Tech-Ed Day One
I just wanted to do a quick write-up from day one at Tech-Ed 2008 Developer in Orlando Florida. The opening Keynote address by Bill Gates was very good. He touched upon his upcoming departure about Microsoft, but not without also leaving us with a nice picture of where he feels the technology of Microsoft is heading. The big pieces were the demonstrations about presentation with the upcoming release of SilverLight 2 Beta 2, development and middle-tier efforts with Visual Studio 2008; including some of the interesting architecture, diagram, and pattern enforcement tools. He ended with discussing and demonstrating the back-end with SQL Server 2008's ability to do spatial queries and the addition of more platform services.
Visual Studio 2008 Development for SharePoint
I also attended some interesting sessions around SharePoint technologies. There will be a 1.2 release of Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services very soon that will support Visual Studio 2008. There will be no added functionality to the extensions, but this is still a useful milestone for moving forward with some of the new development tools. Thank you to Paul Andrew for giving us a walk-through.
SQL Server Reporting Services and SharePoint
There was a very interesting session by Prash Shirolkar on the some of the great integration features between SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) and MOSS. He demonstrated some great examples of SSRS reporting on information in the WSS Content Databases, building and publishing reports from SSRS to SharePoint libraries, and some of the new Web Parts available to view very comprehensive reports within SharePoint. He also gave a quick overview on an SSRS report, running in a Web Part, that was able write data back to a local SharePoint list. Interesting stuff!
Custom Routers in SharePoint Records Center
John Holliday gave a nice overview in a smaller, informal venue about building custom routers in Records Center. Building these routers is actually fairly straightforward, and there seems to be some value to this in the ability to have more granular control via code over the filtering, authenticating, and management of documents that enter your repository. Andrew Connell was sitting on the session and a very thought-provoking conversation sparked up about backing up / managing / viewing snapshots of content managed publishing sites in SharePoint. It seems like we've all been getting requests for this type of management and control over SharePoint lately.
Overall it's been a great time and has been a lot of fun talking to like-minded people working on SharePoint in the industry! More to come...
-Ryan