SharePoint Team Announces the release of patterns and practices Developing SharePoint Applications guidance

A new version of SharePoint guidances (August 2009) is released:

"The Developing SharePoint Applications guidance helps architects and developers design and build applications that are both flexible and scaleable. It shows developers how to provide IT professionals with the information they need to maintain those applications and diagnose problems when they arise. The two reference implementations illustrate how to solve many of the common challenges developers encounter. One reference implementation addresses basic issues such as creating lists and content types. The other addresses more advanced problems such as how to integrate line of business services, how to create collaboration sites programmatically, and how to customize aspects of publishing and navigation. A library of reusable components helps you adopt techniques used in the reference implementations. The guidance discusses approaches for testing SharePoint applications, such as how to create unit tests, and documents experiences with stress and scale testing one of the reference implementations."

Link: here

SharePoint Used Space Information

SharePoint Used Space Information is a console application which allows to retrieve information about space used (bytes) by all sites and sub-sites for a specific site collection into .csv files.

This tool uses the StorageManagementInformation method of the SPSite class to retrieve the usage information.

You can find the solution on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPUsedSpaceInfo

A new version of SharePoint List Access Layer Generator is available

This second version of the project is always a beta, so be careful when using it.

You can find the solution on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPLALGenerator

SharePoint Guidance (patterns & practices) release

Summary from MSDN:

"This guidance helps architects and developers design, build, test, deploy and upgrade SharePoint intranet applications. A reference implementation that is named the Contoso Training Management application demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and application lifecycle management challenges.

This guidance discusses the following:

• Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
• Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
• Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts.
• How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
• How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
• How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.
• Team-based intranet application development.

The following areas are not discussed in the current version of this guidance:

• Content-oriented sites that use Web content management
• Internet and enterprise-scale SharePoint applications
• Multilingual SharePoint applications
• Scale or security testing of SharePoint applications "

You can find the MSDN link and the download link here:
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx
- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C3722DBA-6EE7-4E0E-82B5-FDAF3C5EC927&displaylang=en

Another project which seems to be interesting is SharePoint 2007 SoftwareFactoryLite (still in beta) on CodePlex. This is a project based on the Microsoft Guidance Automation Toolkit.
- http://www.codeplex.com/spalm

SharePoint List Access Layer Generator

SPList Access Layer Generator is a windows application which allows developers to generate classes to access SharePoint lists like an ORM. This project has been initiated to be compliant with the Rapid Application Development methodology.

The first version of this project is always a beta, so be careful when using it.

You can find the solution on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPLALGenerator

SPSite Storage Information

SPSite Storage Information provides storage reports about documents, documents libraries and lists for a specific site collection in SharePoint. The reports can be exported in excel or pdf.

This tool uses the StorageManagementInformation method of the SPSite class to retrieve the storage information.

You can find the solution on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPSiteStorageInfo

Advanced Alert for SharePoint

Advanced Alert is a Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 solution which allows users having the ManageAlerts permission to create alerts on list or item for SharePoint groups.

In using the Alert Me feature on SharePoint lists or items, you can only create alerts for yourself or for several users. No way to create alerts for SharePoint groups. Advanced Alert adds a Alert Group link on the lists Actions menu and on the items contextual menu. It works exactly like the Alert Me links except that the Alert Group links display a page where you can create alerts for groups. Only groups having permissions to see the item/list are selectable.

You can find the solution on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/AdvancedAlert