Blaine Wastell - patterns & practices client architecture guidance : SharePoint

pnp Summit Videos Available online

blaine — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:48:09 GMT

Ajoy just announced that 3 p&p summit video's are now available on-line. He provides a link to a presentation that Francis and I gave regarding SharePoint Guidance. Check it out.

Roadmap for WCSF

blaine — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:01:00 GMT

A number of customers have asked about the future of the Web Client Software Factory. I want to announce that we are starting to plan for the next release of the Web Client Software Factory. We plan to start the project in the spring of 2009 and plan to deliver this next version with Visual Studio 2010. I need your feedback as to the scope for this next release. The overall process for this release is the following.

Announce intent for release and ask for scope requests
Obtain feedback from you and other customers to create candidate scope list
Publish survey to prioritize candidate scope
Build vision/scope from prioritized scope
Start project & deliver the project (if only it were this easy

We will take feedback from the following sources for the release:

Obtain feedback from my blog and Michael Puleio's blog

Obtain feedback from www.codeplex.com/websf

Obtain feedback from advisory board

Obtain feedback from direct customer discussions

We are considering a number of new features for Web Client Software Factory. This list is to get the discussion started but it will not be the final scope which is why we need your feedback. We will not have time to implement all of these features and I am confident that you will provide many other ideas that are not on the list.

List to start the discussion:

Unity for a container
Composite support for MVC
Support for Web pages through dynamic data
Eliminate the use of a base class similar to what we did for Prism
Allow library to be pluggable so you can use your own components including the container
Support for Silverlight controls on your Web pages
Allow Web Client Software Factory controls to be reused with SharePoint
How to distribute logic between layers of the architecture
Improve performance of CWAB

I need your feedback on what you think we should focus on. I also need your help to build a list of customers that are using the Web Client Software Factory. I constantly have customers that are asking who else is using it. Additionally it is helpful to have this list to put the business case together for how much budget we should spend on this next release. So please help me build my list of customers.

As for support, we will continue to provide support for WCSF through our Codeplex site.

Announcing 6 new patterns and practices releases

blaine — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:28:52 GMT

The patterns & practices team just published 6 new releases in the last two weeks. Ajoy discusses the releases on his blog. The new releases include:

Enterprise Library v4.1
Unity Application Block v1.2
Distributed Agile Development white paper and Agile showcase
Application Architecture Guide v2.0 (Beta 1)
SharePoint Development Guidance v1.0
Acceptance Testing Guidance

Check out the new guidance as there is truly lots of new and useful guidance.

Unit Testing SharePoint Projects

blaine — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:38:20 GMT

Since we started the SharePoint Guidance project, I have heard from most customers that they do not unit test their SharePoint projects because it is hard to do. In our drop that will come out tomorrow or Wednesday on Codeplex we have some good content on how to unit test applications built with SharePoint. This guidance started with a recent blog by Francis Cheung.

Check out the blog and the CodePlex drop as it is quite useful if you are trying to understand how to unit test SharePoint Applications. Let us know your thoughts on the guidance. Is it easy to understand? Will you use in on your current or next SharePoint project?

patterns & practices SharePoint Drop is Available on Codeplex

blaine — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:33:15 GMT

In a previous post, I talked about starting a new project to create SharePoint guidance. We heard you need guidance to help with:

Unit testing and debugging
Packaging and deployment
Setting up a team development environment
Unclear which SharePoint features/ components to use and when
Solution maintenance/upgrade
How and when is SharePoint Designer applicable

Based upon your feedback, we decided to guidance on SharePoint Intranet Development. This includes help with solution architecture, solution development, and packaging and deployment.

Elevator Pitch:

Target Customer: Primary: SharePoint Professional Developers (Includes Architects); Secondary: SharePoint IT Pro's

Statement of Need: Guidance for architecting, designing, building and maintaining intranet sites that require collaboration, human workflow, BI and LOB integration, and administration capabilities.

Product Name and Capability:

Intranet Application Development Using SharePoint
Reference implementation, application architecture, and library for developing departmental transactional applications.

Key Benefit:

Provides a reference implementation that demonstrates an appropriate use of SharePoint
Guidance on which SharePoint capabilities to use for implementing the specific scenario
Guidance on the SDLC as it relates to the specific scenario
Common pitfalls in SharePoint development
Strategies for testing and debugging
Improves predictability of developing similar SharePoint solutions.

Focus Areas of the Guidance:

Solution Architecture:

Architect/developer needs to decide which SharePoint components should be used
Architect/developer has to decide if they should be writing custom code
Architect/developer has to decide between storing data in a SharePoint list or a database

Solution Development:

A multi-site development team needs to setup their development environment and processes
Developer needs to unit test and debug SharePoint code
Developer needs to define the Visual Studio solution structure

Packaging and Deployment

SharePoint solution must be deployed to test, staging and production
Developer needs to troubleshoot deployment issues
Developer needs to upgrade an existing solution package

Here is a link to the vision/scope. Let us know your thoughts on the vision.

We plan to deliver the guidance in the late fall. Here a link to our most current drop. Checkout how we unit test our current version of the Reference Implementation. We are using a tool call TypeMock. Unit testing was one of the most requested areas of guidance for Sharepoint.

Need help to prioritize SharePoint scenarios and requirements

blaine — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:36:52 GMT

We are starting a new project to provide guidance on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). If you are a SharePoint developer we need you to take a survey to help us priority scenarios and requirements for the guidance.

As background, customers have been asking for guidance on SharePoint for quite awhile now. SharePoint is a big application development platform that we need your help to determine where we should focus our time.