Tech-Ed Day Two
Day two was better than the first day in terms of session content and interest, at least from my perspective. I took pictures, but decided it was better to get the post up than get the pictures ready.
XMOL / XAML
John Holliday gave an in-depth coding example about how you can build your own XOML/XAML editor that sits between Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer, allowing you load, modify, and build custom Workflows. Although I'm not sure I'd ever use such a tool, the exercise in seeing it built and operate shed even more light on WF.
Federated Search in MOSS 2007
Michal Gideoni from Microsoft presented a session on the new abilities of SharePoint for Search 2008 and therefore the new patch being release within a month that will add these features to existing MOSS implementations.
She demonstrated some very powerful and easy methods to build federated search web parts that basically connect to anything! Ok, maybe not anything, but just about anything that you can call via code to search and return data. Her solution was to convert almost any foreign search component's return data into an RSS format so the local federated web parts can use this for display purposes. This included Google, SQL Server, Mapping tools, etc. With some clever regular expression manipulation she was able to allow for custom search queries to look for specific items that certain searches are more qualified to return.
Finally, Michal mentioned that some new protocols for Documentum and FileNet have been released for MOSS to search and index the content. She also informed us that the new federated search web parts are no longer sealed, thus allowing us to inherit from them and begin extending their functionality. I sure hope Microsoft follows suit on this new direction with their other web parts as well!
Making SharePoint Development Better
Stacy Draper hosted a really great Birds of a Feather session for SharePoint developers. Essentially it was an open forum for those of us working in this genre to ask questions, express ideas, discuss current issues, offer solutions to problems, and generally hear about how other people are doing. It was very informative and good to hear that a lot of people experience the same issues in these environments. We met some talented developers genuinely there to learn, collaborate, and share knowledge. Thanks again Stacy!
Content Types for Document Management
Another session by John Holliday. I seem gravitate towards the types of sessions he covers. This session was a deep-dive coding example about creating Content Types in code and how you can use reflection to make this process much easier. His session is probably the "deepest" I've seen someone get into when it comes to Content Types via the object model.
One thing he mentioned that I hadn't thought of before is the ability to send documents with any/all Content Types into a more generic rules engine if you choose to validate documents/items entering your applications. Right now, you can attach Information Management Policies or Workflows to Content Types, or you can write custom code that can look at Content Types on various events (adding, updating, etc) to validate, but each of these methods is fairly specific to a certain type of document, Content Typde or validation rule. I liked the idea of building these validators that could apply to all Content Types, but your code is essentially a rules engine that looks at all the metadata for each Content Type, along with other conditions, to determine certain allowable actions during certain events. You could get clever with this approach and build a nice front-end for your rules data.
That's it for day 2!
-Ryan