SharePoint Connections 2010: Amsterdam
Just returned from two days of fun @ SharePoint Connections 2010! Great conference with lots of excellent speakers including Steve Fox, Jan Tielens and Richard Taylor (and many more offcourse).
Got to see some pretty exciting things, primarily about SharePoint 2010 (duh), Visual Studio 2010 and the new developer stuff which that combination brings. I’ll try to quickly discuss the main things.
The integration of SharePoint development which lacked in Studio 2008 is now available in 2010. This is being advertised quite big, but I think every SharePoint developer would not have expected anything less. Ok, the features are great and there’s more then just an integrated version of VSEWSS, but still; this should have been there a long time ago.
The new integration does bring some cool stuff to the table. There’s editing of BCS (the new BDC) files, there’s Visual WebParts and visual design of workflows in a neat way. With this new release, SharePoint development in Visual Studio has grown up and matured, cancelling out a lot of the difficulties which were there in 2008. There are some minor drawbacks though… VS2010 and SP2010 are a team and the team members don’t play well with the older family members. So forget about creating 2007 stuff in VS2010 and be affraid for upgrading VS2008 SharePoint projects to VS2010 projects; things will break and customers will be disappointed.
As Richard Taylor stated a couple of times in his talks: nuke and start from scratch! Wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for I must say, but as I saw all the changes I’m starting to believe that might be the better approach. In what way you could migrate sites with existing data to your new 2010 environment I’m not sure, but I’ll keep you updated on that as well.
As for 2010 beta solutions: be carefull with that too. The migration options include an update 2007 -> 2010, but not 2010 beta -> 2010. So when the RTM version is released, you’ll won’t be able to upgrade beta sites to the RTM version.
In the near future I’ll be doing more tests and practice runs with the 2010 beta versions of Visual Studio as well as SharePoint, so please watch my blog for more updates on these topics. As for now, I’m preparing for a good night sleep, my final day at work and then some… SNOWBOARDING!!! YEAHHHHHHHHH
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