PnP Sessions Day 1

Continued PnP Summit Coverage

The second session was Fundamentalist Functional Programming with Erik Meijer, it was a really interesting explaination of the side effects of lanaguages and how the complier doesn't really know what the expecations are.  The idea that 'code can be data' and 'data can be code' really can cause the some strange side effects - this is most apparant when running the same block of code in C# or Javascript.   

One of the basic examples he gave was that DateTime.Now.Ticks in .NET is treated like a function that returns a long value - but how many functions do you create that takes zero parameters and never returns the same thing? The idea is stop thinking that it returns a standard long value, but returns the next long value in collection of long values (the theory is that a side effect is occuring causing the value to change).  It was an interesting session and makes me want to learn more about pure functional langagues like Haskell or F#.

The next session was Application Architecture Guidance with Javed Sikander and J.D. Meier.  

I've always thought that the guidance was pretty impressive but really hard to keep a project going under it.  But they explained that you can break it down and focus on the areas you really need to worry about first and then dig deeper later.  The best place to start is with Fast Tracks and then review the Best Practices section. 

After lunch we got an overview of the EntLib 4.1 and Beyond release with a focus on Unity and how it interacts with the rest of the libraries.  I really like Unity and concept of Dependency Injection for complex applications.  We have so many 'unique' customer needs that we have to provide some seperation of concerns and abstract the implementations to support them safely.  It will be interesting to see how this starts to blend/merge with the Managed Extensibility Framework which is a topic this afternoon.

Half way through Day 1 and 4 more to go. 

PnP Conference Day 1

I'm at the Microsoft patterns and practice Summit in Redmond this week and am really excited about learning some new strategies for architecture and building better products.

Jeff Teper started off the day with a Keynote about Developing for SharePoint. Almost the entire room raised thier hands about using SharePoint but hardly anyone is doing development for it.  He focused the first half of the talk about treating SharePoint development like any other software project and following a proper development lifecycle and invest in learning about the system (SharePoint Guidance).  It's both an applicaiton and development platform, so it's complex enough that you can't just code.

He showed a couple of great SharePoint sites that have been customized to give a entire new look and feel.  The two great ones are Hawaiian Airlines and Viacom. We've used SharePoint to store documents in our Mobile Computing solution, this saved us from having to build a front end to manage the documents and dealing with versioning and other development tasks.  We aren't using all the features, but you have to start somewhere.

They wrapped it up with demo a Silverlight and Sharepoint together, basically they just created a new WebPart and manually added a new Silverlight control.  Then you can create the Silverlight control just like normal using WCF services and SharePoint Web Services to displaying the data as you need.  It works pretty well since you get a rich applicaiton feel to it, but can easily deploy it to a standard SharePoint site and still get all the nice layout  and customization features in SharePoint.

One of the best tools that we have looked at is the LINQ to SharePoint project on CodePlex- it makes development much easier.  From an ISV standpoint - I think the deployment stories are still difficult compared to plain old installers that are customers are used too, but the learning curve isn't terrible and we have had a lot of success so far.