The first ever meeting of the Mississauga SharePoint User Group was held this week on Monday at Microsoft. Here we got a sneak peak at some of the cool features upcoming in SharePoint 2010 from some Microsoft MVP’s that reside here in the Toronto area. My company (Burntsand) was lucky enough to be one of the sponsors.
Thanks to Ray, Rob Windsor, Eli Robillard, Bill Brockbank and the other folks who helped facilitate and organize it.
Here are some notes from the session on new SharePoint 2010 functionality:
- WSS is now called SharePoint Foundation 2010
- not part of win server or office
- free standalone and bundled with SQL Express
- SP Designer 2010 still free
- SharePoint versions
- Internet/extranet server
- standard/enterprise
- Intranet
- Standard/enterprise
- The word “Office” has been removed from the labeling
- UI of SharePoint
- ribbon
- site actions
- site setting
- context sensitive ribbon
- Experience web 2.0, AJAX, less refreshing
- Dialogue framework
- New breadcrumb tree-like “view” web control
- Many list improvements
- Track relations between lists
- 07 loose lookup for relationship lists, now you can have more than one lookup
- Restricted deletes
- Cascading deletes – delete master and children
- Validation on columns – simple formulas like excel like formulas
- 2000 soft cap on views,
- demand on sql server query throttle
- Ability to have eventhandlers to be integrated with External lists – bdc you couldn’t use as site columns. You can have all tables, you can dynamically write code to deal with database changes,
- Content and Configuration databases are now more split apart
- types of work to traffic audit
- Wcm
- Social
- sql 2008, you could have mirror
- Benefits: locking site collections which was driving the size limits, new versions you can lock certain database
- Content can be grouped so that parent and child content can be deleted in groups
- Document sets concept
- Infrastructure
- Require X64 OS and database server
- Win7 is supported
- Vista sp1 is supported
- Windows server 2008 or R2
- 2010 must be installed locally for development
- Foundation or server
- Vs2010 required for development
- For dev you can use vista or win7
- Visual studio extensions upgradable, designer not backward compatible. If you are vs 2005 or 2008 with designer 07 and vs2010
- Project templates, 2010 much easier to use
- .net framework 3.5 is used NOT .net framework 4.0
- state machine replaces workflow chart
- SP Designer 2010 has one way import into VS 2010 for workflows
- Pushing the user to build themselves
- Custom task forms still challenging.
- Import solution package
- Deploy as sandbox solution.
- Sandbox solution is all stored within one doc library and doesn’t need web config to change
- Has restriction on API usage
- Select this in VS 2010 when creating an SP solution
- 12 hive is now 14 hive…
- In VS.NET 2010, you can setup in the folder structure everyone is used too if you want
- Not that way by default, everything is at the root of the VS.NET 2010 solution
- Web part are now Visual Web parts which just reference a user control which you can design
- Adding web part easier to do in SP interface, easier for restrictions/governance
- One click deploy
- Can easily package whatever (webparts) you want in features
- Ajax if you call directly no worry about web config additions (silverlight additions included as well)
- SP project items (i.e. Features dir, Images dir, _layouts dir etc…) – VS.NET 2010 now aware of them so it knows which items go into the solution package automatically
- Can now work all on the same source tree, verus separate vs + wsp
- F5 now creates, builds, packages and deploys!
- You can do custom deployment scripts
- Ability to customize your deployment-deploy (Sharepoint) e.g. copy system folders. Developer push in the dev, can be used in continuous, some tricks
- No more ddf files – package builder now
- Auto generation of manifest, feature files, etc… but also can do it manually if you want
- Pre deploy, post command line in the middle you can configure
- Accessing list data
- Client object model – web services lots of xml, serialize into dataset, new client object models .net clr, silverlight clr, java clr.
- Need to be on same domain
- Batch up calls process and execute as a batch, xml back via json.
- New workflow actions in SP Designer
- Approval
- Feedback
- Comments
- Workflow status
- String manip
- Etc..
- VS 2010 is still 32 bit but SP is 64bit, you need a special workaround
- SharePoint workflows can be created in Visio designer