Today was our second annual MOSS Camp held at the Clarity offices in Chicago. As I mentioned in my previous post, our approach this year was to choose a simple business scenario and then spend the day in various sessions all focused on building and delivering a SharePoint solution. The code is being published on CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/MOSSCamp.
In case you missed it, here’s a recap of the day’s presentations:
- Burt Floraday and I kicked things off with a tag-team presentation of the requirements of the solution and the process of designing the SharePoint artifacts and components to deliver on those requirements.
- Darrin Bishop presented on some generally-accepted ("best" seems so condescending) practices related to SharePoint development, including a discussion of the environments and their configurations in a best-case scenario (e.g. isolated development, integration, test, production). He also covered a summary of the tools used by the presenters in the development of the code for MOSS Camp.
- Dan Herzog presented on the development of the content types, lists, and custom actions necessary for the solution. He also answered questions on workflow and other quasi-random topics that came up. 🙂
- At lunch, we had our second annual airing of grievances — a mostly-constructive conversation about things that we’d like to see improved in SharePoint. (That’s the nice way of putting it.) Larry Clarkin from Microsoft lead out and provided the MS perspective; watch his blog for more details and follow-up.
Some items from the list:
- Development can only be done on a server OS. (No big surprise here.)
- No good way to do equivalent things between SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio — e.g. the types of workflows that SPD creates can’t be opened/edited in Visual Studio.
- Customer timer job execution in a load-balanced farm. (Look for a post on this from me in the future — there’s some weird behavior that SharePoint has in this regard.)
- OOB web part framework requires too many postbacks — can we get some AJAX, please??
- Anthony Handley presented an approach for branding SharePoint using master pages and stylesheets. Conceptually, the items that he covered were familiar to me, but it’s cool to hear a designer’s perspective and to see SharePoint Designer used well. (I’ll confess to avoiding SharePoint Designer — probably more than I should.)
- Paul Schaeflein and Todd Bleeker presented together on custom authentication and zones using portions of the Community Kit for SharePoint and storing site membership information in a custom list. Todd also walked through the process of creating a custom membership provider for authentication against a custom data store.
- Peter Walke presented on unit testing and type mocking SharePoint classes. He referenced the SharePoint Guidance recently released by the Microsoft patterns & practices team, which includes some samples regarding unit testing, and has some examples for SharePoint development following the MVP design pattern.
- Jay Ritchie presented on customization of SharePoint’s search capabilities — specifically around the creation of a custom front-end for a specialized search that uses the out-of-the-box results web parts to render the results.
- Finally, Darrin Bishop, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker closed out the session with a discussion of the packaging of the features and files of the SharePoint solution.
Overall, I think it was a great day. There were things for SharePoint developers of all experience levels — from those just getting started to those with experience dating back to SharePoint 2001. I’d like to especially thank George Durzi for the coordination work that he put in (there was a lot of it), Clarity for hosting the event, Microsoft for providing the food, and all of the speakers for their (substantial) effort leading up to the event.
Hope to see you there next year!
