Notes from SPSPhilly: Session Upgrading existing products to SP 2010

SharePoint Saturday Philly Session: Upgrading existing products to the new SharePoint 2010 by Shai Petel

• Building a new solution
  
  
  
  • VS 2010 extensions for WSS are required to build solutions.
• Is your team ready for 2010?
  
  
  
  • Silverlight, ajax, json
  • Visual web parts
• Prepare to be hosted
  
  
  
  • Limit customization to site collection level
  • Prefer to support sandboxed solutions
• Creating a new web part?
  
  
  
  • Inherit from existing .net web part.
  • Sharepoint web part is for backward compatibility
  • Asp.net web parts are a good choice because they have the capability to be hosted in SP.
  • If you change the base type of an existing web part, it does not know how to serialize, it will stop functioning.
  • Connections out of the zone don’t work in asp.net web parts but those are not required in SP 2010 so it’s safe to use asp.net web parts
  
• What is required to start development in SP 2010?
  
  
  
  • Visual studio 2010 + VSeWSS
  • SharePoint Designer

The above two are the tools that are required for SP 2010 development in VS. You have following options to create development environment:

1. Install in one server
2. Client/server
3. Virtualization (recommended)

PROs and CONs:

1. Install in one server

Pros: isolated, developer control, slower hardware, performance Cons: win7/win 2008 64 bit, hard to backup, easy to mess up

1. Client/server

Pros: easy to backup, hard to mess up the server, slower computers, runtime Cons: not isolated, no control on farm

1. Virtualization

Pros: isolated, developer full control on farm, backup; duplicate; portable, restore Cons: win7 or win2008 64bit only, strong computer

• VS 2010 has SharePoint templates for development.
  
  
  
  • Create a new solution
  • Choose a template
  • Setup trust level
  • Adding new components
  • One-click deploy or package
• Visual web part
  
  
  
  • This project type cannot be sandboxed because requirements exceed limitation of sandboxing.
  • All files are inside MyWebpart folder.
  • VS 2010 creates a package for you. Package is for one project. It sounds limiting but it is not. You can use feature from on one project in another project. It sounds complicated. Copying feature to another project will link it. It will not create a new copy. You can share the elements of one web part package with other projects. You also have feature designer.
  • You can decide where to deploy the web part, for example, on the front end server.
• Using shared resources in WSP
  
  
  
  • There is a disadvantage!

14 hive is not supported in sandboxed solutions

• Some APIs will not work in sandboxed solutions
• Groups cannot be added in sandboxed solutions, buttons can be added
• New APIs: Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.dll, Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll, Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll
• When upgrading, keep namespaces and assembly evidence same. Also, keep elements GUID same.

(Note: These notes were taken during live blogging. Please ignore any typos or mistakes that you may find. Thanks)