David Adamson's Blog

Best Practices - Developing MCMS and Sharepoint for the Future

With all the exciting new announcements at the PDC, the futures of both Sharepoint and MCMS have been confirmed. (were they ever in question?)

In line with this, we should all be ensuring that any development work we do will place us in the best possible position for doing an upgrade when the time comes.

Arpan has linked to a couple of MSDN whitepapers to help us out:

Designing Your MCMS 2002 Solution for Reusability 
Summary:  Use best-practice design recommendations for Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 applications and Web sites to help you create your site in a way that prepares it for future versions of MCMS technology.

Best Practices for Ensuring Application Reusability and Upgrade in Windows SharePoint Services
Summary: Revisit key Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Software Development Kit (SDK) information to know best practices for writing code that will be optimally reusable when software updates, upgrades, or security updates are applied to a deployment.

(via Arpan)

There were several large announcements made at PDC that are very relevant to SharePoint and CMS customers. I'm personally super excited about this and to be part of this. Microsoft revealed Office "12" - client and servers and talked about our investment in ECM. This is great news for CMS and SharePoint customers that there is one integrated architecture for end-to-end document and content lifecyle.

Another huge announcement was the introduction of Windows Workflow Foundation - WinFX. http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/workflow/ Office "12" servers will build on this technology to provide some great workflow!

A lot of CMS and SharePoint customers and partners are wondering what they can do to better prepare for the next version of the technology. If you are a CMS customer, take a look at the newly published whitepaper at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnmscms02/html/CMSDesigningCMS2002Sol.asp.

If you are a SharePoint customer, make sure you follow guidelines published at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/WSSSharePointCodeReuse.asp

IE Developer Toolbar Announced

This new toolbar for Internet Explorer 6 & 7 should become an essential part of any web developer's toolkit. I've installed it and I'm sure I won't be able to live without it shortly. 

(via IEBlog)

The developer community has asked for a long time: Where is the free developer toolbar for IE? We recognized the popularity of free IE tools like Fiddler and we listened to your feedback. I am glad to announce the next addition to our developer tool support: The IE dev toolbar. This tool will help developers to explore their HTML documents and understand everything about it.

With the IE Dev Toolbar you have several features at your fingertips to go deep into existing pages or pages that you are currently creating. You will be able to explore the DOM tree and find elements on the page, disable IE settings, view information, outline elements, control images, resize pages to common screen resolutions and have a powerful ruler that lets you measure pixel perfect content on your page. It also will help you to validate against existing standards and provides pointers to W3C specs.

At Chris’ talk at the PDC on Tuesday, he announced that we would have a beta version available very soon. This is now ready and available for download. It is designed to work on IE6 as well as IE7.

I would like to thank our interns, Carl LeCompte, Mary Ann Jawili, Barbara Morales, Seth McLaughlin and Jeffrey Varga for doing a great job working on this project, and also a big thanks to David McKinnis, our developer.

I would love to hear in the comment section what you think and what additional features you would like to see added. Bugs can be reported at the Channel9 wiki.

 - Markus