Verticalware

A beautiful day...for SharePoint developers

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

Application Architecture Guide 2.0

We released beta 1 of a new application architecture guide last week at PDC, check it out and follow along as the guide is developed: http://www.codeplex.com/AppArch

JD Meier and his team is doing some ground breaking work, developing a practical handbook for you architects and developer out there to choose from a myriad of approaches and technologies and design and develop your applications, understanding and making the right tradeoffs. This guide is the Microsoft playbook for application architecture

This new architecture guide is all about putting the legos together, with Quality attributes, architecture styles and business imperatives, using the right abstractions to deal with complexity, Sw engineering is about abstractions - platforms, tools, languages, runtimes and patterns. To paraphrase Grady Booch, identifying, using patterns is a sign of maturity of the sw industry

It was Sir Issac Newton who said that “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." This guide lets you stand on the shoulder of giants, so to speak…some 60+ architects and technologists at MS such as Brad Abrams, Pat Helland etc has reviewed parts of this guide, the product teams has verified what we say about their products and how they fit into the bigger picture

Happy reading!

New coordinates...

After 4+ years in Developer and Platform Evangelism I moved to a new team. I will be the group program manager for a team called Patterns and Practices in the Developer Division at Microsoft.

PnP, is well known for its guidance, Enterprise Library is a household name with .NET developers. The team recently launched the Composite App guidance for WPF and released guidance for Web application security

While the coordinates change, my overall focus remains the same, evangelism, enterprise, architecture, guidance, reference apps, patterns/anti-patterns, industries etc.

Wish me luck!

OBA Mashups!

composition in the enterprise has been a holy grail, but the lack of a solid app platform that allows for decoupling and provide the 'containers' needed for composing components didn't exist. With SharePoint, we have such a platform. OBAs are composite apps, created by mashing up Web parts, content types, workflows, etc.

Yesterday, at the Office Developer Conference, we announced an OBA Composition Reference Toolkit that allows for easy mashups of OBA components to create OBAs. This is a very cool idea, Information Workers can use a WPF composer to select components from a gallery that based on meta data finds related and supported components. Once the components are assembled, IW can provision the OBA to a hosted SharePoint instance....just like that!

The idea is for developers to use tools like VSTO, SPD, VS to create components, make them metadata rich and an OBA component server can discover and make these composable. While the IW can create the end mashups that allow them to perform their task at hand

Watch me talk about this more at:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=382063

You can download the content and the msi from msdn

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/cc196391.aspx

Book: 6 Microsoft OBAs for MOSS

MS Press recently published a book titled “6 Microsoft Office Business Applications for Office SharePoint Server 2007”.  This book highlights the breadth of approaches developers can take for building Office Business Applications (OBAs). These approaches, OBA patterns, are based on real-world implementations in many cases. In other cases, they are built on Microsoft Office features that have a generalized solution rooted in input from customers and partners. This reference delivers the seven key Microsoft OBA patterns and provides professional developers with extensible examples and the architectural guidance needed for developing OBAs.

Office Developer Conference

2008 Office Developer Conference is around the corner...Bill Gates is delivering a special keynote...I plan to be there, we are running the architecture track at ODC, so if you want to know the latest on OBAs, go register...I will see you in San Jose

Plant Floor OBA Virtual Lab

Whether you are on a slow bandwidth connection or are lazy to downlaod the OBA RAP for PF vpc, now you can see how it works using the virtual lab:

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7091160

Three new OBA RAPs

checkout the new reference architecture packs we released earlier this week

1. OBA RAP for E-Forms processing addresses common patterns in data collection and processing using InfoPath 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, InfoPath Forms Services, Outlook, and WF. While the scenario is based on the application form and process to obtain a hunting and fishing license from a state agency, the underlying solution framework is generic and can be readily adapted to enable end-to-end processing of similar forms

2. OBA RAP for Plant Floor Operations illustrate how to build an Analytics OBA using Office 2007, SQL Server 2005, and PerformancePoint Server 2007. The scenario is based on manufacturing plant floor operations in a fictitious Oil & Gas company and provides analysis and decision making for strategic, tactical and operational levels

3. OBA RAP for Health Plans shows how to build architectures that unify people, process and technology through familiar Office 2007 user interfaces using Windows Live platform for member and coach identification, Windows Live Service Agents as automated bots and SharePoint Server 2007 for coach and member collaboration

creating web parts without writing code

I stumbled upon this nifty SP Web part that can host any ASP.NET web user control, check it out:

http://www.codeplex.com/smartpart

Development on your fingertips: Microsoft Office Developer Map

very cool:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb497969.aspx

Everything an OBA devloper needs, resources, content, documentation on object libraries etc, all bundled in a nice WPF app

Video: Steve Ballmer at Software 2007 on OBA

Here is a video on CNet, check out the Dassault demo, which is cool

http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6182663.html?tag=vid

Steve Ballmer 'RAP's to OBA at Software 2007

Steve talked about Software + Services and OBA in his keynote today at Software 2007. He also announced the OBA RAP for Price Management that we launched today. These OBA RAPs are reference applications that give you an idea of what an OBA looks like and how to build one using Microsoft Office 2007.

S+S is the new application pattern, if you will, where Software on the desktops work seamlessly with Services in the cloud providing a rich epxerience for the end users. Composition is a key pillar of S+S, in this new brave world, apps will not be built ground up. I see OBA as an instantiation of S+S.

You can find more on Steve's OBA discussion at the following few places:

ZDNet Blogs: Software 2007: Ballmer touts Office for composite apps

CRN: Ballmer: Office Business Apps Gaining Steam

Barrons: Microsoft: Ballmer Focuses On “Office Business Applications;” Have Yourself An OBA RAP

OBA RAP For Price Management - a small price to pay for a big gain!

Microsoft today released Office Business Application (OBA) Reference Architecture Pack (RAP) for Price Management. Price Management is a crucial aspect of any company’s product sales strategy. Price is where the supply meets demand and is also the fundamental measure of a product or service value in the market. So to help in this critical scenario, Microsoft released an OBA RAP that show cases use of Office Application platform to build a real time price generation solution.

Find out more from: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb467601.aspx

The famous 40: WSS Site Templates

Have you been using any of the WSS templates on Microsoft TechNet (available here)

If yes, please drop me a line and lmk which one and what you like about it

Duet 2.0 will use MOSS

Duet 2.0, to be released in end of 2008 will use MOSS for new business scenarios such as Sales and SCM, read more...