Fear and Loathing

It's about 15 minutes before the buses start to roll out to Universal Studios where probably everyone is going to be. Microsoft has rented out the entire park for the evening along with all the food places so it's going to be a movie smorgasborg tonight.

Today was SharePoint day at PDC as Microsoft pulled back the covers (or opened the Kimono as Fitz puts it) and opened the fire hose to SharePoint V3. I found the time to sit in on two sessions on configuration and customization and the new additions to the object model, deployment changes, and other good stuff so this is going to be a long (and hopefully informative) post about that (actually took me about 1 1/2 hours to put together from all my crappy notes and memory). More descriptive and more my thoughts rather than bullet points that you've seen around so far. I'm sure my other fellow SharePointers will have more to follow and I hope it's useful to you.

First there's some pretty nice stuff happening under the scenes with V3. There's a nice audit model built-in so things like the number of views of a document are tracked but you don't need to iterate through each document to find it. Makes for a nice simple Web Part that you can build to display based on views (think number of views on a Flickr photo and you get the idea).

For the geeks in us that like to see what the kimono is made of, there's a schwack of great stuff happening in the Object Model. The big thing is the flip from SharePoint intercepting HTTP calls and passing them onto ASP.NET (or rendering ASPX pages with it's own custom parser) to doing a 180 where ASP.NET handles the call (no more ISAPI filter) and then proxies to SharePoint if it needs to. A much better Architecture that will not only expose all (yes, all) of ASP.NET 2.0's capabilties but also play much nicer with ASP.NET apps. The other big thing in the code space is the compatibility with ASP.NET's Web Part Framework and really leveraging the ASP.NET model.

Generally ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts will work in SharePoint V3 (you can "kind" of get this with ASP.NET 2.0 and WSS SP2, but check out SmartPart 1.1 and Son of SmartPart for a better setup). There are some small things that don't work and limitations. For example you can't use ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Pages as-is in SharePoint, you have to use the SharePoint implementation. You also can't use ASCX controls natively like you can in an ASP.NET 2.0 page but again, turn to SmartPart for this. What you can do is write a small ASP.NET 2.0 wrapper for now, but Microsoft will be providing this later in the cycle. The thing to remember here (as a result of PDC) is that this is all for WSS only! Remember that and don't ask when SPS will have these things available to it as there are many other products and services in the Office 12 eco-system that will be coming in the next months leading to the betas and release next year.

So in a nutshell, if you're building for tommorow today, do it with the ASP.NET Web Part model and make calls to SharePoint specific classes to retrieve information, update lists, etc. You can use the SharePoint Web Part base class if you need it and there may be times you want to (e.g. web part caching is only in the SharePoint classes) but use it liberally as the long term is a single Web Part model.

As for forms, the form templates are now in XML and you can replace the base ones on a web basis or per list (as well as other options). Have you ever wanted to modify the New.aspx page for a list but just saw gobbly-gook in FrontPage? Now you can 100% customize the form using a simple XML file. Do some branding, do some rearranging of fields, introduce new fields and controls, whatever. You still need to use CAML for views so don't go throwing away those skills just yet, but that's okay for all the other goodies we're getting.

More stuff. Master Pages. They're big time present in WSS and that, combined with some very cool Master Page Tokens will make it a breeze to totally customize the look and feel of your sites. This is much more than just themes or even custom CSS. Another thing (and I can't remember if this is 100% correct) is that the Master Pages are applied to all pages, not just default.aspx. So the current issue of branding a WSS site and having some pages not take form (except for colours) to your changes is gone. There's a Master Page Gallery (just another doclib) that holds the master page file and you can apply a master page across the web, a site or an entire farm (which is pretty much the same for more of the changes with V3).

On the customization and deployment front, V3 will have less XML and less duplication. It's now easier to change things in the system via the Features and apply it. Again you can apply it to a web, site, web application (think Virtual Server) or an entire farm. Most of the extra stuff that you always had to copy and use (even though you couldn't touch it like base types) is now in what's called a Global Template. Your customization comes in the way of Features. This is very much like features that you get in an MSI where you can choose items to include or exclude. There's also hooks in the OM for handling features so you can do custom code whenever a feature in installed, activated, uninstalled, and deactivated (like extra SQL work, go off to a legacy system, email notifications, tracking, etc.). It's basically the Add/Remove Programs for SharePoint and as a developer, you can create dependancies on your Features so (for example) one feature depends on another before it can be used. This will help avoid putting end users into unsupported or weird configurations.

Another great new feature is the timer job subsystem. This allows you to hook into a continuous running process on the SharePoint server. You specify what gets called and when, how often, etc. so things that are currently built as separate console apps or services can be just another assembly on your server that can be turned on and off (even from within a Web Part say to turn archiving on and off).

More goodness, in a word, XSD. Yup, a fully qualified XSD file for all the configuration files so editing them inside of Visual Studio 2005 will do validation and intellisense on the tags including allowed values and other stuff to prevent you from shooting yourself in the head when editing config files. Okay, so we still have XML based config files but at least there's less of them and they're validated now.

As for customization you can hook into any part of the UI which is similar to what we have today (like adding options to the Modify Shared Page menu) but this goes beyond that and lets you build you own toolbar items, menus, and even hooks into the new Welcome menu which allows you to sign in/out, change the current user, etc. All of these can be security filtered as well.

For hard core coding, there's some new classes like SPGridView which is basically a DataGrid but has a bunch of SharePoint-like look and feel to it as well as features to handle sorting and filtering, ala SharePoint style. So if you have custom classes that do this for you now (like I do) you can throw that code away and just instantiate a SPGridView and Bob's your uncle. There's more goodies like the SPBoundColumn class that you add to a SPGridView and lets you bind to a SharePoint list or library column.

Another much needed class is the SPDataQuery. This is a class that will do cross site queries with a little CAML (set as properties). Basically create an instance of it, set the properties (list type to search, scope, keywords to search) and fire it off to get back a result (or bind it directly to a SPGridView). Sweet.

If you look around the SharePoint space, there are a lot of navigation components. SharePoint V3 has these now baked in including breadcrumb trail stuff and a new Navigation Node object that you can get and traverse tree views of the entire site. This also has security filtering so if you don't have access to a feature, it's not available to you. Yes, in V3 we finally get links filtered based on your security or role.

Still another beautiful thing (that got some applause in the audience) is the SPDataSource which is a SharePoint class exposed as an IDataSource. Yup, just hook it up to anything you want now and treat a SharePoint list as any data source which will make SharePoint reporting a snap.

There's a small SharePoint/CMS MVP group growing at PDC. Today I met with Jans Tielens and Patrick Tisseghem. Interesting how people are different in person. Jans is taller than I imagined, Patrick younger and Angus Logan... well, Angus is just plain Angus (complete with his Porn room at The Standard). Good times and I'm sure you'll see more interesting blogs from them on the sessions they attended and thoughts that they have about things (Angus has been doing a series of one-line blog posts everytime he hears something new, we'll talk to that boy).

That about covers it and I do apologize if there's some errors or omissions I made here. Like I said up front, the fire hose has been turned on and trying to go through what I have access to and what was presented, I might be wrong here and there in details so my apologies for that. If you're unsure about something or want more details, just yell and I'll see what I can do. Off to be a movie geek now!

P.S. My heart almost stopped today as I saw Fitz blogging. Again. That's twice in two days, a record for him. Now that the gag is lifted, he's got a LOT of catching up as do we all. Watch for more to come.

Tags and Links
PDC05
Flickr
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)

I just woke up after dozing off in my room. It's 2:30AM and HBO is just finishing up with The Terminal starring Tom Hanks. Some days I feel like Viktor Navorski. Wonder if I could fall asleep at PDC and live there for a week undetected? Maybe I'll try that tonight after the Universal Studios party.

After watching the public unveiling of Office 12 there's been a lot of posts of screenshots and peoples opinions of the new UI and features (including a lot of bitching and griping from the Slashdot crowd which isn't surprising). One thing I really like is the paradigm shift from the traditional Windows menu to the tabbed toolbar idea. Sure, there are some applications that I've seen that have tabbed toolbars but to merge the toolbar and menuing system and replace it, that's slick. I mean, we've been with the File/Edit/Help menu design since Windows 3.0 (or even earlier) and it's part of the CUA/SAA (?) standards (my memory may be stale but I think it's CUA?). I for one really think this is a big change and something that is for the better. I love the menu system idea but then when you look at tabbed toolbars, well it just makes more sense. It still takes up the same real estate for the menu items and on applications with a toolbar (which ones don't have it these days) you still have the same toolbar area (okay, the Office 12 toolbars take up a little more horizontal space) so why not only have toolbars? It makes sense and seems like an improvement. As for user training and such, I don't see a big leap here as the tabs appear very much like the current Menu items and well, people are used to toolbars already. I for one welcome our Toolbar Tab overlord.

The killer is of course the extensibility that was briefly demonstrated during the keynote where you can add your own tabs or inject controls onto existing tabars. I really hope by the launch that they'll adopt this consistently across all products as it still isn't completely there for IE7 and things yet but I'm sure it will be. Just a little thing but a nice improvement and something to look forward to. For those building on the Vista platform, you can take advantage of it through the improvements in the framework but today, keep it in mind when you're building Fat and Smart Client apps the next time you sit down to start a design. You might like the change and it would prepare your users for the leap forward into the next version of Office. Again, keep an eye out on Office 12 stuff especially around new SharePoint features which will be flooding the channels after the keynote today.

If you're looking to see who's going to be "manning" the SharePoint/Office lounge check out Erika Ehril's post here with the names and times. Erika is responsible for the lounge and is also the Site Manager of the MSDN Office Developer Center (ODC) and runs a pretty tight ship (yes kids, a girl who knows code and stuff, odd huh?). Fitz isn't officially listed (guess he's higher up the food chain? or maybe lower) but he'll be there as will some of the MVPs that are down here at the conference (I don't have a definitive list of who is but feel free to chime in on MSN and let me know).

Tags and Links
PDC05
Flickr
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)

Today I capped out at 14,592 steps. That's 11.04 miles according to ped-o-metre. That's a crapload of walking and I spent a lot of time just messing about at the SharePoint lounge. I expect it to be bigger later this week. It was a great day and there's so much to keep on top of here.

First off must be Bill Gates keynote speech. With a hillarious back to school video (Bill G and Napoleon Dynamite star) it was really great to see the progression from the beginning of Microsoft and the shift that seems to be happening every 10 years or so (has it be 30 years already, wow). Check out Barry Gervin's post for an excellent summary and if you can find the webcast online take the time. It's worth it.

Some of the covers on Office 12 got pulled back with some demos at the keynote and there are lots of screenshots popping up all over the place. I have to check with some people to see if I can use Office 12 for posts now that it's been revealed as I would prefer to use that for some SharePoint screenshots so check back later on that. There's a lot of great stuff happening for SharePoint and Office 12 but it's just the surface. Stay tuned in the next day or so as everything comes out of the closet. You'll be in for a wicked ride. Trust me.

I stumbled across Mike Fitzmaurice in the SharePoint lounge so that was good (we SharePoint guys just can't seem to get organized enough for a dinner or drink-fest, hopefully we'll be able to all get together by the end of the week). Fitz has been doing his mole-like behaviors but popped up with some nice stuff about SmartPart and with the release of SmartPart 1.1 and Son of SmartPart, well, just go and start building. Jans and Patrick do such great stuff. Watch for (hopefully) a lot of posts by Fitz as he's got a ton of new stuff to blog about (mostly as a result of the stuff coming via PDC).

Finally, PDC is freakin' huge. I think there's something like 7000 attendees but they have 50+ buses running from 7am to 10pm between 6 different routes. That's just to shuttle people from hotel to convention centre. I'm sure someone will do a detailed blog post about all the resources that went into this PDC, but as Bill Gates said this is the biggest PDC ever and we're still not even halfway there yet.

Tags and Links
PDC05
Flickr
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)

Well another half day, another 5000 steps (thanks to my Microsoft ped-o-metre), and about 20 new t-shirts later here's the afternoons blog. I've been wandering the floors and will be heading off to the Groove session shortly. Talked with Hugh Pyle, the Senior Product Manager for Groove. He'll be there talking about it (and I think there's a demo). Check it out in Room 406AB at 2:45. You can check out Hugh's new blog here.

I stopped by the Ontolica booth. They're the ones that make the most excellent free SharePoint Explorer tool (that I'm sure you all have downloaded by now). They have their newest version of their commercial search add-on there and I got to see what was up with it. Their new feature is very goole-like (as if that's news with new products these days) and will display hits within documents. Nice. The demo we did was a search in a Word document which then got rendered via the HTML Viewer and the hits were colour code highlighted. I think the beta is available for download, but check their site here.

That's it for now. I'm pretty wiped so far and it's only 2pm. Another few more hours, some dinner and copius amounts of drinking should finish off the day. I'll be spending a lot of time in the Office and SharePoint track lounge (but would spend more time here if they got an X-Box hooked up, hint, hint). Catcha later!

Good morning! The night went well with no blackouts, earthquakes (where are the earthquakes!) and very little food as parts of this town seem to roll up at 9PM. I'm staying at the Miyako hotel, not an "official" PDC hotel but it was what Expedia suggested to me and looked pretty good so I went for it (note to self: 3 star hotels in L.A. do not mean what I think they do as far as the rest of the world is concerned). So it seems everything here is geared, well, for the more Oriental types whos average height is 4'5". I'm not a really tall guy at 5'11" but as you can from the photo below, the shower doesn't make for a good morning experience. Next visit I'll ask for the hotel run by Amazons (not the Jeff Bezos type).

Well, at least Channel 9 guy can get a good start on the morning.

I just wanted to mention Flickr just plain rocks! I mean there are some great tools out there (Skype, Google, etc.) but Flickr just plain rocks. I've been using it for awhile now but didn't get to upload a lot of pics until PDC. Then I figured I would see what the "pay" version was like and it's great. Get it. Really. It's only $25 bucks a year. Yes, a year! It's more than worth it.

Anyways, Channel 9 guy and I are off (I've decided that he will now be my official guide while I'm here in California and handle all the press and photo ops that may come my way as he works on being my agent). Everyone needs a travel companion and at least he's foam and not imaginary. So we're off for breaky at PDC and hit the sessions, Bill G's keynote, and the SharePoint pit (I'm just teaching Channel 9 guy the SharePoint ropes so be kind to him when asking questions). Back later from the floor and more pics!

PDC05
Flickr (what is with that shower?)
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)

Pop quiz. Who would be the person at PDC to lose the most digital cameras? The second question is how quickly (and often) can someone lose a digital camera at PDC? The answer is me on both parts. Well, almost. I was at PDC this evening after getting my replacement camera that went MIA last night and, yes, after leaving from one of the BOF sessions guess what SharePoint knob left his camera behind. I made it all the way to the hotel before I realized what was missing from the picture and then stumbled back to the bus, tore down the hall ways to the room and luckily I did manage to get it back but boy was that close. From now on I'm attaching it to my neck so if you're looking for me, I'll be the uber-geek with a camera permanently attached to his big head.

Tonight I stepped in for Michael Herman to host the BOF session about open source tools and SharePoint. I was there to attend the session but for whatever reason Michael was unable to make it so I figured I would step up and do wherever I could. Thanks to everyone who did show up and not leave (yes, my jokes can be painful especially if you haven't had enough to drink). The session was fun and while I was completely unprepared, we covered a variety of tools and talked about a few aspects of SharePoint development. Hope everyone had a good time.

I mentioned I would provide as much as I could in this blog so here it is. Below is a list of links to some of the bigger resources out there for SharePoint including specific links to some (hopefully most) of the tools we talked about tonight. Let me know if  I missed anything or if you just want to say hi. I'll be on MSN most of the time (bsimser@shaw.ca) and on the floor and hanging out in the SharePoint/Office 12 lounge.

OpenCanal Community - A WSS site with resources for open source tools, webparts, etc.
SmartPart - Grab the latest version (1.1)
SyncToy - Sync file system folders with SharePoint web folders
SharePoint Discovery Kit - Everything you need to really understand SharePoint with labs and screenshots
Mark Kruger - Excellent list of tools, webparts, and more (also check out the left sidebar for more resources)
GotDotNet Workspace for SharePoint - Big collection of tools and utilities, most with source
SharePoint Resource Kit - Lots of handy tools and excerpts from this great book
SharePoint Tools Galore - Another fabulous list of tools and goodies for SharePoint
CAML Builder - Forgot to mention this during the session (doh!) but it's a must-have tool if you're pulling your hair out with CAML
SharePoint Explorer - A must have tool for developers and admins. Free from Ontolica.
SPSDev - Lot of great little utilities and web parts.
CorasWorks - The grand daddy of rollups for those with a budget
NinTex Smart Library - Workflow (and more) for your libraries
AJAX.NET Library - More DHTML to load up your otherwise bloated SharePoint sites but cuts down on post-backs
Bluedog Limited - Technical blog for SharePoint
Code Segment Blog - Free rollup type web parts
Reflector - Lutz Roeder's tool that every developer should have.

There's always more to talk about with SharePoint. The discussion did come up and people are still maybe confused over the whole SPS vs. WSS thing so feel free to grab me and we can head into the SharePoint lounge for a longer discussion around that with an impromptu get together (could be a long one, so pack a lunch). Also I noticed there were some pictures taken at the session so if you do have that it would be great if you can direct me to where they are or send me a copy (the session was at 7PM in room 501B).

That's it for me tonight. Tommorow I face the amazingly short shower (with pic so you get the full experience, don't worry this is with clothing) and the almost as amazing long day (complete with keynote from big Bill). A day of sessions, hanging out in the lounge, and finally coming to grips with my own inhumanity to people with one eyebrow.

PDC05
Flickr (new pics of Channel 9 guy in various situations, make up your own and join in the fun)
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)

While the day is just winding down, I managed to find the incredible toy district here in L.A. and replace my lost camera. L.A. seems to be broken down into districts. There's the bank district (where most of the office buildings and banks are, so appropriately named). The jewelry district where you can get the latest knock-off tiaras and whatnot. The fashion district where Gucci and Louis Vuitton clones are more prominent than a gaggle of Jango Fetts (okay, that's a geek reference in case you missed it). And then there is the toy district. Yes, an entire district where you can buy toys and electronics and pretty much every other odd and end (like a 50 quart (50!) pot which is great for cooking copius amounts of chilli, or small nocturnal marsupials; which I'm sure happens here all the time).

There are probably other districts (the overpaid Hollywood actors who starred with Kevin Bacon district?) the but it was there in the toy district where I found a suitable replacement camera for my stupidity. I was able to haggle for a new Olympus C-60 camera. Pretty nice with 6.1MP, lots of modes (auto, aperture mode, shutter mode, etc.) and got a 256MB card thrown in (to replace the crappy 32MB that comes with it). All this for $200USD so I don't really care where the guy got it from. It turns out to be better than my old FinePix camera, still uses the xD cards (which I'm happy with and plug right into my laptop) and has lots of great modes for taking better pics. Here's the first pic of the PDC swag that I got when I registered this morning.

There's a lot of great stuff here. First off the bag itself is pretty nice. Well built and lots of nice components and compartments. The only problem that I have with it (that others have commented on) is that it can't handle anything bigger than a 15" wide laptop. These days I think everyone is getting the 17" widescreen ones. Oh well, can't please everyone. There's some sweet stuff in the swag including a free subscription to Visual Studio Magazine (Thanks PDC!) and the even better wristband that's required for us to wear which will let us in Wednesday night to Universal Studios for a night of debauchery. Also included are some nice CD/DVDs including a pretty cool package of some Smart Client apps that you should load up and check out.

So the pics are back (at least until I lose this camera) and you check my Flickr blog below for all of the images over the next week. Hopefully I'll have the pics showing up on the group Flickr pool site but I've been a little technically challenged with my posts. Flickr didn't seem to be grabbing the images (even though I have the "pdc05" tag) and my blog entries haven't been showing up on the PDC blogger site (even though I'm listed as a PDC blogger). Whatever. Stay tuned for lots of great pics tommorow starting with Big Bill G. and the keynote speech (yeah, pictures of a billionare talking are not very exciting, but hey go with the moment).

Off to find some kind of nightlife. Feel free to bug me on MSN (bsimser@shaw.ca) if you want to hook up and make fun of the locals (after a few rounds of course).

PDC05
Flickr (new pics are up with my new Olympus! Hurray for the Toy District!)
Moblog (some new pics including me in my shower, stay tuned for blog tommorow on this)
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)

Wow. What is it with me and trips? I come to a new city and first there's a terrorist threat, then I lose my camera and now there was a power blackout. I was heading back from PDC to the hotel and we started to hit various traffic lights that were out. After driving for awhile, we noticed it was a blackout. I hopped off the bus and asked a couple of LAPD officers walking the beat here in Little Tokyo and they said it was out for about half an hour. I was going to just hop back onto the bus and head back to PDC (where there is power) but as I walked into my hotel, the lights came back on. I personally attribute it to my own electric personality. Looking down the street, all the lights are blinking but at least they're powered now.

What is it with drivers? When the lights go out, you treat the intersection as a 4 way stop. Here in L.A. the drivers basically run as they see a whole, and god help any pedestrian running across the street at the time. Anyways, on the bus ride back to the hotel we passed through various districts. The jewelry district was cute but nothing I need (right now). Then we hit the fashion district. Good to know. I saw a trickle of electronics store scattered amongst the Gucci knock-offs but then lo and behold... the TOY district! Yahoo. I'm going shopping (as long as the power lasts anyways).

PDC05
Flickr (no pics yet but there is hope in sight courtesy of the TOY DISTRICT!)
Moblog
Google Maps where I'm staying (Miyako)