SharePoint Connections 2010 

The SPC 2010 event seems to have been taking place ages ago, in actual fact it was only last Monday and Tuesday. Anyway I was too busy to report on this straight away, trying to finish two stressful projects at the same time this week.In short, it was a good one. Not ground breaking, but useful because it filled some essential gaps in my knowledge and it was good to take a timeout to focus on SharePoint 2010. The running theme of every session was, “the real product has yet come out, don’t come crying back if it turned out to be different”. My guess is, looking at the SharePoint 2010 Beta, that there shouldn’t be that many surprises.

As a developer, I tried not to focus too much on the developer aspects, thinking that this will come to pass anyway. I went to an intro session and session on unit testing Sharepoint by Peli de Halleux. Here at Aviva Solutions all internal projects use TDD where possible and useful. Peli showed how he is able to make SharePoint development unit testable by using Pex and Moles. Moles allows making test stubs of any .NET code and that way might even make the file system testable. As a showcase Peli and his team made a comple Mole-d SharePoint. Recommended!

Development with Visual Studio 2010 will be fundamentally different, no more manifest.xml, feature.xml and copy/paste of GUIDS. The question is now if this is a good thing in all respects, because a session by Serge van den Oever and Mirjam van Olst showed that VS 2010 flattens out all components of your solution into separate features. Large solutions, like complete site definitions, end up completely unstructured. New opportunities for WSPbuilder!

However, the major surprise for me was the shift of focus for development to SharePoint Designer. SharePoint designer now  allows you to save changes as reusable solutions, WSPs. When imported into VS2010, these could be good starting points for your development. Do not expect too much yet, the WSP import in VS 2010 seems to be messy and broken for now. Microsoft has made Designer more powerful to cater for Power Users. In absence of Power Users I think developers should not be shy and use Designer to quickly get from A to B. If the WSP import works that is. Designer failed in sessions on more than one occasion during the event.

When trying to sum up the remaining goodies of this event, Claims based Authentication is worth mentioning. Or this is at least something that caught my attention. How to finally get rid of the annoying logon popup when opening Office documents. Also a new way to cross process boundaries without having to elevate to administrator rights.  Spencer Harbar pointed out the highlights, but could not really show it hands on unfortunately. Otherwise the way SharePoint 2010 will be more scalable and less restrictive in implementations showed up throughout all sessions.