Day 2 @SPC2009

Today we got into lots of details, no more generic overviews, it was all down to the juicy code samples. I selected mostly Developer oriented sessions today. I knew the potential of Visio Services, by having looked at it during the early visits to Redmond this year, but now that the bits are pretty much backed, we got to see some of the finished very impressive demos. I have to say Visio 2010 and Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 continues to amaze me. The Dynamic Data Driven scenarios we can start implementing in 2010 are mindboggling. I urge the interested readers to make their way over to the Visio Team blog to get as excited as I am!

Another interesting session today presented by Zeyad Rajabi was around the new Word Automation Services announced here at SPC 2009. No longer do we need to rely on running lengthy processes through (illegally) installing Word on the server. We can now simply write an event handler or workflow action that performs a range of typically operations, like save as PDF or XPS, at lightning speed. Combine that with the power of the Open XML SDK 2.0 and it opens up so many scenarios for updating and generating documents. I'll throw in another plug for a blog here, so you can go and read all about that on MSDN.

Those of you that know me, know how passionate I am about both these topics, so expect some posts and presentations from me before the year's over.

After lunch time things got slightly more technical (makes you wonder if we'll survive the Wednesday, and keep in mind the beach party is tonight :-) ), the first afternoon session by Paul Stubbs was focused on the new Client Object Model, you heard it right, in 2010 you no longer have to resort to Web Services to access SharePoint Data. From WPF, JavaScript or Silverlight you now have Client Side libraries available that give you 'direct' access to your lists and libraries. There are some things you need to be aware of, like when you actually call to the server to do the work, and that JavaScript and Silverlight do things asynchronously but still this delivers a very powerful model for Client side programming. The next session I attended was by Eric Shupps around the improved Business Connectivity Services (BCS, formally known as BDC), Eric delivered a great session that provide a lot of confidence for me when it comes to using SharePoint as the Application Delivery and Development platform. The day ended on a high when the Patterns and Practices guys gave us the insight around Development best practices in 2007 and how they apply to 2010 as well as what the new testing capabilities in VS 2010 combined with TFS can deliver to provide a good end to end Application Lifecycle Management process.