Rob Gillen's WebLog
Random comments on MPF, Provisioning, and .NET Development
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Project Templates for SharePoint Development
I've had the privilege of working with an organization for almost two years now doing alot of SharePoint development. There's a team of approximately 75 developers that cover the gammut of skill sets and experiences, most of whom are working, to some degree, with C# and SharePoint development. One of the things that has come up repeatedly, is "how do I get started"? or "what project template should I be using"? These are good questions without a completely clear answer. This post (and hopefully some following) are intended to discuss what we are using, how it evolves, what options we discarded, and why. I spent last Friday teaching a class attempting to bring our team up to speed as to how to structure their SharePoint solutions/projects in VS and get them integrated with Team Build and packaged for deployment in our organization. As the day wore on, I realized how "janky" the "elegant" solution I had been using felt to someone new to the problem set. The supposed elegance was simply relative to the pain I had been experiencing doing it the "old way"... there has to be a better answer for the causal SharePoint developer.
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.NET is a Smorgasboard?
Like many other .NET devs I often find myself expecting to be current in all of the existing and up-coming tools/technologies in the Microsoft/.NET platform. Frankly, I don't know how that is possible, especially with the pace at which MSFT (not to mention the surrounding ecosystem) is releasing tools and platforms. Over the past few years, my approach has been to know "enough" about the various tools/technologies so that I can be conversant, and also know when a particular toolset applies to my current project, thereby warranting a "deeper" dive into that area. Such has been the case for me with WPF and WCF (much of my work over the past while has been in the SharePoint/web space meaning WPF - until SilverLight - didn't have much of a play and we hadn't yet seen a need to switch from standard ASMX for our services). They fell into the bucket of tools I had seen while walking along the smorgasboard, but I simply hadn't decided I needed to consume them yet.
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Does the “Cloud” help the Public Sector?
[Warning… rambling mind walk following]
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Isn’t it Time for 64Bit?
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Thinking the Cloud…
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Stop (re-)Inventing the Wheel!
This is more a personal reminder than anything else…
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Finally back where I want to be...
It's frustrating to me to find myself redoing things that I've done before or re-solving problems. Over the years at Planet I've been involved with different software teams each with different levels of rigor, however most all of them have had, at minimum, an automated build process of some sort (at least for the past 4 years or so). Some of these systems were elaborate msbuild driven systems while others were a cobbling together of batch scripts or PowerShell linking msbuild, Vault, FogBugz and Community server.
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What I'm looking for...
In a number of the posts I've been writing on the SOA/BPM conference I've referred to the applicability (or lack thereof) of a given approach to "the problem set" that I'm currently working on. I thought it might be good to describe what it is that I'm looking for and a little bit as to why.
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MSFT/BPM/SOA Session 6
The sixth session I attended was entitled "Next Generation Business Applications" and was presented by Mike Walker of the Architecture Strategy Team (MSFT).
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MSFT/BPM/SOA Session 5
This session was titled: "The Human-Facing SOA: Realizing the Value of Web Services with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" presented by Hugh Taylor (Senior Marketing Manager, MSFT)