SharePoint Connections 2010, Amsterdam

Last 2 days I was at the SharePoint Connections 2010 conference in Amsterdam. All about the upcoming release of SharePoint. Some things I took home from the conference (as I walked the dev track, most of it is dev related):

Good news for developers! Our lives will definitely be more easy with SP2010.

• Client side object model, no longer a need to manually craft Xml messages. The model comes in three flavors: 
          for JavaScript
          for Silverlight
          for normal .NET apps
      I guess each of them will have different limitations
      Btw, a company named HubKey has a flavor of this already available for 2007 see http://www.hubkey.com/sharepointapi.aspx
      The 2010 client OM will obviously be a subset of the full SP OM.
• Ajax supported out of the box, no longer a need to adjust web.config
• WCF Ajax enabled webservices work out of the box, no longer a need to build/register your own Vvirtual Path Provider
• Visual WebParts, user control support ala SmartPart out of the box
• Silverlight support out of the box. There is a standard Silverlight webpart that you can point to a .xap and have it rendered on a page
• Full integration in VS2010; 'F5' debugging experience, all kinds of SP project templates, a BDC designer etc.
• SandBoxed solutions, although it has some limitations (e.g. no Visual WebParts) this gives devs better deployment options (site level iso farm level)

Very interesting was the presentation given by Peli de Halleux, a MS researcher who works on tools and frameworks (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/) to automate unit testing. He basically developed a way to ‘mole’ (stub) the SharePoint API so you can unittest your SharePoint code without……..SharePoint, yeah. I wonder how far they can take this for more complex code…