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

European SharePoint Best Practices Conference

The first SharePoint Best PracticesTM Conference in Washington, DC in September, 2008 was an overwhelming success. . The First European conference (April 6-8 2009) promises to be just as popular.

Link: http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk/

Storing metadata in SharePoint Lists vs. SQL Database

A colleague gave me an interesting link speaking about storing metadata in SharePoint Lists vs. SQL Database. It can help you to take the right decision about building a SharePoint application or a classic ASP.NET application.

Link: http://www.sharepointusecases.com/index.php/2008/11/storing-data-in-sharepoint-lists-vs-sql-database/

SharePoint 2007: Creating SharePoint Applications with Visual Studio 2008 (webcast from PDC 2008)

Here is an interesting webcast about how to build a SharePoint application using the Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB13/

Do Less. Get More. Develop on SharePoint

A colleague sent me an interesting Microsoft link for SharePoint developers. It provides all you need to know to build powerful SharePoint solutions.

Here is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

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