The sun is out after days of rain here in Seattle, there is a new hope in the air across the country...but these are not the only reasons, today we released the developer guidance for sharepoint developers to

• Make architectural decisions about feature factoring, packaging, and the appropriate usage of design patterns.
• Determine design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
• Design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
• Set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
• Manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.

For the past few years we have been talking with customers and partners building SharePoint solutions, one common concern we have heard over and over is the baseline guidance on setting up SP environment, test driven SP development and deployment is missing. So, we in p&p started on a new project 6 months ago to dig into this and create this guidance.

More on Blaine's blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/blaine

Check out the release: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx

Download and participate in the discussions, give f/b:

http://www.codeplex.com/spg