Stop, Collaborate and Listen:
SharePoint’s Back with a Brand New Invention.

Technorati Tags: Comedy, Development, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 Training, Songs, Videos

Silverlight also plays delightfully well with SharePoint. SharePoint 2010 has the Silverlight Client Object Model – a rich API that allows developers to work with SharePoint 2010 objects in batches, remotely.

The two together make a very good partnership.

In this video Scott Guthrie talks about the developer community – did you know that there are over 1 million developers who use Silverlight today? There are also hundreds of recognised user groups around the world. Quite an impressive boast for such a new development platform.

Hang on. It *feels* new, but it’s not *that* new is it? Silverlight is now a mature platform that has been around in one guise or another since late 2006. It’s been a .NET platform since version 1.1/2.0 in 2007, and Microsoft have just unveiled version 5.0.

Silverlight has fast become the application platform of choice for the Web and Enterprises alike. The video shows what SAP have managed to do using Silverlight as a browser-based front-end for visualising data in a rich and impressively interactive way. Another familiar app Scott demos is the Silverlight Facebook app by Telerik, which is available at http://facebook.telerik.com.

Silverlight is also the language of choice for Windows Phone 7 development. There are now more than 3000 Windows Phone 7 applications available for download or purchase on the Microsoft Office Marketplace. I have an iPhone and an Android device, and I’m jealous.

Technorati Tags: Development, RIAs, Silverlight, Videos

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010 Training, SharePoint Architect, SharePoint Videos, Videos

I’ve been following the Microsoft cloud service offerings for a couple of years since the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2008. What started as SQL Server Data Services and the nascent BizTalk Services, has now grown into an offering that in my opinion does not just complete with Amazon and Google cloud services, but far exceeds the capabilities of their model.

Here’s a screenshot of a really simple ASP.NET page that I’m going to run in the local Azure test harness. You need to make sure it’s running as Administrator, or you can’t launch the Azure Simulation Environment.

If I’ve done all that, I can hit F5 and get this:

Shortly followed by the web application as if it were running in the cloud:

In the video, Jason builds a quick application connecting some .NET entity classes to a SQL Azure instance and shows how quickly a simple web service can be deployed to the cloud.

You also get to see the developer tools for Visual Studio 2010 and Azure, including local simulations of the App Fabric and Dev Fabric infrastructure of Azure. In other words, you can test your Azure apps by running them on your local machine without needing to actually deploy them.

Instead of deploying an ASP.NET Web Application like I did above, Jason shows you the newly released Visual Studio Express and he walks through the steps to build a Silverlight mobile application to consume the service he just deployed on Azure.

The key takeaway here is just how easy it is to build and consume cloud services and applications across a broad spectrum of platforms. Follow this link for more information about Microsoft Azure, or give us a call a JFDI Phoenix in the UK.

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Mirosoft Azure, Mobile, Videos, Visual Studio 2010

The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform has really come of age. In my three recent video podcasts, I showed some of my favourite features in SharePoint 2010:

• SharePoint 2010 Enabling Business Agility using Workflow
• SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services and Offline Synchronisation
• SharePoint 2010 Sandbox Solutions

But there’s so much more for the SharePoint Developer to enjoy!

• Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Projects and Project Items
• Client Object Model (for .NET, Sliverlight and JavaScript)
• LINQ to SharePoint
• Solution and Feature Lifecycle with the Versioning and Upgrade Framework
• SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visio 2010 Integration
• InfoPath 2010 Forms
• Claims Based Security
• SharePoint Powershell Integration
• Lists and Libraries Enhancements
• Branding Improvements
• Enterprise Content Management Improvements, Taxonomies
• Search Improvements
• Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, PowerPivot for SharePoint
• Access Services
• Office Web Access
• …More! More! More!

To round off my week as the Firebrand Blog guest blogger, I’ve made a high level video overview of some of the new Business Intelligence features in SharePoint 2010. A quick look at the Business Intelligence Center site definition, a look at Excel Web Access and the Excel Web Access Web Part, and finally a peek at the REST API for Excel Services.

Don’t forget you can find all my videos as podcasts on iTunes! Just search for “joelblogs tv” and you’ll find them.

Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence, Charting, Excel Services, Excel Web Access, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Videos, Training, Videos

We’ve had Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight for a few iterations now. Windows 7 comes with even more of these APIs as standard, which you can use to give your applications the distinctive Windows 7 look and feel.

Whilst managed languages in .NET have had excellent support for developing shiny applications for a while (Paint.NET is a great example of this, go ahead and download the Paint.NET source code!), unmanaged C++ and MFC has lagged behind in the tools department for too long.

Visual Studio 2010 changes this.

If you’re a C#, WPF or Silverlight developer, then you’ll be anxiously awaiting the WPF 4.0 Windows 7 and Office Ribbon Control, which is not yet released. Scott Guthrie as a long-standing article on the out-of-band WPF 4.0 controls package.

At a Microsoft TechDays UK event at Reading last month, Jason Zander the Visual Studio 2010 general manager, went through many of the new features in the platform.

In the video below, Jason walks through the steps to upgrade an old MFC application, with a distinctly 1990′s feel, to use the up-to-date look and feel of Windows 7.

There’s a lot of copy and paste of MFC and C++ code in this video. Looking at all the steps MFC and C++ guys have to go through, I’m quite happy my C++ days are over. Even though there’s a lot more help for C++ in the IDE these days, it’s still seems a very pedestrian way of cutting code. At least you’ve got Ctrl-Comma to launch Intellisense in the IDE.

One feature missing that was removed in the 2008 release of Visual Studio was the MFC class wizard, so you can’t say they don’t listen!

Jason also shows how you can access some of the animation subsytem in unmanaged code. This is so much easier in WPF and C#.

The nice people at VivaMind have build this splendid WPF sample to show the tree of WPF documentation samples available on MSDN.

Technorati Tags: C#, MFC, Videos, Visual Studio 2010, WPF

The second set was about Workflow in SharePoint 2010, looking at the end-to-end story from business analyst, through designer, through to developer. We look at how each of these types of worker can use Visio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 respectively to play a part in the overall process of creating a workflow.

SharePoint 2010 Enabling Business Agility with Workflow

Don’t forget, you can find all the podcasts in the series on iTunes – search for “joelblogs tv” and you’ll find me! :o)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Architecture, SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint Videos, Videos, Visio, Visual Studio 2010, WCF, Windows Workflow Foundation, Workflow

Welcome to the second in my SharePoint 2010 series of how-to videos for developers. This one is all about Business Connectivity Services, the technology previously known as the Business Data Catalog.

The BDC in SharePoint 2007 was pretty cool. It allowed us to quickly create read-only forms from existing line of business, or back-end, systems. The technique also allowed us to index and then search data in these back-end systems in a structured way.

In this video, I’ll show how easy it is to work with SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services. We’ll use SharePoint Designer 2010 to hook up with an old friend – the Northwind database – and bring a SQL table of Contacts into SharePoint.

We’ll also see how SharePoint does the hard work for us in creating not just read only, but all the CRUD operations – create, retrieve, update, delete. It also creates InfoPath and browser forms for us, without writing a single line of code. Lastly we’ll have a look at the offline functionality of the BCS and SharePoint Workspace, including the magic of conflict resolution.

Technorati Tags: BCD, BCS, Business Connectivity Services, Business Data Catalog, Offline Sync, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Architecture, SharePoint Designer, SharePoint Videos, SharePoint Workspace, SQLCE, Videos

One of my favourite features of the news development platform has got to be Sandbox Solutions and the User Code Service. This allows developers to write code, packaged up as a SharePoint .WSP solution, and deploy it at the site collection level in a security sandbox. This feature is aimed at hosted and multi-tenant SharePoint customers, and also the incredibly security conscious.

In this video walk through, I shows developers how to create a simple Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Sandbox Solution in Visual Studio 2010, I show what works and what doesn’t inside the Sandbox, and lastly how to write a custom validator for other developers’ solutions.

Technorati Tags: Development, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Architecture, SharePoint Videos, Solution Sandbox, User Code Service, Videos, WSP

The video was created with the excellent Animoto SaaS video authoring application. You can also see the video streaming from Animoto’s site.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint, Training, Videos