SharePoint Conference 2009 (“SPC09”) Postmortem
The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 (“SPC09”) has finally come to a close and I hope to wrap up my thoughts about what I saw at the conference in this post.
I first need to say that this has by far been the best conference I have attended. This is not necessarily because of all the great content but more of the social aspects that surfaced during the conference. With all the communication happening on Twitter around the announcements, features, thoughts, etc, about the sessions I felt like I was in many rooms at once. I also met many great people due to the communications we had via Twitter. Also, thanks to Jeremy Thake (@jthake) and SharePointDevWiki for providing a site with all the Twitter session codes (http://bit.ly/xO5ur). These made it extremely easy to track the sessions you were interested in and provide thoughts of sessions you attended.
Overall the session content was really good and I was pleased with what I got out of it. Having the session videos available a few days after the session ends will make it extremely useful to go back and rewatch sessions or view ones you missed.
I felt that many of the improvements made to SharePoint 2010 are targeted to the developer / admin in the SharePoint world. Sure, the new ribbon interface impacts end-users greatly – I just do not feel they are going to truly understand the improvements we are getting with SharePoint 2010.
Some of the high level features / enhancements I am really excited about are:
- New Ribbon Interface and Dialog Infrastructure
- Sandbox Solutions
- Developer Dashboard
- Client Object Model
- REST
- SPLINQ! aka “LINQ for SharePoint”
- Improved Central Administration
- Performance and Throttling
- Managed Metadata
- Business Connectivity Services and External Lists
- PowerShell for SharePoint
- Service Application Framework and new architecture topology options
- Additional Event Receivers (Add / Delete on Lists and Add on webs)
- SQL Logging Database
- Developing on your client PC (Windows Vista / Windows 7 only)
- Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint tools
Some other things that I saw / heard throughout the conference that I think is going to benefit our end-users:
- Pagination now factors into filter of views
- Column Validation
- Insure Column Uniqueness
- Web Pages embedded anywhere in wiki pages
- Lookup Lists can now bring back multiple columns
- Referential Integrity between lists
- Editing the New, Edit, View form pages right from the browser
Frankly, there is so many new improvements it is almost impossible to list them all. Hopefully more content will start surfacing now that the NDA’s have been listed and has more people get their hands on the SharePoint 2010 beta.
Client PC Development Thoughts
This is probably one of the most requested things from a SharePoint developer and it is finally here. Yes, it requires Windows Vista or Windows 7. Since SharePoint 2010 requires 64-bit, you will be forced to run the x64 versions of those operating systems. Also, it was mentioned at the conference that 8GB was the minimum recommended memory to have allocated to your machine for SharePoint development.
Depending on your current hardware this may or may not be a difficult sell for your management. Either way, this is something I think many developers are going to want to jump on.
Beta Availability
The SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 was announced at the conference and will be available sometime in November. Some dates I heard was November 15th and November 23th. Just be patient – it is coming.
RTM Availability
April 2010 was thrown around by some people at the conference as the availability of the final RTM version of SharePoint 2010 (Unconfirmed).
That’s all I have for now. More to come in the coming weeks. Please say tuned.
