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Archives for November 2010

Event Receivers and Content Deployment Jobs

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SharePoint 2010 has many wonderful improvements over previous versions. One of which is a vastly improved Content Deployment mechanism and API.

If your application makes use of Event Receivers or Feature Receivers, these can, depending upon what they do, cause problems during a Content Deployment job. If you have code that you’d rather not execute when your event is triggered as a side effect of a Content Deployment job, you can use the SPImportContext object to find out if a job is running, and if so, to take alternative action.

Here’s an example on an ItemAdding Event Receiver (you’ll also need a using statement referring to the Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment namespace)

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// An item is being added.

   3: /// </summary>

   4: public override void ItemAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)

   5: {

   6:     if (!SPImportContext.Current.IsRunning)

   7:     {

   8:         //TODO: add event receiver code here

   9:         base.ItemAdding(properties);

  10:     }

  11: }

If you miss this out this check in an Event Receiver or Feature Receiver, you might cause deadlocks or spurious List Items that you did not intend.

Overview of Cloud Computing (SaaS, S+S and Microsoft Azure)

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Whether we’re talking about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the cloud is really just another place to run your applications.

Microsoft’s vision of Software plus Services takes the basic offering of SaaS and augments it with on-premise productivity software such as Office.

In this TechNet video Brian Prince talks about cloud computing terminology, the role of the IT professional in cloud computing and Microsoft’s approach to the topic.

Brian also discusses the spectrum from on-premise, through hosted, cloud services and SaaS hosted applications.

  • In an on-premise scenario, I would be in charge of managing, feeding and watering my servers, with all the IT people that required.
  • In a hosted scenario, I would out-source some of that basal responsibility to my hosting provider, but I would probably be tasked with looking after the operating system and above.
  • In a cloud scenario, such as Azure, I delegate all the running and maintaining, patching and potentially even scaling of my solution to Microsoft or other third parties. If you’re interested in automatically scaling your Azure applications have a look at the Windows Azure Dynamic Scaling sample application (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/azurescale) and also at one service provider that’s offering this funcitonality as a service for Azure (AzureWatch from http://www.paraleap.com).
  • Traditional SaaS solutions are geared towards one-size-fits-all approaches, such as shared CRM, email or productivity solutions (for instance Office 365 and SharePoint Online).