Matt Bremer's Blog : WSS 3.0

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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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.

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.

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.

Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for WSS 3.0 Released

mattbremer — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:32:00 GMT

This is great news for anyone wanting to use VS 2008 for SharePoint/WSS development. Here is the official announcement. Happy coding.

St. Louis SharePoint User Group Meeting for May

mattbremer — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:11:00 GMT

The St. Louis SharePoint user group is having their bi-monthly May meeting Tuesday, May 13 at 8:30 am in the Microsoft office. Visit the STLSUG site and register to attend if you are interested and have not already. The group will be presenting best practices on how to upgrade to SP1 for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 in the first session and tips on enabling AJAX support in the second. If you are in the St. Louis area, interested in MOSS/WSS and are not already a member then what are you waiting for? Many dedicated professionals work hard to share their MOSS and WSS experience with the community and plan these meetings. It is also worth mentioning that Microsoft provides the requisite free breakfast and plenty of swag at the meetings. No self respecting technology organization would not provide free food and t-shirts! Sign up now!

MOSS/WSS 3.0 Deployment Guidelines

mattbremer — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:49:00 GMT

Anyone that has considered or has actually deployed MOSS or WSS 3.0 is most likely familiar with the "Plan for Software Boundaries" article on TechNet. Recently when researching an architecture for a customer I noticed some significant updates to this guidance document due to the release of SP1. Most notable to me was the increase in the maximum number of documents per document library from 2,500,000 to 5,000,000. That's great you say, more is always better, but what does it all mean? Well it means that the guidance on SharePoint is being updated all the time as Microsoft works to optimize the platform. Enterprises with a large number of documents would find this change significant in that it may alter their architecture when considering MOSS as a document management system. I suggest referencing this document often and ensuring your architecture matches best practices as updates are released for MOSS. Here is the link to the document in case you missed it above and some links to additional tools and resources that will help you architect and deploy MOSS successfully:

MOSS/WSS 3.0 Dispose Pattern Reference

mattbremer — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:15:00 GMT

Anyone doing MOSS/WSS development has most likely at one time or another encountered the gotchas with knowing when to explicitly dispose of an object. While I will try to limit posting links to other blogs, this resource was so good I wanted to share it in as many ways possible. Roger Lamb covers dispose patterns by example in his blog and it is an extremely valuable resource to anyone doing custom MOSS/WSS development. Thanks to Mike Beatty, Architect at Microsoft, for forwarding this on to me.

Roger Lamb's Blog