Overall, an enjoyable conference.

On the plus side, some great presentations on the new platform showing a taster of what we can look forward to. Met some new people and of Vegas is a buzzing city.

For me, the downsides were the number of people (7500) and the audio in some rooms was very echoy making it difficult to hear  (especially if the presenter is talking quickly) I'm not sure about whooping and clapping over new features or improvements......

Overall, Microsoft did a good job on the content and logistics.

<Gary/>

• New editing controls and publishing mechanisms
• The updated authoring experience
• Using the ribbon effectively

• Best Practises
• Sandbox solutions
• Lifecycle management
• Service Applications

• Best practise guidance for public facing sites
• Examples of high profile sites
• Language variation and publishing process simplified
• Governance and processes still need to be in place for sites

Unfortunately Heather had major problems with the video hardware so no real demos were possible. But the following were noticed

• All through SharePoint CSS is used rather than tables (excepting data)
• The MySites implements a two tier navigation
• Although still loads of CSS, it is more granular in the file structure
• Silverlight ‘my network’ can be degraded to PNG when no silverlight available

Composites

•  Links to external applications / LOB can be created in SharePoint designer
• Several new connectors to simplify external connections
• JQuery support allows for web part connections without post backs

Social Networking and MySites

• Facebook type ‘whats on your mind’
•  Users can tag content either using structured taxonomy tags or ad-hoc tags
• Connect with other users using tags and user data
•  Profile suggestions via outlook mining
• New organisation browser

Visual Customisation

• Wiki style editing of pages for things such as title, description
•  Ability to change site ‘theme’ in browser and customise the theme
• CSS uses parameter to match to configurable elements in the browser
•  InfoPath to design list interfaces (forms to edit / input data)
• Ability to change elements such as ribbon style, announcement/ message and forms

SharePoint designer to create composite applications

• The next itteration of the dataview web part
• Datasources
• Linked data sources
• Conditional formatting
• No more ghosting of modified pages

Day 2 of the conference – but first, last night in Vegas. The city buzzes and the evening saw us do teh tourist trail – Luxor, Excalibor , New York New York, Ceasars, MGM and Belagio. Inside, the gaming floors are much the same, but some great bars and eating places (it was Noodle No 9 and teh Irish Bar for us J )

Search

Fundamental changes to the search architecture – splitting indexes across servers, less down time for backups etc.Within the UI –

• Support for Boolean operators
• Results as you type
• Result refinement
• Pheonetic support (eg search enter ‘cough’ in the search box and get people with last name Koff in results

• Analytics data is now stored in a separate database with a published schema, to allow for external reporting tools.
• Improved usage analytics (page hits, users etc)
• Improved search analytics (top queries, zero hits etc)
• Can attach notifications to analytic results – eg. Alert if search zero hits goes above threshold)

• Tag Cloud web part (for user created tags)
• Content Tagging and rating

Afternoon 

Workflow

• SharePoint designer now allows creation of reusable workflows.
• InfoPath forms can be attached to workflows in SPD
• More actions available
• Workflows can be exported to Visual Studio for enhancement
• Workflows can be packaged for re-use on other servers
• Workflows can be exported to a Visio diagram for visual representation & vice versa, a workflow can be created from a Visio diagram

Hands On Labs

spent time playing with the labs, though the quality of the lab exercises was quite variable!

UI Extensibility of the Office Ribbon

• Can more easily create new ribbon elements using XML and .net or VBA for functions
• Can link content in a document to custom ribbon
• Ability to customise the office actions page (the page displayed when the office icon is clicked)

Evening Event

The evening saw 7400 people ht the Mandalay Bay Beach for an 80's party. Give away towels (:S), sunglasses and wrist bands.

Aside from the food and open bar ( :) ), many 80's video games around. The highlight(?) of the evening was Huey Louis & The News plus a great firework display.

• List capacity is now millions of items
• Ribbon interface (Contextual)
• External List support – showing data from external applications within SharePoint as lists (Business Connectivity) This is now available in SharePoint foundation (WSS)
• Much deeper integration with Office 2010
• SharePoint workspace – allowing offline storage of site lists and data, including external data
• Easier editing of pages, using wiki style editing
• Improved management and navigating by taxonomy
• Repeatable workflow in SharePoint designer
• LINQ, JSON and REST support
• Significantly less page refreshing and post backs
• Improved social computing
• > 500 Powershell cmdlets to ease scripting (that will please Iain J )

Development platform overview

• SharePoint 2010 can be run on Vista and Windows 7 64 bit workstations so developers don’t need to have a server to developer
• Visual Studio 2010 now has many extra tools for development including:
• Visual Web Part design (drag and drop controls)
• Sharepoint server explorer – to see all the lists / sites / features and their proprieties
• LINQ for SharePoint to talk to lists
• Developer Dashboard – the ability to view page data (load times, payload, the stack etc) in the browser
• Relational Lists – cascading deletion
• Validation of fields with excel type formula
• Lookup to multiple columns
• XSLT is now the standard for rendering views (but CAML is retained for queries
• Client Object Model to collaborate with SharePoint and undertake some admin. It has .net, Silverlight and JavaScript api’s
• Some new event handlers -  eg. When lists are created
• A new notification area – displays small pop up notices in the browser (e.g. loading)
• Dialog Framework – e.g. for editing SharePoint list items without the need for post back
• Sandboxed Solutions – administrators can limit what resources an application can use.
• Improved packaging and delivery

• Visio 2010 has a number of improved functions for diagramming. One of the most interesting is the ease of which diagram can be connected to external data sources and information from those displayed on the diagram.
• A new Visio Service is now included in SharePoint Enterprise. This allows diagrams saved in the web drawing format to be displayed in any browser. The diagrams can have zoom / drag etc.
• Visio diagram web part that will host a diagram and allow the above functionality. Allows web part connections and ‘mash ups’

• The browser based InfoPath service now support more controls.
• Cascading drop down lists are now supported without needing code
• An interesting demo is using InfoPath to create forms for SharePoint lists

Well, we're here - Las Vegas for the 2009 conference!

After a gruelling day (up at 5am UK time, 11 hour flight) arrived at Mandalay Bay - what a huge place - larger than our local shopping Centre.

Registered and collected the give aways - then gave them! (not good give aways this year, sorry guys). Glad we registered early as the queue this evening is huge. Good food at the welcome reception, but my brain is still over the Atlantic and after workign on the flight over I'm fried - now in bed at 7.30pm :(

Day 1 tomorrow - Key Note in the morning, then onto the sessions. Daily review to follow

<Gary/>

These are a couple of really good blog site's for Silverlight.

http://timheuer.com/blog/
http://silverlightforbusiness.net

When hosting a WCF web service remember to set up a client access policy file. As a Silverlight
call will require this file for security purposes. In iis you just need to add it to the root folder of
the web site.

 Example File

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
        <domain uri="*"/>
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

 File Name:  ClientAccessPolicy.xml