3 Degrees of SharePoint Development

SouthColorado .NET User’s Group Presentation

Dave Milner — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:00:24 GMT

Just a post to highlight my presentation tonight for SouthColorado.NET User Group – I'm speaking on an "Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers". See www.southcolorado.net for details. The two communities (SharePoint & .NET Dev) seem to be separate. While some of that is certainly specialty focus, my feelings are that the two groups have a lot more in common than not. The development platform in the .NET arena is rapidly expanding to demand collaborative data sources and platforms. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, forums are all the information stores of 2009+. .NET skills are expanding to a wider environment than ever.

SharePoint and the File System UX model

Dave Milner — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:09:39 GMT

All right, to start out with I have to admit that although my day-to-day career is very much in the applied science software development area, my background in my undergrad work is in Math – totally a pure science. This means that I tend to think in more of a pure model approach as opposed to inherently accepting applied models. This has its pluses and minuses at times, but we all work with what we have.

I was thinking recently “Why the success of SharePoint in the enterprise?”. Of course all the standard arguments of Enterprise 2.0, collaborative environments, information sharing surfaced as an answer. But as I am delving into the software development aspects of SharePoint 2010 and starting to see a little deeper into the platform, I’m starting to realize a more basic reason.

In reality, I think one of the major contributing factors to the success of SharePoint in the enterprise as a platform has to do with how poor the user interface paradigm of a file system really is. Now this is taking a lot of reflection, because I trace my beginnings back to Fortran 4 and being a so-called BSD Unix hacker in the 80’s and early 90’s. So in other words, directories and files are ingrained pretty deeply in my “taken for granted” psyche. When you think about it, from a user’s perspective a filing system such as the one they use or have used in the past for paper looks like this:

Note the external enclosure with clean lines, the drawers, the ability to place decorations on top of it to facilitate good feng shui. To access information in a filing cabinet, you need to physically approach it, pull out a drawer, and then start to look for the particular document you desire. 95% of all filing cabinets have folders organized in an alphabetical order, so you know what to expect. Some of the other 5% and later filing systems would organize cabinets or sections of cabinets into different purposes, like “day to day” or “long term”.

Now a “filing system” on a computer looks and acts much differently than the above. It looks like this:

I think after the 4998765555th time of helping someone not very computer literate find the document they were working on and saved but didn’t know where they saved it to and couldn’t quite get the picture that they might have saved it so someplace different than “My Documents” it started to dawn on me that this whole “file system” paradigm really wasn’t a very good one at all. When you think about it a file system on a computer is the simplest way that “developers” could organize a pointer in memory to a location – by using a string. The forward slashes in a string are a “developer’s” organizational construct, not an intuitive one.

This relates in my mind to some different books I’ve read on the topic of HCI or Human-Computer Interaction and the interrelated field of “UX”. A couple of the first books I read were “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” and “About Face” by Alan Cooper, which I purchased shortly after being at an architecture conference and having lunch with Alan and about 6 other known tech industry leaders with Alan being on a soapbox about how developers cannot design user interaction because they think differently than end users. Alan’s known as the “Father of Visual Basic” as he designed the first UI interface for Basic that he sold to Microsoft.

So to bring these thoughts and this discussion full circle, I think one of the successes of SharePoint in the enterprise has to do with the fact that a large number of information workers in your enterprise environment are not developer types, and to successfully interact with computers they need paradigms that they can relate to. Most users are familiar enough with the Internet by this point that navigating to a website to procure information is not that foreign at all to them. So if they can browse to a “HR” website, or a “Finance” website they have a head start on finding their document. But a “shared drive”? Not so much. I think organizing information content through a web interface is a UX paradigm that is slightly better than a file system. I think your average information worker “gets this” a little better than a file system. So in my opinion, that is one core fundamental reason that SharePoint has in starting to tie together the enterprise. Network shared drives that are maintained by departments are starting to be replaced with SharePoint document libraries and team sites.

Now maybe you might say that I have too narrow of a view of the skills of an information worker, and that power users or anyone that has used a computer successfully understands the file system. I would respond that first my viewpoints on this have been developed over many years of watching and helping people interact with computer systems and software, and second that a UX paradigm that is “natural” or “intuitive” helps UX flow and facilitates interaction much more than any paradigm that presents an obstacle.

Until next time, happy UX and SharePoint design and development!

Channel 9 SharePoint Learning Center

Dave Milner — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:38:27 GMT

I just learned that Channel9 has put up a new site for a SharePoint Learning Center for SharePoint 2010. A number of people are responsible for this, including Paul Stubbs, Girish Raja, Steve Fox, Donovan Follette, and Chris Mayo. It looks to be a video based course center with topics on SharePoint 2010 like:

Getting Started with SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 Developer Roadmap
Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010
UI Enhancements
Lists and Schemas
LINQ to SharePoint
Client Object Model
Workflow
Services Architecture
Accessing External Data
Enterprise Content Management
Extending Search
PerformancePoint Services
Sandboxed Solutions
SharePoint 2010 Security

The SharePoint community and Microsoft is rolling out well ahead of the SharePoint 2010 beta release a number of resources to help developers come up to speed quickly on SharePoint 2010.

For the Channel 9 site, they are first rolling out video examples of all of these sessions and then in about a week or 2 after the beta is released they will release labs with updated code that is compliant with the beta release.

SharePoint Development – From the Ground Up

Dave Milner — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:20:21 GMT

Of course starting to blog about a journey in SharePoint or a re-focus to that product really drives blogging about experiences and things from the ground up. What I've found is that while a couple books walk you through setting up a SharePoint dev environment, and one or two blog posts I've seen out there do the same thing, there are several very basic things that are usually either assumed, implied, or buried 30 feet into the middle of a chapter or post. So I'm going to focus on answering basic practical questions that I had first. In going through this I've developed some opinionated answers, which as my style is I will present with colorful mind pictures.

Q. What Operating System do I need for SharePoint development?

A. People will say you can either do SharePoint development from Visual Studio on any O/S, or to do the development in a server type environment. They are huffing glue. While it is possible to do development for SharePoint in Visual Studio 2008 installed on Windows XP, or Windows 7, or Vista 64 bit, if you do so you will be crawling like a turtle through coding, testing, deploying, testing, etc. You will be slower than a 90 year old who hasn't quite yet had their driver's license revoked. You'll be working at the pace of molasses on the North Slope, Alaska on a cold December morning. You get the point. For any kind of reasonable development pace, you will need to develop on Windows Server 2003 (or stay tuned because SharePoint 2010 will facilitate Windows Server 2008). You need to have pertinent libraries handy, be able to debug, and to deploy to an environment you see the result in a timely fashion. This doesn't happen outside of a server setup for SharePoint development.

Q. OK – I'm going to go with Windows Server 2003 / 8. What else do I need installed?

A. SharePoint 2007, Microsoft Office, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, updates. Don't bother installing the SharePoint SDK or those VSeWSS12 / 13 templates. They don't work very well. Install WSPBuilder for deployment tools from Codeplex. This is not an easy answer to put up with, because it goes against the grain. It takes too !@#$ long to do all those installs just for one stupid dev box. Suck it up, Eggbert, and do the installs. It takes less time to do it right once than wrong three times, and don't ask me how I know. Also you can customize your environment for all the cool little tools you know you always need – like Fiddler, IE Dev Toolbar, SPDisposeCheck, etc.

Q. What about Virtual PC 2007 and using Virtual Machines?

A. Yes, absolutely. They run pretty well from my experience with most of what you're doing in SharePoint. Also, if you keep a copy of your .vhd's every step of the way after building servers (after OS install, after MOSS install, etc.) you can save yourself some duhhhh time. Again, don't ask me how I know. You can also in theory download VM's for SharePoint from Microsoft. I say in theory because they are in 7 parts at over 800MB each and not on MSDN, so you can't use the File Transfer tool. Then you have to piece them together. And it's an eval license on SharePoint so it expires. All those hurdles pointed me towards just building one good MOSS development environment and then backing up the .vhd.

Q. How much space do I need to allocate for the hard drive for my Virtual Machine?

A. My fully loaded dev VM has a VHD that is 14.3GB. This information is nowhere else on the web that I could find. I found it through trial and error. After allocating VHD's of 5GB, 10GB, 40GB, and 20GB. Also after purchasing 2 8GB USB keys which are worthless for SharePoint. Yes a 16GB USB key is plenty to store one good copy of your dev environment Virtual Machine. I don't have info for this yet on the 2010 environment, but I'm going to start testing it at 16GB, and if it doesn't work, try 20GB. A good sturdy external USB hard drive is a good thing to have for storing all these. If you've never been a big fan of virtual machines before, believe me you will be now.

Q. How much RAM does my Virtual Machine need?

A. If you can spare 2GB, by all means do it. If you're RAM challenged (is that an underprivileged class?) than you can squeak by with 1GB, and depending on your box it may not be too slow. If you have the option, get the most RAM you can handle on a machine. If this means a custom order for a laptop with 16GB RAM and Windows Server 2008 as your OS, go for it. You know you want to anyway just to look cool at user's groups and conferences. And put a custom sticker of Wolverine from an old comic release on it too, just to stand out.

Q. These .vhd files have the same extension as the ones I see on Windows Server 2008 in Hyper-V. Can I use my Virtual PC .vhd's on a Hyper-V server?

A. Yes you can, Captain America. What a great excuse to upgrade your dev and test front end servers to Hyper-V.

Blog Change of Direction - SharePoint

Dave Milner — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:33:44 GMT

After thinking about it for quite a while, I've decided to change the direction in which I am going to pursue blogging. Previously, with 3 Degrees of .NET, the blog served more as an information collection and link list type of service. However, with the rise of other social media such as Twitter, this purpose has become obsolete.

Also, I've been more recently focusing in my development on SharePoint, WSS 3.0 and MOSS2007. So I am going to migrate the content of my blog over towards my learning journey in SharePoint. With the product positioning, I'm right on the tail end of an old product and right on the verge of a new product. MOSS is going away, and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is the official new product, as highlighted here in a note from Tom Rizzo: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/14/microsoft-sharepoint-14-is-now-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.aspx

MSDN Unleashed Presents: The Best of Mix in Denver and Co. Springs!

Dave Milner — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:45:10 GMT

Please join us as we present some of the highlights of MIX!

Because of the overwhelming demand for this content, we're offering two different sessions in Denver and on in Colorado Springs. We are still working to hold an event in Ft. Collins.

Please register for the one that works best for your schedule!

What's New in Silverlight 3?

Are you interested in building business-focused Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)? Would you like to take advantage of 3D in the browser, but assume it is too hard? Have you wanted to take a Silverlight application offline? Then this session is for you. We will explore and illustrate the new features of Silverlight 3, including the following:

 Support for perspective 3D

 Offline Support

 .NET RIA Services which simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms

Building Web Applications with Windows Azure

This session will begin with a brief overview of Azure and discuss some of the announcements made at MIX. We will then illustrate through demo how to build a Windows Azure application from the ground up. We will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage, how to host services, web pages and Silverlight components, as well as how to deploy your solution to the cloud.

MVC 1.0 vs ASP.Net Webforms

Have you heard about the new ASP.NET MVC framework from Microsoft and wondered what it was all about? Are you curious whether this replaces ASP.Net WebForms? Well in this session you will learn how to use the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to take advantage of your favorite .NET Framework language for writing business logic in a way that is de-coupled from the views of the data. In addition, we will talk about the pros and cons of both MVC and Web Forms, how to determine the best choice for a specific project, various techniques and patterns used to build MVC applications vs. Web Forms applications, and the implications for using each approach.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Microsoft Denver Office
7595 Technology Way #400

Denver, CO 80237

Time: 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032413165&Culture=en-US

1-877-673-8368, reference Event ID 1032413165

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Microsoft Denver Office
7595 Technology Way #400

Denver, CO 80237

Time: 8:00 am –12:00 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032413166&Culture=en-US

1-877-673-8368, reference Event ID 1032413166

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Configuresoft
7450 Campus Drive

Colorado Springs Colorado 80920

Time: 1:00 pm –5:00 pm

Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032413167&Culture=en-US

1-877-673-8368, reference Event ID 1032413167

jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog

Dave Milner — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:54:09 GMT

Microsoft has announced that they will ship jQuery with Visual Studio ongoing, and support it with Intellisense and include the standard MIT open source license.

Pretty cool!

jQuery is a small library that is one of the most popular on the Web for interacting with DOM elements, providing a "selector" feature - $("div.mytag"), and the ability to chain commands to the selected element.

jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 on Virtual PC: It takes a village | Linux and Open Source | TechRepublic.com

Dave Milner — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:24:07 GMT

Normally this is a blog centered on .NET related technologies. However, if you are getting an itch to play around with Linux systems, here is a step by step way to install the latest and greatest Ubuntu Linux OS on your laptop with Virtual PC. Note everyone commenting on the install trying to talk you into using VMWare.

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 on Virtual PC: It takes a village | Linux and Open Source | TechRepublic.com

ASP.NET - Home

Dave Milner — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:11:54 GMT

One of the sites to keep tabs on is the ASP.NET home section of CodePlex. For those not familiar, CodePlex is Microsoft's free hosting site for their version of open source software. Software hosted there is not under the GPL, but a similar type of Microsoft open license. It has seemed to evolve into Microsoft teams areas for exposing software they are working on and that can have visibility exposed to the outside. It is also their answer to SourceForge. From this page on CodePlex, there are many links to what the ASP.NET team is considering and working on in different projects.

ASP.NET - Home

Dropthings - Free AJAX Web Portal, Web 2.0 Start Page built on ASP.NET 3.5

Dave Milner — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:44:12 GMT

I've recently been more and more interested in Web 2.0 frameworks that support widgets. Silverlight has an excellent mashup protocol but many clients aren't always ready to jump to that type of framework unless they are doing a good deal of video processing. Dropthings is a widget framework portal that has an accompanying book that describes the framework, is optimized for performance, and utilizes a number of the newer Microsoft technologies. It's worth checking out.

Dropthings - Free AJAX Web Portal, Web 2.0 Start Page built on ASP.NET 3.5

South Colorado .NET User Group

Dave Milner — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:40:30 GMT

The monthly Tuesday meetings for the user group are going to be postponed one week to July 8th, 2008. David Yack will be covering ASP.NET Dynamic Data. David always puts on a great talk with very useful and pertinent examples. Be sure to check it out over lunch at ConfigureSoft!!!

South Colorado .NET User Group

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit - Release: Preview 3 (1.3)

Dave Milner — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:36:31 GMT

Troy Goode has just released an updated version of his very excellent MVC Membership Starter Kit. Check it out if you want a good resource for integrating web site membership, authentication, and the MVC Framework Microsoft has in preview bits.

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit - Release: Preview 3 (1.3)

Email and ASP.NET

Dave Milner — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:36:09 GMT

I have been troubleshooting an ASP.NET application with respect to e-mail notifications going out. One of the most useful things I've run across with respect to this is Dave Wanta's site at www.systemnetmail.com. This site helped provide very in-depth details in a well organized fashion to the System.Net.Mail classes, configurations, and workings. The tip that helped me specifically the most was his explanation of how to capture a log file of the Smtp session – this tip is at http://www.systemnetmail.com/faq/4.10.aspx

MSDN Code Gallery

Dave Milner — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:02:14 GMT

Microsoft has just launched the MSDN Code Gallery, a portal for snippets, samples and other resources. The code gallery is designed to contain code samples, supporting documents and screenshots, and design documents. There are also hosted conversations about these samples, sample projects or other resources that have been provided to the community. This destination is open to the entire community to contribute content to.

The MSDN Code Gallery is designed to be a community enabled site where developers can share code, information and resources that will be integrated into the MSDN experience.

New SouthColorado.NET Web Site

Dave Milner — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:46:52 GMT

The site for the INETA user's group SouthColorado.NET has just been updated with a new web site. There is a new theme and look, and blog posts that will update users as to the schedule for upcoming meetings. Also of note is a signup form for being enrolled in SouthColorado.NET's e-mail updates. Be sure to update your address on the mailing list to stay in touch with current developments.

For February, Dave Yack is speaking on the flexibility of a whole new platform Microsoft has released. It is very powerful, very flexible, and goes way beyond the product title offering it is known by. Be sure to stop by and check it out on Feb. 12^th. Note that the date changed from the first Tuesday of Feb. to the 2^nd Tuesday due to CO caucuses. Get out and rock the vote on Feb. 5^th!!!!

Microsoft Big Event in Denver

Dave Milner — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:18:44 GMT

Details follow, but you can register here.

If you want to go I would get registered, these events often times fill up.

The Big Event!

Do you miss the old Dev Days events? Do you wish that you could attend a TechEd or PDC, but don't have the time or budget to get to one? Well the Big Event is for you. Come spend a day with us as we delve into developer and architect topics during the day. With a mix of some your favorite local presenters as well as some from Redmond. Here is the agenda for the day:

Keynote

Patterns and Practices

Microsoft has invested heavily in producing guidance, application building blocks, and software factories to help developers and architects build solutions in a high quality and predictable manner. Peter Provost, a senior development lead from P&P will be joining us to discuss where much of that investment has produced and how you can get started with their products.

Developer Track

Exposing and Consuming Data in the Microsoft Stack

The way in which we work with data is changing drastically... for the better. In this session Rob Bagby will discuss a few of the technologies we, as developers, will be taking advantage of in our applications. Rob will discuss how the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows us to easily expose an application-centric data layer to your application. Rob will then discuss various means of exposing and consuming that layer, including LINQ and ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code named 'Project Astoria'). This session will be largely demo driven.

Office as a Developer Platform

Nearly all of us use Office in our day to day activities, but we rarely think about it as a platform for development. This session will cover how you can start to incorporate Office into your application development activities and keep you from feeling dirty afterwards.

What's New in Visual Basic 9

There are a great number of new features in the latest version of Visual Basic, such as XML Literals, Object Initializers, Anonymous Types, Type Inference, Extension Methods, Lambda Expressions and much improved Intellisense. In this session we'll go over the major new features in Visual Basic 9, and how these new features can help you write applications much more rapidly than ever before. We'll take a look at how these features tie into Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and how working with XML in Visual Basic provides ultimate performance and productivity.

Architect Track

Why the User Experience Matters

Many of us who are great developers and architects are not very good at designing the user interface, it is often an afterthought in building out a solution. In this session we will cover the reasons why we should be paying more attention to the UI and what mistakes are commonly made that inhibit application adoption.

Agile Development at Microsoft

Over the last couple of years the Patterns and Practices team has fully adopted agile methods for development. They even rebuilt the interior of their building to support this methodology. In this session Peter Provost will discuss how Microsoft adopted agile and the lessons learned over the years.

The Live Platform

Live is much more than search and Virtual Earth. Come hear more about the service based building blocks that Microsoft has released that you can use on you application development efforts – in many cases with no licensing fees!

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Community Server 2007 Documentation

Dave Milner — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:25:20 GMT

There is a link to complete documentation for Chameleon at

http://communityserver.org/files/folders/documentation/entry580101.aspx

Updates to C++ MFC in Visual C++ 2008

Dave Milner — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 01:51:33 GMT

I like to keep up on advancements in the C++ realm, as it was an early on language of choice for me dating back to college days. "Soma" Somasegar, one of the few Microsoft execs who blogs consistently, announced the results of Microsoft's ongoing investment in native libraries in his blog.

According to Soma with the the new MFC library, developers will be able to create applications that feature the "look and feel" of Microsoft's most popular products – including Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio.

Great new features for the C++ language.

Community Server SDK Overview & Customization

Dave Milner — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:15:25 GMT

One of the first things I hear from people working with CommunityServer for the first time is "where are all the codebehind files?" As an educational process, I thought I would trace some of the Community Server 2007 functionality through a page lifecycle and highlight some of the systems involved. This overview is written for the CS 2007 SDK, or version CS2007.1_3.1.20917.1142.sdk

We'll start with a simple request to page login.aspx in the home directory.

Here is an overview of how Chameleon, the CS2007 theme engine and the URLRewrite module handles the request and how the URL re-writing works.

Request for login.aspx reaches server
ASP.NET gets passed the request.
CSHttpModule intercepts the request as it is processed.
URL path is rewritten (look at the SiteUrls.config file for details of this. This is where the /themes/[currenttheme] path is injected).
Appropriate Theme page is redirected to
ASP.NET resumes processing the request.

So one of the things incorporated in this model is a great deal of flexibility control over how a particular theme that is coded is laid out and works.

Next, let's continue digging into the request.

At step 5, the theme page is redirected to. Here we end up at (for example), at /themes/default/common/login.aspx. Login.aspx has the master page of master.Master, which contains an OnInit() function with code setting up the left or right columns if present in the theme definition. Note the following 2 lines at the top of most of the .aspx / .ascx files:

<%@ Import Namespace="CommunityServer.Components" %>

<%@ Import Namespace="CommunityServer.Blogs.Components" %>

These settings import the controls compiled in the CommunityServerComponents project and the CommunityServerBlogs project.

At this point it's useful to point out a feature in the Chameleon engine – each Chameleon control has contextual, implicit data-binding. Chameleon control context begins at the page level, using the URL of the current page, and recognizes query string properties such as GroupID, SectionID, App, userID, PostName, etc. So a PostListing Chameleon control has wrapped within it it's own databinding. The same with a UserListing or UserData Chameleon control. Because of this implicit databinding, the Community Server Chameleon controls know from their context what to load in them.

The advantage of this is a great deal of re-use of these controls throughout the whole CommunityServer product. The disadvantage is that individual modifications have global impact, and also they are a little more complex.

In customizing CommunityServer, this design tradeoff should be weighed. If there are core modifications to a blog post that are necessary for re-use throughout the whole product, the appropriate place for modification is in the Chameleon controls. If they are unique to one area, but should display differently in another area, perhaps inheritance and extension principles can allow for this. Controls that are being developed that do not have a great deal of changing context surrounding them do not need the benefits that the Chameleon engine provides.

Continuing on the journey through Login.aspx, the master.Master page has content placeholders and a CSUserControl:UserWelcome control. The UserWelcome.ascx control is a file in the same Themes/default/Common directory, and contains several nested CSControl:UserData controls. If you are wondering where the "CSControl" prefix comes from, it is a global tag prefix defined in web.config:

This shows what namespace and assembly the controls are loaded from. Here it is the assembly compiled in the CommunityServerControls20 project.

The UserData control is in the /User folder – UserData.cs. One element here I will highlight is the method of implicit data-binding in this Chameleon control. The UserData control inherits from the CommunityServer's ObjectDataBase.cs control in /Base folder, which has a BindDefaultContent method in it.

Where the data is populated in the UserData.cs control is that control has a DataSource property in it, which is used in the parent's BindDefaultContent method. Look for this line in the DataSource getter:

CSControlUtility.Instance().GetCurrentCSContext(this.Page).User

From there, you go to the definition of User in CSContext, which loads the User definition from the Users.cs file in CommunityServerComponents20 project.

The Users.cs User class has all data operations encapsulated. The GetUser function passes to the function which looks up User data in the Cache first, then if not present, gets the user from the Data provider in GetUserFromDataProvider. This value for the data provider is injected from web.config, and is from the CommunityServer.ASPNet20MemberRole.dll. There is not source published for this in CS2007, but was in an old SDK download. The User data access is a unique one in this respect. For modifications on this on can inherit from the ASPNet20Membership class, and extend it to use another extension to user profile contained in a separate table, not the built-in aspnet_User tables and built-in ASP.NET Membership provider.

Other examples of items with data binding roll down to the SQLDataProvider20 project and classes.

So for a complete overview, each individual control has its own data source, which uses a data provider, which is injected from the context and configuration. This is a classic provider model, which uses a Dependency Injection IOC (Inversion of Control) container. It is self loading from context, and has built-in caching.

There is a little overview of Chameleon controls and the CS 2007 framework.

Scrum Overview

Dave Milner — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:54:18 GMT

I am working with a dispersed team in a software development scenario, and am acting in the role of educator on the Scrum practice. So here is a list of resources that are my initial "required reading" for working on a Scrum project.

Scrum at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29
ScrumAlliance - http://www.scrumalliance.org/view/scrum_framework - read about the 3 roles, 3 ceremonies, and 3 artifacts.
Ken Schwaber's site and overview of Scrum (Ken "invented" Scrum) - http://www.controlchaos.com/ - base web site. See the "Learn more" link.

Thanks for all your efforts in reading up on what is a very effective and fun way of developing software.

Happy reading !!!!

Dave