the best description is a balance of top-down and bottoms-up vs. one extreme or the other. We try to balance consistency with innovation and empowerment with governance. If that sounds a lot like our vision for the SharePoint product, that is the idea. The team should reflect the product. While we consider a shared vision, schedule and process core to our approach, we have lot of brainstorming and collaboration as we iterate on this shared plan. After the vision is set, we push down almost all the decisions to the teams about what to build and how features should work as long as they are consistent with fundamental tenets like security and performance. That bottoms-up innovation is how features like My Sites and the Business Data Catalog got created and we have many examples like that coming in 2010. Of the 40 teams, almost everyone is contributing to SharePoint or building light-up scenarios that work with SharePoint. There is a core SharePoint team (actually two – one for Windows SharePoint Services and one for SharePoint Server building on top). However, the code comes from across the organization. Some teams (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Access, InfoPath, OneNote, etc.) have been client-centric but increasingly are building client-server scenarios including the Office Web Apps (e.g. the 2010 PowerPoint Web App) or SharePoint features (e.g. InfoPath Forms Services). Other teams are more server-centric such as our Content Management, Search and Line-of-Business Integration groups but even they are focused on end-to-end scenarios. There is a mantra inside our group to optimize customer scenarios top of mind and not “ship the org chart”. Interoperability is a key part of this process from day one including publishing all the interfaces between our clients and servers. We have published SharePoint APIs and protocols for a long-time. We formalized this approach as part of Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and significantly expanded the depth of our documentation in the last couple years including sharing preliminary information earlier than ever before for the 2010 wave.

Team investments and innovations come from a lot of different places and we used all of these approaches as part of the 2010 development:

· Existing Teams – Most of the 40 teams (e.g. Excel, SharePoint) evolve from previous releases coming up with ideas based on customer research, technology investigation, brainstorming, etc. Some of the work the Excel team has done for business intelligence in 2010 is a good example of a team evolving its mission in a big way.

· New Teams Created for the Release – OneNote is a great example of an effort where we created a new team within the Office organization. The core Office Web Applications team is the best example of this in 2010. Prior web work had been done in Outlook + Exchange, Excel and InfoPath, but we wanted to create a shared team to provide shared capabilities for the 2010 wave just as we have done in the rich Office client for several releases.

· Incubations – As I mentioned last post, SharePoint itself evolved from a couple different incubations. The Line-of-Business Integration team is the best example of this in 2010. We had a sub-team inside SharePoint Server building the Business Data Catalog (BDC) in SharePoint 2007, but we beefed that up considerably with the LOBi team who had been working outside SharePoint on some early stage work that we decided to bet on for this wave. We have a number of partnerships with Microsoft Research and other teams looking at things that will come in future releases.

· Acquisitions – While we don’t do a lot of acquisitions, we have been fortunate to make some great companies join us dating back to PowerPoint, SharePoint Designer (previously FrontPage), Web Content Management (from NCompass Labs) and SharePoint Workspace (previously Groove). The FAST Search team is a great example of an acquisition enhancing our team in 2010.

Hopefully, this gives you the sense that to build a broad product we have invested in a large team with a variety of sources of experience and innovation, but all striving towards a shared vision for building easy, integrated and interoperable SharePoint and Office clients, servers and services.

The People

The roles within Microsoft R&D have been covered a few books and blogs before so I will not go into great detail. At the highest level:

· Software Development Engineers (SDE) own the architecture and write the code

· Software Development Engineers in Test (SDE\T) own the test strategy, plans and automation investment and test the code

· Program Managers own the vision, specifications, project management and coordination outside the team with marketing and others

· Product Planners own the customer, market research and feedback processes

· User Assistance owns the documentation from in-product help to IT guidance to SDKs

· Designers owns the look and feel of the product from the overall approach to refining specific features

· Usability owns the prototype and product usability testing , analysis and recommendations

In addition, we have lots of key roles outside R&D helping us design, build and support SharePoint. Product Managers own marketing programs, customer and partner engagements, and readiness activities (like the SharePoint Conference) and provide some of the most important feedback to Program Managers.

While this sounds like a lot of roles, it is not as compartmentalized as you might think. Most of the work in Office and SharePoint is done in what is called “Feature Crews” consisting of a PM, SDE and SDE\T. They work extremely closely together on the whole lifecycle of an area of the product from brainstorming to scheduling to prioritization to development to testing to dogfooding to early adopter customer projects. Some Feature Crews use approaches like Scrum, some don’t. At this level we really leave it up to the team how they want to operate day-to-day and we try to keep the organization chart very flat above them. Most new hires have just 2-3 layers between them and an area VP/GM like me. We have a common engineering system (specs, build, test framework, etc.) but we encourage a lot of creativity and best practice sharing across Feature Crews. One we used for 2010 is promoting great early work the SDE\T team had done using real world data sets to validate upgrade much earlier in this cycle than 2007. Each release, there are dozens of new things we try in our approach to building better software. Some work. Some don’t payoff. For SharePoint 2010, our big new investment in people and roles was our Customer Assistance Team (CAT) that I mentioned in the last post. We were initially worried about creating another role. We already had the SharePoint Center of Excellence within our Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) organization who looks at key customer and partner projects and brings the feedback into the team which was a key part of us designing 2007. However, we decided with the growth of the business and range of deployments, we really wanted dedicated people sitting within the engineering group living and sharing complex manageability, governance and application development customer scenarios. Our CAT team shares customer overviews, architectures and feedback on the http://office SharePoint site and in atrium sessions and works with developers and testers 1x1. In fact, I expect some of our top ranked sessions at the upcoming SharePoint Conference to be delivered or co-authored by members of our CAT team. In sum, while a broad product needs some expertise and specialization, the culture of the group is very much “make the right decision for the customer, make others great and get stuff done” so it really is a team effort which we think is an ideal culture for building a collaboration product.

The Feedback Loop

Customer and partner feedback has long been the key to the Office and SharePoint engineering process. We are fortunate to serve a very diverse set of organizations and users around the world. As you would imagine, one of our most valuable sources of input is discussions with IT leaders in large organizations. However, we are careful not to get skewed too much away from direct end user feedback. We talk to lots of end users and partners. We synthesize what is similar and unique when we to school teachers about collaborating with their students vs. VPs of manufacturing trying to share best practices in plant operations across their factories. A few of the mechanisms we emphasized while building SharePoint 2010:

· Statistical Research – We have a few different instrumentation and telemetry mechanisms we use in Office and SharePoint including SQM (actions and profile data), Watson (crashes) and Feedback from the App (e.g. Send a Smile/Frown). At scale, this is the best data we can get to help us go from gut decisions to data-driven decisions so we appreciate you using them. We have rigorous privacy guidelines around this data. This helps us understand everything from typical network latencies to query term patterns to document library sizes. Over the last few years, we have also gotten lots of operational data from SharePoint Online. While we always looked at activity profiles from Microsoft’s own 100,000+ person intranet / internet running on SharePoint and a set of early adopter customers, it is valuable to have detailed data from our much larger online farms supporting a broader range of customers. This also helps tuning the user experience, performance, deployment documentation, etc.

· Product Planning – Planning does a broad range of primary and secondary research we share across the team. One of our favorite things they do is “Day in the Life” research where we follow real people around doing their jobs irrespective of whether they use software to get tasks done to keep us grounded in addressing unmet needs.

· Internet Blogs and Forums – We read these intensely looking for the key trends and feedback so please keep it coming.

· Conference Chalk Talks –Some of our highest bandwidth discussions come after sessions at the SharePoint Conference, TechEd, the PDC and regional events where we have someone from the development team brainstorming with people on a particular topic – be it designs for high availability or how to evangelize SharePoint to new users. There is something about getting an unplanned set of people together without too much structure that sparks a lot of creativity about where we should take things next.

· MVPs, Customer and Partner Advisory Councils – These are more formal activities where we try to balance being inclusive but small enough to be manageable early in the cycle when our plans are still forming. Our MVPs have always given us great feedback during every stage of the development process. Our Partner Advisory Council meeting is small enough that everyone fits around U shaped table so people feel comfortable chiming in if they like or hate an idea. We have extranet SharePoint sites and Live Meetings for these relationships so we can collaborate virtually as well. We work hard to make sure these cover a cross section of organizations and geographies as we are not able to include as many people as we would like in these forums.

· Field Advisory Councils – We have a group of Microsoft employees in technical sales, consulting and support we call “SharePoint Insiders”. They are mix of new and old employees - some have been part of our feedback loop since pre-release SharePoint V1 @ 2000. They are a very direct group and do not mince words when reflecting the feedback they hear from you or opportunities they see.

· Usability Labs – During the development cycle we do 1000s of tests (paper prototypes, terminology, screenshots, working code, etc.) with a sample of people following a pretty rigorous methodology. The labs are here on campus but anyone can watch a test live from their office. This is one of my favorite parts of the development cycle. If we show a design for a new feature to 8 people and only 2 of them can complete the task, it is back to the drawing board.

· Early Adopter and Beta Program – We have a staged disclosure where we work with a cross section of early adopters to get early product feedback followed by a broad beta to help us understand what we need to fix across a broad cross section of scenarios. The upcoming broad beta is a very critical part of the process, so again, thanks for your participation when we roll that out.

I could keep going but this is covers the biggest investments.

The Vision

My second favorite day in a SharePoint release (after the day we ship) is the day the team rolls out the vision. This includes a vision statement, pillars (e.g. embracing cloud delivery, supporting business processes), tenets (e.g. upgradability, security) and, of course, the schedule which grounds us in the realities of tradeoffs needed in any software business and project. The schedule is based on all the data we analyzed from the last release about how long it took us to complete various parts of the engineering cycle vs. hopes. It gets rolled out to the team in three forms – a one page Word document we can all keep on our desktops or walls to guide us on tradeoffs through the release, a longer Word document that goes into detail and a big PowerPoint demo to the team. The latter is my favorite part. We take everyone in team into a big conference center for the vision roll-out meeting. There are a couple text slides to describe the pillars and tenets but 90% of the meeting is the experience we want users, developers and IT to see. One big giant three hour demo. Everyone leaves very fired up. With the vision in place, we unleash specing, development and testing. Here is where lots of details get written down, debated, reviewed and finalized. Along the way, the teams come up with new ideas, get feedback from customers, partners and the market and make tradeoffs to adapt our plans but that is much easier to do from a grounded vision. All of the collaboration and tracking is via our intranet http://office SharePoint site I will describe below. However, we have a few key face-to-face checkpoints along the way. The first is “demo day” after the first coding milestone. We get everyone back together to demo the real code to see how it holds together and where we can share ideas or need to adjust the plans. The second checkpoint comes later when the code is close to polished. The design team takes the original vision PowerPoint and replaces the mockup bitmaps with real screenshots of the working builds. Again, it is a great chance to holistically see where the designs have evolved from the vision day (which they always do a lot!) and where we still need to tweak. There is always a mix of some cool new things we added and some things that we had to defer but each release we have been about 80-90% consistent with the original vision. I think a clear collaborative vision is a key to building a successful team and broad product like Office or SharePoint. We obviously hope you use SharePoint to foster the same kind of planning and collaboration in your organization.

The Process

I will not going into the detail of how we do software engineering. As with our roles, there’s been a number of good books and blog posts over the years that have covered at least parts of what we do. One of the best has been the Engineering 7 blog done for Windows 7. I did want to highlight a few things we evolved for SharePoint 2010.

· Dogfood – A lot has been written about the importance of dogfood (running your own software internally for real work) at Microsoft to build usability and quality in and give us a data on the project status. When I first joined Microsoft in 1992, I was put on a very early dogfood version of what became Exchange for all my e-mail and used a pre-alpha version of what became Access for a customer tracking app. It was rocky at first but a great chance to get data, give feedback and help ship these products. The Windows NT team compiled Windows NT using early builds of Windows NT which was called self-hosting and developers got a visit from Dave Cutler, the NT development manager, if you they broke this. Dogfooding is the most critical to driving a sufficient level of real world stabilization to facilitate external feedback. This release, we embraced dogfooding earlier and more frequently than ever in SharePoint. We have been using Office and SharePoint 2010 builds to do our work in the team for over 18 months. For me it has been no net ever since. Mails via Outlook 2010. Documents to SharePoint 2010. For the client software, we have a http://voteoff site where people in the development team vote and comment if a particular build is good or not. While we have lots of manual and automated testing where we find the vast majority of our issues, but the data we get from dogfooding is an indispensable part of the process. If we find an issue during dogfooding, it not only improves our product but also flags areas for increasing our test automation. For SharePoint, over the course of the release we have dozens of upgrades to our dogfood and puppyfood (the corny name for our pre-dogfood servers for the really brave– another 2010 cycle invention). We just upgraded http://office again this week and the build is looking very good. We will start the process to upgrade the SharePoint servers for all of Microsoft which we see as a critical part of validating the beta release before making it available to all of you.

· Early Adopter Interaction – In the past, we gave the software to early adopters who described their scenarios and feedback. This release we had Feature Crews actually build sites with these early adopters. This turned out to be extremely educational. Another new thing we did year was hosting trade fairs in our Building 16 atrium where each team had a booth to show off their customers’ projects and developers would walk around and learn about how features would be used and feedback. We gave fun awards for the best sites including most creative scenarios and most interesting bug found in the process. It was a great chance for developers in the team to see customer scenarios face-to-face, ask questions, etc.

· Performance Analysis – SharePoint performance is very complex and multi-dimensional depending on the hardware, software and network configuration, data set, usage profile, etc. Our CAT team has done a lot of great work to publish much better performance guidance for SharePoint 2007 than we had at 2007 RTM. They also helped the entire team dramatically increase its performance analysis and investments for the SharePoint 2010 cycle. We probably collective 2 orders of magnitude more performance data vs. during the 2007 cycle. For example, we don’t just want to understand the median latency of a page but the 95^th percentile latency across a browser and bandwidth matrix as users don’t want the product to be slow even 5% of the time when an asynchronous job might impact performance. From looking at hundreds of our largest customers in detail, the top two opportunities for performance improvement are the hardware configuration and custom code written to SharePoint. So a lot of what we did to help our development team we put in the product for 2010. Some of this is tuning, isolation and throttling but one of our favorites is a report that shows you your slowest pages and lets you turn on the “Developer Dashboard” on a page so you can see exactly where the time is spent. A couple releases ago when we upgraded Microsoft overall corporate portal to SharePoint 2003, it took us several hours to track down a slow page to a custom web part that did too many round trips to a non-SharePoint database. In SharePoint 2010, you will know this proactively and can diagnose in minutes. We also have a new way to prevent this Web Part from slowing down the site which I will describe in the next post.

· Grid Team – In the last couple of posts I mentioned that SharePoint Online is big part of our development cycle. It is a way to reach many new customers. It also gives us a much larger scale environment than our own SharePoint intranet, extranet and internet apps to analyze and tune. This release, we created a dedicated team called “The Grid” team to analyze and optimize in great detail the total costs, time, reliability and other factors of a SharePoint deployment we hope to reach 10s and eventually 100s of millions of users. Almost all of what we learn there helps make the product more reliable for customers and partners hosting their own servers from a small company to a 250,000 employee enterprise. There is a bunch of great learning from things like virtualization with Hyper-V to best practice analysis to operations monitoring we will share in the coming months. The Grid team will be at the SharePoint Conference.

SharePoint on SharePoint

The key to successful dogfooding is picking a real scenario and not just a playground. So we run the Office and SharePoint projects on early builds of SharePoint 2010. Except for the first couple builds, there is no fall-back site. We have to make it work. I often get asked about how to balance empowerment with oversight by SharePoint customers, so I will describe in a little detail what we do on http://office as we have a mix of ad-hoc stuff with some pretty formal engineering processes. Part of http://office is collaboration sub-sites for each team, where they can do whatever they find useful except, and this is a big one, open up security to anyone they want in Microsoft. We use SharePoint’s security permission and inheritance features to restrict who in Microsoft has access to information about future versions of Office. The core of http://office is more structured sites including Vision, Schedule, Specs, Test Plans, Status, Metrics, etc. A few people running the overall project customize these but almost everyone contributes and consumes. Right now, I spend a lot of time looking at the Metrics site. I have two monitors on my desktop and one usually has an IE window with this maximized. It uses our BI features including Excel Services and SQL Server integration to bring together data from across the teams on a variety of metrics. It uses Excel features like heat maps (e.g. teams with more than 5 bugs per developer are red) and sparklines (new mini charts that fit in a cell in Excel 2010 showing) to show areas for focus and key trends. Finally, we have a bunch of social networking tools on SharePoint. I keep my internal team blog there. We have Engineering Wikis for developers, testers and program managers that are living training and best practice sites that new hires in particular find very useful. Everything on http://office is indexed so rather than everyone sending e-mail to everyone about everything, we use alerts, RSS feeds and some new 2010 social networking features I will describe in the next post to keep track of things that are of interest to us. I mentioned our design and usability specialists earlier. I subscribe to a weekly alert for all the test and research posts they make to the SharePoint site. Others may want that more or less frequently. http://office is used by thousands of people around the world daily so we also get great operational data that helps us tune the work-in-progress code as well. So dogfooding helps throughout the cycle - from validating new collaboration features to ensuring good code quality to final stabilization and documentation work. Of course this is not sufficient; it complements manual and automated testing, early adopter testing and pilots, broad betas and other parts of our process.

Three Common Questions

I thought I would wrap-up this post with the top three questions I hear from customers and partners about how we think about building SharePoint.

· Do you guys think of SharePoint as an application or a platform? SharePoint is both but we start by aspiring to be an application. We want to solve as many problems as we can out-of-box without requiring a developer. Of course, many sites and solutions need developers and in the core SharePoint teams we have lots of people working on developer features and 2010 will be a major leap in programmability and developer productivity as I will cover in the next post. But I think we should always be looking at custom solutions and asking how we could have enabled them using less code. While this is this the right philosophy, there will always a huge variety of needs for building solutions on top and we’re very focused on supporting that as well. As I covered in the last post, while we are focused on solutions, we made some very clear architecture bets in SharePoint on integrated storage, rendering, security, etc. so the platform is a big internal focus as well.

· How do you guys make tradeoffs vs. product X, Y or Z? SharePoint is a broad product and we position it as such so we understand we invite this comparison. We have been asked to contrast SharePoint to everything from SAP to Facebook! We make tradeoffs focused on broad deployment of a general purpose server and service spanning collaboration, portals, content management, search, business intelligence and business process integration. All else being equal, we will prioritize capabilities used by the broadest number of organizations and users. Over the last couple of releases we have substantially increased SharePoint R&D to invest in depth as well. To use the Office analogy, not every Excel user creates PivotTables but most organizations have lots of people creating them and many more people interacting with them. You saw a leap in depth investments in content management in 2007 and will see a similar leap in Search and BI in 2010.

· What do you guys really think about the cloud? Is it an opportunity or a threat? What if I want to or need to keep running my own servers? We love the cloud! We have been running SharePoint Online for customers based on SharePoint 2007 for a few years. Last year, we announced some of the largest enterprises adopting SharePoint Online as well as a multi-tenant service for small-medium sized organizations. You can choose to use SharePoint Server, Online, partner hosting or a combination. We see all models going forward. While SharePoint Online helps organizations who may not have access to IT resource, we believe it helps in larger organizations with deep IT groups well. We think we’ll do the very best job running it which translates to happier users and IT and lets IT professionals spend more time higher business value activities for technology adoption than just low level operations tasks. Even for organizations who want to run SharePoint, you will benefit because we build our experience running high availability, low cost services into the product and guidance. Again, your choice: server, service or mix. We apply and share what we learn from our SharePoint Online experience.

Thanks again for reading and your feedback. Next post from me will be an overview of the 2010 capabilities. I promise!

Jeff

Jeff Teper – Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server, Microsoft

SharePoint Conference 2009 has officially SOLD OUT!

sptblog — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:21:49 GMT

SharePoint Conference 2009: SOLD OUT!

We’re officially SOLD OUT! With 7000+ SharePoint experts, developers, partners, users, MVP’s and enthusiasts this is officially the BIGGEST SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE EVER!!! We’ve had a phenomenal response to the conference this year with a 94% increase in attendance and we can’t wait to see you all in just over 10 days!

Discounted Hotel Room Rates: SOLD OUT!

Due to high demand in registration our discounted hotel room rates at The Hotel and Mandalay Bay Hotel, are SOLD OUT! Luckily Las Vegas is a big place with plenty of hotel rooms, so if you’re looking for accommodation check out some of the deals at the neighboring properties like the Luxor, but act quickly!

Post Conference Workshops: SOLD OUT!

The SharePoint Developer Deep Dive and SharePoint Server 2010 Installation and Upgrade post-conference workshops are both SOLD OUT! If you’re interested in attending one of these post-conference workshops open to all registered SharePoint Conference 2009 attendees, please contact spc@microsoft.com to join the wait-list.

Registered? Why Not Tell Everyone!

We're excited you've decided to register for SharePoint Conference 2009 and you should be too! Here are some images you can use on your website and in your email signature to let others know you'll be attending.

For more information visit www.mssharepointconference.com.

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 Team