SharePoint Best Practices - San Diego

I have to start off by saying that this was the best conference I've been to. Maybe that doesn't say much since I've only been to a handful, but it has topped them all. Last year, I attended conferences such as AJAX World and Microsoft's ReMix in Boston and they were OK at best. The SharePoint Best Practices show brought many of the industry leaders together in an effort to spread knowledge to a broad range of people in a broad range of sectors. From developers and system integrators to project managers and CIOs, SharePoint Best Practices didn't just sell SharePoint to people (I think its user base is beyond that); it taught them how to use it, why they'd want to, and what to do to get the most out of it without going insane. SharePoint is a great platform and I look forward to my continued work on it.

My Agenda (Notable sessions)

My goal at this show was to learn as much as possible about deployment, permissions, testing, and WebParts (namely "What can I do with a WebPart that doesn't seem normal?"). Every session I went to was fantastic, so I'll only highlight the ones that stood out.

Best Practices for Developing Web Parts : Todd Bleeker

While I was at this presentation, I decided to open an IM window and beam all of my notes about the talk to my colleague, Dave Terrell. By the end of our conversation, we ended up buying a few copies of Todd's book, Developer's Guide to the Windows SharePoint Services v3 Platform.

Todd covered everything from packaging the WebPart into a solution as part of a feature to some of the cool things you can do with invisible web parts (I'll be exploring this more in a future post).

Automating your test environments for SharePoint development using Hyper-V : Ben Robb

Side note: On the last night, we ended up going to SharePoint by Day SharePint by Night and I played pool with Ben. I must confess that I am absolutely terrible at pool. It didn't help that Ben is quite good at the game. Maybe I was imagining it, but I think heard him say he played snooker semi-professionally. It was a good time.

During his talk, Ben discussed automating the provisioning of new SharePoint virtual machines for integration testing and development. One thing that we'll be adopting from this talk is the idea of a-new-machine-a-week. In this setup, every developer gets a fresh machine every Monday. This way, we know the machine is clean and there's no cruft that could cause issues in development.

Best Practices for Disposing SharePoint Objects : Todd Bleeker

Besides going over the basics of properly disposing your SPWeb and SPSite objects that you create, Todd highlighted a new tool from Microsoft called SPDisposeCheck. It has been less than 2 business days since I left San Diego and it is already part of our build process here. Hopefully Microsoft will continue to improve the tool (namely fix the -xml output parameter). It's a great find.

Best Practices for Unit testing on SharePoint : Francis Cheung

In an earlier talk in the conference, Francis discussed abstracting all SharePoint object model calls into Repository classes that made code easier to read and allowed your business logic to be tested outside of SharePoint. During this presentation, Francis explained how to test those repositories using TypeMock for SharePoint. It's a pay-for product, but is really the only way to get the job done (outside of mocking all of WSS yourself).

Secure Coding Practices for the Administrator : Maurice Prather

This talk should have been called, "How to determine whether or not your third party solution provider has good SharePoint programming practices". Maurice discussed how developers should be using CAS policies to specify what level of security their assemblies require, when to ask your vendor for more information about their GAC-deployed assemblies, and much more.

Using Elevated Privileges and Impersonation : Paul Schaeflein & Maurice Prather

Paul started off by discussing what it means to "run with elevated privileges" and its differences with "impersonating as system account (or other users)". I will post more on this topic in the coming days. These two concepts are very different and depend on what you are looking to do.

More to Come

This was an excellent conference and I got a lot out of it. This will surely shape future development. I will be posting more on each of these topics with how-tos and the like. If you want more information about any of these talks, post a comment to move them up my stack.