Julie Turner – The SharePoint Associate Perspective
This article is the second in a two part series providing two KMA perspectives on what the big Microsoft TechEd 2011 takeaways were and interesting morsels from keynotes and sessions they each attended.
In May, KMA sent two developers to the Microsoft’s TechEd 2011 conference in Atlanta, GA to gain insight into Microsoft’s technology direction and solutions. The conference hosted more than 10,000 attendees this year with keynotes, over 30 break-outs, and a multitude of interactive sessions to choose from. The 4 days were filled with an immense amount of high-quality content.
Note: For those that missed this content-rich conference, all the TechEd presentations are available on-line, whether you went to the conference or not. You will need to login (which is free) if you are not already registered.
Julie Turner is a KMA Associate focused on developing and designing SharePoint-based solutions. Julie has over 15 years of industry experience improving business processes through integrated software solutions. She has extensive development expertise with Microsoft technologies such as SharePoint Server, Visual Studio .NET, Visual Basic, IIS, SQL Server, Exchange, and Office.
Julie attended TechEd to take advantage of the numerous SharePoint development sessions offered over the four days. Following are Julie’s biggest takeaways from the keynotes and sessions she attended.
Automate Business Process with InfoPath, BCS, Workflows, and Word Services by Keenan Newton
- Great blog on how to move workflows from development to production
- You can create a custom activity to use word services to create documents on the fly
- Use secondary data connections to “loopup” data from BCS connection where security is a consideration (not everyone can see every entry)
- Open XML SDK 2.0 Productivity Tool for Microsoft Office creates C# class file from word document
- Workflow Best Practices
- Visio workflows is a good place to start layout of a workflow but it’s not backward compatible and cannot be changed
- Try to create custom activities instead of creating custom workflow
- “While” loops are a reason to create a VS workflow
- Make custom activities call a WCF service
- If WCF service exists you can use the “create item” workflow activity because it can call a WCF service
The Future of Microsoft Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management by Cameron Skinner
This demo-heavy session offered early insights into the future of Application Lifecycle Management and agile development incorporated in the next release of Visual Studio.
Session Takeaways:
- Intellitrace – Production debugger. Collector is a free plug-in (used with Visual Studio Ultimate)
- Powershell – take cab file to turn on at a specific server, use configuration file and run against an application pool
- Opens trace file in visual studio ultimate, VCR for your code
- StoryBoarding tool in PowerPoint
- New Web UI for TFS that’s more interactive.
- Code Clone tool which allows you to search your code to see where you’re duplicating code to help you with reuse
- Stakeholder review tool to allow stakeholders to give feedback to the development team. Action recording that tracks all the clicks and audio and video for the UI. The when submitted it can be reviewed and changed into tasks, etc.
- Jason Zander – good Microsoft Blog resource on Visual Studio
HTML, jQuery, and JavaScript in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development by Joseph Homnick
Session Takeaways:
- http://Bit.ly/sphtml- internet screenshots from presentation
- To get HTML5 to work in SharePoint need to change reference in masterpage. Lots of caveats so should make a separate HTML5 masterpage.
Referencing jQuery and other .js libs
1. <Script src-""> tag
2. <SharePoint:ScriptLink> -incorporates throughout a site? -doesn't work in sandbox solutions
3. <script type="javascript">Sys.loadScripts("/siteassets/scripts/jquery-1.4.2.js", function(){alert("");});</script> etc
To get body on load function to work you need to add a call in the content query webpart.
Creating Great End-User Experiences with Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 by Microsoft’s Daniel Benson and Mark Stone
This session talked about customizations that can be made to Fast Search for SharePoint both at the backend and front-end to drive great search experiences.
Session Takeaways:
- Extending the pipeline – allows you to write code to augment the search and indexing results. For instance, add a property/field that can then be used to filter to display. Setting the value of the field is done in extension logic by creating a C# executable that you then reference in the xml file.
Cross-Organization Collaboration using SharePoint 2010 & Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 by Samual Devasahayam
This session discussed how to collaborate across boundaries using Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Active Directory Federation Services 2.0.Session
Takeaways:
- Presentation given has useful powershell script to set up ADFS trust in SharePoint.
- ADFS 2.0 If you use ADFS 2.0 and set up SharePoint to do claims authentication then you can set up a “trust” that allows users from another authentication provider to pass credentials into your SharePoint site using the credentials from that authentication provider which can be another AD domain, or google, or live, or yahoo, or facebook, thus allowing you to have users sign into your SharePoint site without having to manage another set of credentials.
In summary, the week was packed with valuable information. When asked what was the best session and the coolest thing you saw during TechEd, Julie pointed to the Cross-Organization Collaboration using SharePoint 2010 & Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 session and ADFS 2.0as the coolest thing seen (though more an infrastructure thing than a developer thing). She has already forwarded detailed information to two of her SharePoint practice colleagues.
