Wictor Wilen

This is the first post for the year of 2010 and what could be better to start with than announcing that I’m writing a SharePoint 2010 book. More specifically I’m writing a book about SharePoint 2010 Web Parts development with the working title SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. This is a dream come true to me and I have been thinking about writing a book on and off for quite some time. I want to take my writing/blogging even further, it’s through writing that I educate and evolve myself. It makes me think twice and really make sure that I’m writing the correct stuff (who wants to be haunted down by all the readers and pros out there :-). So a book will be perfect to learn more about the SharePoint 2010 platform and dig down even further in Web Parts development.

The year of 2009 is about to close and it’s time for me to summarize this year, as I’ve done for the last few years (2006, 2007 and 2008). This year has been one of the most inspiring and exciting years for me in a very long time. I have been doing so much fun stuff this year. The most significant change has been starting to work for my new employer Connecta (after nine years at basically the same employer). I needed some new challenges and I now work with some really talented people from whom I learn and share so much. As you readers know, it’s all about SharePoint for me and I have done some awesome projects this year that I’m proud of and really looking forward to some SharePoint 2010 gigs. I also finally got my MCT certification and already scheduled a number of courses for next year, looking forward to meet some aspiring SharePoint students!

SharePoint 2010 comes equipped with a set of new tools to improve the monitoring of your custom applications, there are built-in functionality to check how long your operations take, how many SQL Server calls are done etc. All this is logged and can be visualized in the Developer Dashboard. Another good thing with this is that it’s not something that just automatically is there but you can also hook yourself into the monitoring and the actual Developer Dashboard.

Yesterday we had a Swedish SharePoint User Group meeting, hosted by Connecta (yes, my new employer). We had a new record with number of participants, over 60 interested SharePointers of all kinds showed up to listen to MVP Göran Husman, Humandata, talk about the news in SharePoint 2010 and Peter Karpinski, Microsoft Services, talk about how to do Rapid Application Development with SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, Visio 2010 and InfoPath 2010 and how to script you SharePoint 2010 installs. Thank you for great shows and thanks to everyone who showed up.

Working with SharePoint 2010 is really a joy, you stumble upon great things all the time. The API has not had any revolutionary changes to be backwards compatible; but small changes here and there, both publically visible and internally, really makes the API better than before. SPListItem.SPContentTypeId To get the Content Type Id of an SPListItem you had to first get the SPContentType from the SPListItem.ContentType and then get the Id of the content type. This method was one marked as internal in version 12, but is now marked 14. It’s those little things. There are actually a lot of previously internal properties and methods that now are public, for example the CanBeDisplayedInEditForm property on the SPField class.

SharePoint 2010 is one greedy beast and you can’t settle with your plain old laptop; first of all you need a x64 bit environment and second of all you need some RAM. Developing for SharePoint 2007 required just a 32-bit machine, less than 4 gigs of RAM and Virtual PC and you could do most of your work without complaining to much. SharePoint 2010 requires some more thought through development environment .

Visual Web Parts are a nice addition for SharePoint 2010 developers. A Visual Web Part is essentially SmartPart revisited and is one of the project types of the new SharePoint extensions for Visual Studio 2010. Sandboxing is one of the most interesting features of SharePoint 2010, especially for large scale implementations and hosting providers. The Sandboxing feature, or User Code Solution, allows you to easily upload a SharePoint feature into your farm into a special controlled environment – called a Sandbox. These Sandboxed features can be controlled by the SharePoint administrators so that they do not consume to much resources and automatically disable them if the exceed their limits. Sandboxed solutions also have severe security restrictions – you cannot access all objects or resources that you would like.

SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2009 (#SEF09) is over and I’m pretty tired but really excited. Two full days, here in Stockholm, Sweden, of SharePoint 2010 information with some awesome speakers and topics. SEF09 was a great conference, about 200 participants – just about the right size to have the time to chat with a lot of people and having a good time. This year the SEF conference also was the official launch of Exchange 2010 and the first larger showing of SharePoint 2010 bits in Sweden. As an extra bonus the SharePoint 2010 beta 2 bits were released during the Monday night party, and during the Tuesday sessions everybody was downloading the bits.

Just hours before the SharePoint Conference 2009 starts in Vegas, and all information will flood out from the conference, blogs and twitter, Microsoft released three four posters that should help you in planning and updating your SharePoint 2007 installation to SharePoint 2010. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Approaches (added since original posting) Visually describes the different upgrade approaches Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Planning Takes you through how to upgrade hardware and software on your servers. Shows the available upgrade paths.