Well I happened upon wssdemo.com today, not been there in a while and saw that Ian Morrish has upgraded to SharePoint Foundation. It's nice to see how it looks, and be interesting to see how Ian develops it from here. http://www.wssdemo.com/default.aspx

Upgrading Web Site to 2010

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

Architecture Guidance

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

Rich Web Sites

• 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

The evening saw the 'Rock Band' contest on the XBox, plus some good sea food and open bar

Customising and Branding MySites

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

Afternoon

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

The evening saw us go to MGM to see Cirque du Solei – ‘Ka’. An amazing show within a huge theatre – moving stage, acrobatics and in seat audio effects

Day 2

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

• 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)

Within the UI

• 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.

Day 1 in full of the conference.First full day at the conference and a mixed bag of presentations.The morning was a long session comprising a  keynote by Steve Bulmer and an overview of the new features of SharePoint 2010. Steve’s presentation was slick as would be expected, but I lost count of the number of time the words ‘Super’ and ‘Excited’ were used JThere was of course a lot of whooping and clapping....Main features of note from the presentation are:

• 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 )

AfternoonThe afternoon saw the start of the breakout sessions.

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 Services

• 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’

InfoPath Services

• 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/>

I came across a blog post  today by Christophe Fiessinger, he outlines a performance comparison between running SharePoint VMs on a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 and a Samsung SSD SATA 3.0Gb/s (Solid State Drive). The warm up time for the web applications were between 2 and 10 times quicker, now that's a lot of wasted time cut out from a developer's day or waiting in a demo situation.

Then, I also spotted the following from Doug McCutcheon with a video clip on youtube and links to discounted Dell laptops for demoing. Looks good, hopefully they'll make the deals available in the UK too.

This post is more an aide memoir to myself as I regularly re-apply an image to my laptop.

Often, in Visual Studio, we need to open projects from Source Safe, which can be done by chooing File > Open > Project, then clicking Source Safe in the favourite folders.

But on my laptop (Server 2008 64bit) when trying the above, I couldn't see the sourcesafe project list - the window was empty, similar to the screen shot below.

The resolution was to download a hotfix from Microsoft (see this http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=939808 for detail) Once downloaded, install thehotfix, then I had to run the following:

For 32 bit systems, you may have to run

Once Visual Studio was re-started, eveything was better and we could browse the Source Safe databases

I'd like to introduce Andrew to you all and welcome him to our team. Andrew has joined us in a creative role, driving our design and content offerings. Hopefully you should see the start of Andrews posts here soon.

Welcome!

I've been made aware that comments on the blog are not available.

We will get the development team to investigate this and apply SP2 (making sure that all blogs will not explode after 180 days!  ) - Please bear with us