Java Developer's Journal

The last day of the SPC had some tech-laden sessions hosted by Andrew Connell. The first was about migrating from 2007 to 2010, and how you can add the nice 2010 development features (like the ribbon and the developer dashboard) back into your 2007 master pages when you migrate them. The theme seems to be that you invested in branding and customizing 2007, and Microsoft is making it straightforward to move that content to 2010. The idea is to not have to stop doing work in your 2007 instance waiting for 2010 to release. All in all, it looks like going from 2007 to 2010 should be much easier than 2003 to 2007.

Andrew’s second session was on the ability to create Service Applications. When I first heard it described (local versus proxy execution, service discovery, etc) I started having flashbacks to an app we built back in 1998 in C++ – the Bridge Pattern and CORBA live again! The more I heard the more I was impressed with what had been implemented. It is CORBA-like, but seems to be much easier to use/administer and much faster. Still some hand-rolling of code to bind things together, but all in all some powerful capability if you need it. Who might need it? I can see an ISV who wants to embed some of their product’s capabilities into SharePoint where there are long-running operations or a need for horizontal scalability of compute-intensive operations. There is a decent amount of development overhead to do so, but it’s nice to know the capability is there if needed. One Best Practice mentioned – if you do decide to create a Service Application, make sure to create the Central Admin and PowerShell interfaces to make administration straightforward.

The conference was a great time and was very informative. A few themes:

• I noticed a lot of people from other countries at the conference – SharePoint is definitely catching on worldwide and is standing up to the multi-lingual challenge.
• Microsoft decided to build on the good ideas of Excel Services in 2007 and make it super easy and powerful to do basic BI in Excel Services 2010
• The success of Excel Services in 2007 has borne Access Services and Visio Services in 2010. My instincts say that Access Services will be much more popular – making it much easier to take a departmental application and “upsize” it to the enterprise
• The sheer size of the conference was an indicator of how huge the product has become, and how much customers and Microsoft are betting on the platform.

Our next steps will be to update our webinars to show some of the new 2010 features and how they relate to the existing features, and to try everything out in the Beta release next month. Looking forward to it.

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