Experiences with Binary and DNA abstractions

Since over a year now, I have been working on an Innovation product on SharePoint 2010 (read more…) and I would like to share some my experiences, architecting and developing it. Below I have tried to group my experiences into technical and non-technical headings and also shared some of the interesting resources that I went through.

• Business Context
• Understanding the business problem.  (Business Drives)
• Why SharePoint?
• Defining Common Goals.
• Understanding your Customer’s Customer.
• Architecture & Design
• SharePoint Artifacts  (SharePoint 2010 Architectures Overview)
• Storing data in Lists vs. SQL Tables (SharePoint Large List Performance: SPMetal vs. SPQuery)
• SharePoint Foundation vs. Standard vs. Enterprise specific Features
• Site Definitions/ Site Templates / Master Pages / Page Layouts …
• Adventures with Variations
• SharePoint 2010 Cache (read more…)
• Search
• Loose coupling  (Dependency Inversion Principle)
• Avoiding “Pattern Pathology”
• Performance
• Tips & Tricks while using Entity Framework (EF Deep Dive)
• Embracing JavaScript via jQuery (Douglas Crockford, John Resig, Paul Irish)
• Versioning and Upgrades
• Data Import
• Unit & Integration Tests (Unit Testing Best Practices, using MSDTC for Integration Tests)
• Team Lead
• Communication is the ‘key’
• Vertical vs. Horizontal slicing (Code Leaders and Beautiful Teams)
• It is hard to Unlearn
• Process
• Adopting Team Foundation Server
• Sprint Planning
• User Stories / Tasks / Bugs
• Daily Standups
• Daily Builds

In the next few posts I would try to expand some of these headings and talk about them in more details…

Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools

Here are few features I liked from the VS 2010 Power Tools released last week :

Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools

• Close button in tab as well
• Pinned Tabs
• Searchable Add Reference Dialog
• Triple Click to select a line
• Align Assignments (Ctrl + Alt + ] )

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools

• Sandbox Visual Webpart

(Although there are few limitations which are mentioned in the tool description tab here)

Zion Rebuild . . . . . . . . Again !!!

Right from the RFP meetings to the daily scrums and the final PROD release calls/emails, it has been a tremendously exciting journey once again with this project. I am immensely happy to announce the launch of our new SharePoint site: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com

The entire team learnt & applied a ton of exciting stuff in SharePoint 2010 including :

• LIVE ID Integration with SharePoint 2010
• 2010 Media Player Integration
• Localization using Variations + lots of Hack
• [PageQueryString] in Content Query Webparts
• SharePoint Tools in Visual Studio 2010
• Caching API’s for accessing SharePoint List Data
• Bing Maps Geo-code service
• HTML Compliance / Accessibility standards
• jQuery

SharePoint 2010 is a huge successor of 2007 and since last 1 year I have been enjoying more and more working on this product . . . . . .

Diving & Exploration

I was busy with PDC so this post is coming a bit late. Here are some of the gems that I had explored lastly:

• Developing SharePoint Applications : A series of articles from the patterns and practices developer center on building Collaborative Applications using SharePoint. One of my college Todd Baginski has also contributed to these articles
• SharePoint 2010 Sandbox Solutions : Yet again excellent article series from Sahil Malik explaining all the details that you would possibly need to develop Sandbox Solutions in SharePoint 2010.
• ASP.net Performance and Microsoft AJAX CDN.
• ASP.net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Web Development Beta 2 Overview:  Whitepaper explaining the new changes coming in ASP.net in .Net framework 4.0.
• What’s new in WCF 4.0 : 3 Part series explaining some of the new features of WCF 4.0.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course: Yet another **FREE** training course form channel9 with lots of videos and hands-on-lab.

Summary of all PDC09 – Announcements / Product Features / Cool Stuff

 

Silverlight

• Silverlight 4.0 Features & More:
  • Support for Webcam, Microphones, Right Click, Mouse Wheel
  • New Rich Text control
  • Clipboard Access
  • Print Preview Dialogs
  • Authorization support in Client HTTP Stack (NTLM, Basic, Digest)
  • Running outside sandbox for Trusted Out of browser applications
    • HTML rendering control inside Silverlight
    • Local file system access
    • Keyboard in full screen
    • COM automation support (read word/excel files)
    • Notification Popups
• Screen Presentation Framework (MVVM + Prism) for Silverlight
• Silverlight Media Framework - Smooth Streaming Porting Kit
• Microsoft XAML Toolkit : Provides Static Analysis, Localization, & XamlDom for .NET/Silverlight XAML
• ADO.NET Data Services is now “OData”  - Open Data Protocol & WCF Data Services 
• .NET 4 Location API - Installed by default with .NET 4 and supported in Visual Studio 2010. (System.Device.dll) See WHDC site for Sensors/Location : www.microsoft.com/WHDC/Sensors
• Bing Maps Silverlight Control
• Advanced Performance & Profiling in Silverlight 4
• WCF RIA Services for Silverlight

SharePoint

• SharePoint 2010 Features :  (*FREE Channel9 SharePoint2010 Developer Course)
  • SharePoint 2010 Designer New Tools
    • BDC Entities
    • List Schema
    • Custom Actions
    • Task/Approval Designer
  • Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools
    • Web Part, BCS and Workflow designers
    • View SharePoint site in Server Explorer
    • Support for SharePoint Sandboxed Solutions
    • Import WSP from SharePoint Designer
    • Packaging Explorer
  • Platform
    • Web UI Framework
    • Silverlight
    • XSLT Views
    • LINQ
    • REST
    • Client OM
    • External Lists
    • Improved Event Model
    • Improved Solutions Lifecycle
• Word Automation Services in SharePoint 2010 + Open XML SDK
• “Identity normalization” in SharePoint 2010 – Services in Single Farm, Windows Identity Foundation Identity Delegation Feature
• Identity and Web2.0 Services – OAuth Token Authentication mechanism in SharePoint 2010

Windows Azure

• Windows Azure + Windows Identity Foundation + ADFS2 : https://federatedidentity.cloudapp.net/
• Windows Azure Platform AppFabric - provides secure connectivity as a service to help developers bridge cloud, on-premises, and hosted deployments
• Velocity is now “Windows Server AppFabric Caching”
• Dublin is now  “Windows Server AppFabric” - The Windows Server AppFabric supports WCF and Workflow services by:
  • Providing runtime databases
  • Capabilities for monitoring, persistence, hosting and caching
  • Tooling and scripting to manage and monitor WCF and WF services
• Windows Azure :
  • Features
    • Blobs – Provide a simple interface for storing named files along with metadata for the file
    • New Type - Page Blob
    • New Operations – Updated, Copy, Snapshot, Lease Blob
    • New Ways of Accessing and Service Blob Content -
      • Custom Domain Names
      • Root Blob Container
      • Content Delivery Network access
      • Shared Access Signatures
    • Entity Group Transactions - Atomically perform multiple insert/update/delete
      over entities in same partition in a single transaction
    • Dequeue count returned with message
  • Futures
    • Administrator privileges in the VM
    • Deployment of pre-configured VM images
    • User-selectable geo-locations for replicas
    • Secondary indices on tables
    • New storage option “Drives” - Provides durable NTFS volumes for Windows Azure applications to use (Feb 2010)
    • Remote terminal server access to VMs
    • Microsoft Sync Framework and ADO.NET Sync Services - Tools for data synchronization with SQL Azure
• TCO and ROI Calculator - provides a customized estimate of potential cost savings you (or your company or organization) may achieve by building on the Windows Azure Platform
• Windows Azure Diagnostics - SDK component providing distributed monitoring & data collection for cloud apps
• Visual Studio 2010 RTM and SQL Azure Futures:
  • Connect to SQL Azure – Data | Add New Data Source (DataSet & EDM)
  • EDM Conceptual Data Modeling Designer – Generate database
  • Server Explorer – Browse
  • Data Sources Window (DataSet, EDM, LinqToSQL, data binding tools)
  • Configure SQL Data Source
• File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) - provides many avenues to be part of end-to-end data lifecycle management solutions
• “Houston” - Project Houston will provide a easy to use cloud based database development experience
• Access Control Service - claims based access control for REST web services
  • Implements OAuth Web Resource Authorization Protocol (WRAP) & Simple Web Tokens (SWT)
  • Integrates with AD FS v2

Surface & Windows 7

• Multitouch on Windows 7
  • Manipulation Events
  • ScrollViewer Panning Support
  • WPF Controls Styles with Panning Enabled
  • Multi-Touch on the web with Silverlight
    • Manipulation and Inertia Process API
• Windows API Code Pack – Managed Class Library to access to Windows (7) features
• “Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch” – Would be coming shortly after the WPF4 Launch
• Surface Futures:
  • Cheaper
  • Thinner
  • Vertical
• Surface SDK & Resources now available free

Visual Studio, WCF, WPF

• WCF 4.0 Features:
  • Default Endpoints, Protocol Mapping, Binding Configurations,Behavior Configurations
  • File-less Activation (no .svc)
  • Simple Ad-hoc Service Discovery
  • Service Announcements
  • Routing Service
  • Message Filters and Content-based Routing
  • Automatic Help Page
  • HTTP Caching Support
• WPF 4.0 New Features: Here is an excellent blog series from Lester covering all the below features with sample code:
  • MultiTouch
  • DatePicker\Calendar
  • Datagrid
  • Visual State Manager (VSM)
  • Easing Functions
  • JumpLists
  • Pixel Shader 3 support
  • Cached Composition
  • Full trust Xbap Deployment
  • Binding to Dynamic Objects
  • Custom Speller Support
  • Script Interop in Xbap
  • UIA Virtualization
  • UIA SynchronizedInputPattern
  • Input Key\Gesture Binding
  • TextFormattingMode
  • CaretBrush
  • SelectionBrush
  • Bindable Run
  • ClearTypeHint
  • LayoutRounding
  • Updated File Dialogs
• Manycore & .NET 4.0 with Visual Studio 2010 (Concurrency):
  • ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem
  • System.Threading.Tasks.Task + System.Collections.Concurrent
  • New Sync Primitives in .NET 4
  • Visual Studio 2010 Concurrency Profiler Views + Parallel Debugger Toolwindow
• Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility – Extensions Gallery & VSX Samples

ASP.net & SQL Server

• ASP.net 4.0 Futures:
  • OOB Helpers for Image manipulation, Email (and signup email with verification), Background tasks, File upload with progress updates
  • Support for HTML5 - <video>, <audio>, <menu> tags, Web Storage
  • AdoNetDataContext – to get data from Windows Communication Foundation web services (*.svc)
  • IntermediateDataContext to cache data in Web Storage
  • Velocity – distributed cache platform
  • Active Record design pattern to keep the database schema in sync with the Object-Relational Mapper.
• FREE ASP.NET 4 & MS Deploy Hosting
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Embedded BI: Visual Studio 2010 Report Viewer Controls
• SQL Server Modeling Services
• Statistics Used by the Query Optimizer in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Microsoft Research & Labs

• Infer.NET - framework for running Bayesian inference in graphical models (from MSR)
• “Axum” : A .NET Language for Safe and Scalable Concurrency
• “Holmes” - Automated Statistical Debugging using Path Profiles (from MSR)
• “Darwin” - An Approach for Debugging Software Regressions (from MSR)
• “Project Trident” - A Scientific Workflow Workbench (from MSR)
• “Pivot” by Live Labs : Visualizing collections of objects, Revealing hidden patterns within data, Acting on discovered insights
• DevLabs: Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)
• Trustworthy Data Collaboration SQL Azure Codename ‘Vidalia’
• Microsoft Codename “Dallas” - Content Brokerage and Discovery platform

Other

• Messenger Web Toolkit
• Concurrency Runtime (ConcRT) & User Mode Scheduling (UMS) for C++
• “Snoop” - A random utility made to simplify visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime.
• “VMmap” - Process virtual and physical memory analysis utility from sysinternals
• DryadLINQ - Declarative programming style of LINQ for clusters
• Windows Performance Tools (WPT) Kit - contains performance analysis tools
• Windows Ribbon Framework Developer Guides
• .NET Micro Framework 4.0 Porting Kit and .NET Micro Framework 4.0 SDK
• Image Builder Wizard (IBW) – Quick and Easy Embedded OS Creation
• Microsoft adPlatform for Developers
• Windows Identity Foundation - Extension to .Net for claims-based identity
• Software Certification Toolkit – For ISV Application Readiness and Certification
• UC 14 Metro - OCS 14/OC 14 platform early adopter program

Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2) – First Look

Here are some screenshots of VS 2010 Beta 2 (Ultimate) and some of the new features coming along with it :

I just liked the new curvy splash screen . . .

That is the new ‘Startup’ Page. If you are new to Visual Studio or want to know ‘What’s New’, this page has ton’s of information to get you started and also lots of guidance and resources links for various platforms including Windows, Web, Cloud, Office, SharePoint and Data.

Here is the Project Templates Screen. A bunch of templates are now included out-of-the-box in VS 2010 including Cloud, SharePoint, Silverlight and off-course the new Visual F# templates for Windows & Silverlight applications

Some of the new Explorer’s including the ‘Architecture Explorer’ and other windows – F# Interactive, Performance Explorer, Code Metrics Results 

Performance Analysis as well as the much interesting ‘IntelliTrace’ feature. Find out more about IntelliTrace here

Performance Analysis Report. . .

The ‘Generate Dependency Graph’ feature which generates a DGML document, part of the Architecture Tools in VS 2010

Also you can downloaded the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - October Preview which has lots of Presentations & Demos on many of the new features and language enhancements coming up in .NET 4.0

VS2010 & .NET 4.0 Sneaky Features

A must watch features Video from Mr. Guthrie himself on VS2010 & .Net 4.0 

• Parameter Usage Highlighting
• RegEx based Intellisense Filtering
• View Call Hierarchy for Methods
• Vertical Text Selection
• Consume First Intellisense Mode
• Snippets for Markups & JavaScript
• Debug History
• .Net 4 (New CLR)
• Search Project Templates on Online Gallery
• VS Web Development (Code Optimized) Profile
• URL Routing in Web Forms
• IIS SEO Toolkit
• XML comments in Intellisense within JavaScript file
• Dynamic named variable Intellisense in JavaScript
• T4 Template customization in ADO.net Entity Framework
• LINQDataSource + QueryExtender Control
• DynamicValidation of data
• New Markup Syntax for automatically HTML encoding . . <%: Message %>

Lots more in the Video so check it out. . . .

'System.Dynamic' namespace missing on VS2010 CTP

Finally I got my hands on all the materials from this year’s PDC including the VPC with VS 2010 CTP, Oslo, WF & WCF 4.0 and other bits.

The first thing I wanted to try out was the new ‘dynamic’ keyword and the creation of dynamic classes but I found that I can’t seem to refer to the ‘System.Dynamic’ namespace as mentioned in Anders Session.

Googling around I found the resolution around this issue here. I just had to slightly modify the code to include a generic dictionary for the dynamic property dispatching as below :

Enjoy dynamic learning,