Matt Bremer's Blog

St. Louis Day of .NET Recap

mattbremer — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 09:28:10 GMT

The St. Louis Day(s) of .NET was a great success. This year the event expanded to two full days of content. Over 500 people attended over 65 sessions presented by subject matter experts and Microsoft MVPs throughout the region. This is by far the largest community driven developer event ever held in St. Louis and I hope it is only the beginning.

I thought the organizers did a great job making the event approachable by beginning each day with “Jump Start” sessions. These sessions were designed to provide developers an introduction to technologies they were unfamiliar with but wanted to learn. I presented the “Jump Start: SharePoint Development” sessions and received good feedback from those that attended. I approached these sessions from the perspective of a .NET developer new to SharePoint and that seemed to resonate with the attendees.

My other session covered the SharePoint developer experience. In this session I talked about the current challenges SharePoint developers encounter and demonstrated how utilizing tools can help you become a more efficient developer today. I then finished the session by previewing how SharePoint development will become a first class citizen with the release of SharePoint 2010 and VisualStudio 2010 showing the screen shots Microsoft made public at the Worldwide Partner Conference.

I had a great time at the event and am grateful to the organizers for their efforts and for allowing me the opportunity to speak once again. I cannot wait for next year and am confident the organizers will improve upon what is already becoming a must attend event for the region.

Slides from My Sessions:

Jump Start: Share Point Development

View more presentations from mattbremer.

SharePoint Developer Experience Present & Future

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Update: STSDev 1.4 has been released and appears to offer a lot of new functionality comparable to WSPBuilder as well as resolved a number of the issues in 1.3 I discussed during my session. Thanks to the attendees in my SharePoint Developer Experience Present & Future session that brought this release to my attention. You can download STSDev 1.4 here.

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Practical Uses of Twitter

mattbremer — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 07:08:37 GMT

Today I noticed a billboard for a local hospital advertising the use of Twitter to alert followers about current ER wait times. I thought this was a very clever and practical use of Twitter and it left me pondering other ways brick and mortar businesses could leverage Twitter.

Now the fact that this particular hospital uses Twitter to broadcast current ER wait times is not likely to make someone choose that particular hospital over another. Given that this particular scenario is a potential medical emergency means that you are more likely to choose the closest hospital or one that is affiliated with your doctor or insurance. That, however, is not the point in my opinion.

Many complain that Twitter has a lot of noise and for the most part I agree. In my experience I have observed that most brick and mortar businesses mainly use Twitter to engage their community as an extension of their advertising strategy as opposed to providing a service. A hospital broadcasting their ER wait times is providing a service to potential patients in a clever way. This made me wonder if other brick and mortar businesses have embraced Twitter in this way.

I immediately thought of a couple of practical uses for Twitter. I would find it quite useful if local restaurants would use Twitter to broadcast their current wait times or whether a reservation would be recommended for a particular night. I also think that it would be useful for airlines or airports themselves to tweet about potential delays. I realize that most airlines already provide notifications via email and text messages but that is one more place for me to check. If I already use Twitter I would find it useful to watch for these alerts in my twitter stream.

I am interested to hear other ideas or to know of businesses already using Twitter in this way. Please leave them in the comments section.

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Specify Default Scope for Advanced Search Box Web Part without Using Scope Picker

mattbremer — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:57:08 GMT

On a recent project I had a requirement to develop a search application for a specific subset of content within SharePoint. By creating managed properties for the site columns of my content type and then consuming them as properties in the advanced search box web part I was able to create a usable search interface quickly without writing custom code. An issue arose, however, when I wanted to limit the search results to a particular scope.

Apparently when a scope is not specified via the scope picker the advanced search box web part uses the “All Sites” scope thus my results included matching content outside of my specific scope. To meet my requirement I needed to find a way to specify the default scope for an advanced search box query without input from a user. One way to do this would have been to create a custom web part that called the search API via the object model and then I would have complete control over the user interface. I always counsel my clients, however, to use the out of the box functionality within SharePoint whenever possible and felt that a custom web part for such a minor issue was overly complex.

My first idea to solve this was to create a new scopes display group containing only the scope I needed and then use this display group to populate the scope picker list of the advanced search box web part. This was an effective solution but had a significant drawback in that it still required a user to specify the scope. Next I went out to my internet search provider of choice and found that most developers had resorted to javascript that selected the checkbox for the scope picker automatically when a search was performed if the user failed to specify a scope. I quickly decided this was not an ideal solution and continued searching.

This led me to investigate the advanced search box web part further and the solution presented itself when I went and viewed the XML for the “Properties” property of the web part. Within the <ResultType> schema there is a node called <Query>. It is here that the out of the box configuration specifies the various result types used to bind the result type picker to. Below is the default results type XML for the advanced search box web part.

  <ResultTypes>
    <ResultType DisplayName="All Results" Name="default">
      <Query/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Documents" Name="documents">
      <Query>IsDocument=1</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Word Documents" Name="worddocuments">
      <Query>FileExtension='doc' Or FileExtension='docx' Or FileExtension='dot'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Excel Documents" Name="exceldocuments">
      <Query>FileExtension='xls' Or FileExtension='xlsx' Or FileExtension='xlt'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Presentations" Name="presentations">
      <Query>FileExtension='ppt'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
  </ResultTypes>

You’ll notice that within the <Query> node that query syntax is being used to filter the search as opposed to keyword syntax. This is important and may explain why you see little to no documentation on how to specify a scope in an advanced search query. In order to specify a scope in query syntax you must enclose the scope restriction in quotes as follows: “scope”=’Your Scope’.

Queries for the “Advanced Search Box” web part, however, are declared in XML. Therefore, in order to enclose the scope restriction in quotes you must escape the quotes in order to make them XML safe. You do this by using the entity reference of ". Other properties do not require this, only the scope property. Below is an example of limiting the out of the box result types for the advanced search box web part to a specific scope.

  <ResultTypes>
    <ResultType DisplayName="All Results" Name="default">
      <Query>&quot;scope&quot;='Your Scope'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Documents" Name="documents">
      <Query>IsDocument=1 And &quot;scope&quot;='Your Scope'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Word Documents" Name="worddocuments">
      <Query>FileExtension='doc' Or FileExtension='docx' Or FileExtension='dot' And &quot;scope&quot;='Your Scope'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Excel Documents" Name="exceldocuments">
      <Query>FileExtension='xls' Or FileExtension='xlsx' Or FileExtension='xlt' And &quot;scope&quot;='Your Scope'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
    <ResultType DisplayName="Presentations" Name="presentations">
      <Query>FileExtension='ppt' And &quot;scope&quot;='Your Scope'</Query>
      <PropertyRef Name="Author" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Description" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="FileName" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Size" />
      <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Path" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Created" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Write" />
      <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Title"/>
      <PropertyRef Name="Manager" />
      <PropertyRef Name="Company"/>
    </ResultType>
  </ResultTypes>

Now that you have declared a scope in your result type query your advanced searches will be limited to the specified scope. This means the scope picker does not need to be displayed as user input is no longer required to limit your results to a particular scope and you can do this without one line of custom code or client side script. I hope you will find this useful and consider using the advanced search box web part for your search applications in SharePoint.

St. Louis Day of .NET 2009

mattbremer — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:32:59 GMT

I will once again be speaking at the St. Louis Day of .NET conference. This year the event has grown and the conference will offer two full days of sessions on Friday, August 28, 2009 and Saturday, August 29. 2009 at the Ameristar Casino Conference Center.

I will be presenting the SharePoint Development Jump Start sessions each morning where I will show .NET developers how to begin developing solutions in SharePoint and provide some resources to assist them in this endeavor. In addition, I will be presenting a session entitled “SharePoint Developer Experience Present and Future” where I will show developers how to take advantage of available tools and techniques to help them be a more efficient SharePoint developer. I will also talk about the roadmap Microsoft has unveiled for SharePoint development in Visual Studio 2010.

You can learn more about St. Louis Day of .NET at http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com. Reserve your spot soon as this event is sure to be in demand.

SharePoint Saturday Ozarks Presentation Follow Up

mattbremer — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:17:58 GMT

In my session at SharePoint Saturday Ozarks I promised a blog with links to additional resources and the code snippets used in my demo. I will also hopefully have a screencast of my demo completed and hosted at http://endusersharepoint.com in the coming weeks. Until then, however, here is the additional information I promised during my session.

Code Snippets

<!-- Dump search results to raw xml for use as datasource in SPD -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
<!-- Example QueryEX packet -->
<QueryPacket xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Query">
    <Query>
        <SupportedFormats><Format>urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document:Document</Format></SupportedFormats>
        <Context>
            <QueryText type="STRING" language="en-us">contenttype:"Sales Brochure" scope:"Sales Brochures"</QueryText>
        </Context>
        <Range>
                <StartAt>1</StartAt>
                <Count>10</Count>
        </Range>
        <EnableStemming>true</EnableStemming>
        <TrimDuplicates>true</TrimDuplicates>
        <IgnoreAllNoiseQuery>true</IgnoreAllNoiseQuery>
        <ImplicitAndBehavior>true</ImplicitAndBehavior>
        <IncludeRelevanceResults>true</IncludeRelevanceResults>
        <IncludeSpecialTermResults>true</IncludeSpecialTermResults>
        <IncludeHighConfidenceResults>true</IncludeHighConfidenceResults>
    </Query>
</QueryPacket>
<!-- QueryEx packet formatted for Data View Web Part datasource -->
<QueryPacket xmlns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Query"><Query><SupportedFormats><Format>urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document:Document</Format></SupportedFormats><Context><QueryText type="STRING" language="en-us">contenttype:"Sales Brochure" scope:"Sales Brochures"</QueryText></Context><Range><StartAt>1</StartAt><Count>10</Count></Range><EnableStemming>true</EnableStemming><TrimDuplicates>true</TrimDuplicates><IgnoreAllNoiseQuery>true</IgnoreAllNoiseQuery><ImplicitAndBehavior>true</ImplicitAndBehavior><IncludeRelevanceResults>true</IncludeRelevanceResults><IncludeSpecialTermResults>true</IncludeSpecialTermResults><IncludeHighConfidenceResults>true</IncludeHighConfidenceResults></Query></QueryPacket>
<!-- Show file icon in Core Results Web Part -->
<img align="absmiddle" alt="Type" border="0" src="/_layouts/images/{ddwrt:MapToIcon('', ddwrt:GetFileExtension(string(url)))}"/>
<!-- Show file icon in Data View Web Part -->
<img align="absmiddle" alt="Type" border="0" src="/_layouts/images/{ddwrt:MapToIcon('', ddwrt:GetFileExtension(string(Path)))}"/>

Links

Slide Deck

Aggregating Site Content Across Site Collections Without Custom Code

View more presentations from mattbremer.

SharePoint Designer Available as Free Download after 4/1/09

mattbremer — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:28:40 GMT

I received confirmation today that the rumors and suspected April Fools’ hoax regarding SharePoint Designer becoming available via free download are in fact true. Below is the customer ready announcement directly from Microsoft:

“One of the key aspects of the SharePoint value proposition is its ability to support customized solutions built on our platform. Our strategy is to facilitate the creation of these customizations and allow our customers to make the most of their overall investments in SharePoint. Based on the feedback from our customers, we are making SharePoint Designer 2007 available as a free download to all customers of SharePoint and Windows SharePoint Services products. This change takes effect on April 1, 2009. It is important to note that SharePoint Designer 2007 is NOT going end-of-life. The future release of SharePoint Designer will be released simultaneously with the next release of the next version of SharePoint. In addition, customers on SA will be granted rights to Expression Web.”

While this is a great value add for current and future SharePoint customers, this is significant given how powerful SharePoint Designer is. The previous licensing of SharePoint Designer forced many Enterprises to deploy SharePoint Designer to a limited user base thus the potential for harm was limited. Now that the tool is available via free download, care must be taken to mitigate the risk. Click here for information on how to secure your SharePoint implementation and enforce proper governance for SharePoint Designer users.

UPDATE: Official announcement is now available on SharePoint Designer site: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA103607611033.aspx

Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 3.0 1.3 CTP contains 64-Bit Support

mattbremer — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:45:37 GMT

Previously I had posted the SharePoint product group's explanation as to why VSeWSS 1.2 did not provide 64-bit support. I am happy to report that the product group announced this morning that VSeWSS 1.3 CTP includes 64-bit support. This incremental release is positioned as a bridge to assist SharePoint developers until the release of Visual Studio 2010 which will include significant improvements to the SharePoint development experience as outlined here.

You can download VSeWSS 1.3 CTP here. The final version has an anticipated release for North America in Spring 2009. I believe I will continue using STSDev for my development work but am pleased to see that the product group is continuing to improve the developer experience for SharePoint.

Possibly Presenting at Kansas City's SharePoint Saturday in February

mattbremer — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:38:43 GMT

Going to give my talk on aggregating content across site collections using search without writing code. Should be a great event. Any suggestions for fun things to do in KC with a family in February are appreciated.

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/kc/Pages/default.aspx

Speaking at St. Louis SharePoint User Group January Meeting

mattbremer — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:02:00 GMT

I will be presenting at the St. Louis SharePoint User Group meeting January 13, 2008. The talk will cover how to aggregate content across site collections without writing custom code or purchasing a third party solution. In this session you will learn how to use the Data View Web Part connected to the SharePoint search web service to aggregate content across site collections without code and still respect your list and site security. I hope to see you there.

Speaking at St. Louis Day of .NET

mattbremer — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 05:03:26 GMT

I'll be presenting at St. Louis Day of .NET tomorrow on Live Services and Mesh at the Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) at Washington University in St. Louis. Looks like quite a few people will be there. Stop and say hi if you are attending.

Unit Testing in SharePoint

mattbremer — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:15:00 GMT

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

Windows Azure

mattbremer — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:13:00 GMT

The big announcement at PDC 2008 this morning was the CTP launch of Windows Azure. Microsoft bills this as an OS for the cloud. This will revolutionize the way applications are architected but I wonder if enterprises will be willing to cede control of their data to servers not under their control. This will require a culture shift and Microsoft acknowledges this by stating that the Azure rollout will be slow and deliberate. I will post more on Azure as it comes to light but it appears as though PDC 2008 will be the start of a technology shift once again.

Live from PDC 2008

mattbremer — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:54:00 GMT

Tomorrow I will leave for Los Angeles for PDC 2008. I will be blogging from the conference in real time to discuss all of the exciting sessions I plan on attending. I also have a few posts queued up around my recent work with SharePoint search. One will be a make it real post on how to quickly build your own custom search web parts and another on how to reference the keywords used in a search in xsl without custom code.

SharePoint Development Guidance

mattbremer — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:47:00 GMT

The Patterns & Practices group has released a Codeplex project on SharePoint development best practices and guidance. This is a very comprehensive guide and will eventually be released to MSDN. The team is asking for feedback and has released it on Codeplex to faciliate collaboration within the community. I encourage you to review the information included in the guide and provide feedback if you see fit. Thanks to the Patterns & Practices team for their excellent work. App dev on SharePoint is a challenge and it is very helpful to have all of the lessons learned compiled into a robust set of documentation.

http://www.codeplex.com/spg

Why do Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 3.0 not support 64-Bit Platforms?

mattbremer — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:02:00 GMT

With the recent release of VSeWSS 1.2 I have had a number of customers inquire as to why Microsoft does not provide support for 64-bit platforms. I wondered this myself as our prescribed guidance to users is to run MOSS and WSS 3.0 on 64-bit platforms. We even announced that 32-bit support will not be available in future versions. This is also rapidly becoming the standard across many of our products. Given this, it is reasonable for customers to want their dev environments to be 64-bit as well so that there are no surprises when deploying custom code to production.

I reached out to the product group that develops the extensions on this issue. In addition, I asked that if 64-bit support is not a priority then would they consider opening up the extensions to the development community on Codeplex. This same suggestion is found repeatedly within the comments on the product group's blog. As a result of my inquiry I received a very reasoned response from the product group that I wanted to share as I think it may help you understand why 64-bit support is problematic and also to let you know the product group understands your concerns and is currently thinking of possible solutions to this issue.

First, having your dev environment on a 32-bit platform and your production environment on a 64-bit platform should not cause issues. The artifacts in MOSS/WSS dev are .NET assemblies and thus the JIT compiler in the CLR handles the architectural differences. This is why the product group does not see a conflict in our prescribed guidance of having your farm on a 64-bit platform and your dev environment on a 32-bit platform. That said, we do recommend you test your artifacts on a 64-bit platform before deploying to production.

That is just Microsoft's way of spinning this issue you say! That is not the case at all but I could understand why you might think that. Chris Johnson, Program Manager for WSS, gave the following explanation as to why 64-bit support for the extensions is problematic. Because the VS IDE is 32-bit, it loads plugins into a 32-bit process. That, however, is not the issue as the extensions will load on a 64-bit platform. The trouble begins when you attempt to use them.

VSeWSS uses the SharePoint object model to provide certain functionality. This means that on a 64-bit platform the object model is 64-bit and this presents a problem for the aforementioned reason that VS is loaded into a 32-bit process even on a 64-bit platform using WoW. One scenario where this is an issue is when the SharePoint object model queries the registry for items like the Config DB information. WoW gets in the way here and queries the 32-bit registry instead of the 64-bit registry the object model expects.

So now that we know why 64-bit support is problematic, what should we do about it? One possible solution for VS 2008 would be to build an out-of-process mechanism to call the SharePoint object model from VSeWSS. Chris Johnson informs me that this is not trivial, however, and would require a level of effort the product group does not currently have the bandwidth for. They are all busy getting the new version of SharePoint ready for us instead!

So what about open source and Codeplex you ask? While that is a reasonable suggestion, we at Microsoft have to clear many hurdles before releasing code to Codeplex. It would require a signigicant amount of time for a developer in the product group to package the code and make it ready for public distribution. As aforementioned, the product group is already tasked with other development priorities and thus does not have the bandwidth to package the extensions for open source development.

Thank you to Paul Andrew and Chris Johnson from the product group for taking the time to explain the reasons for not providing 64-bit support and for all of their hard work. I hope this post allows you to understand the reasoning behind the decision and also helps you realize that we at Microsoft do hear your concerns and even share them most of the time.

As a reward for reading through this very lengthy post, here are some recent resources that were updated and announced at TechEd that you may find interesting:

UPDATE: VSeWSS 1.3 CTP now has 64-bit support. Read about it here.