DevConnections 2012

Applies To: SharePoint, SQL, .NET, HTML5

I just got back from DevConnections 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I learned several things that the made the trip worthwhile and I’m glad I got to be a part of it. I choose DevConnections over SPC because I wanted to take workshops from a variety of tracks including SQL, .NET and HTML5. Choosing DevConnections also meant I didn’t have to go alone.

There were several good speakers and I received plenty of swag (8+ T-Shirts, an RC helicopter, a book and more). Not surprisingly, I enjoyed the SharePoint Connections track the most and Dan Holme was my favorite speaker.

For all those that didn’t get to go I thought I’d share my notes from the sessions I attended and any insights I gained as well. My notes are not a total reflection of what was said, but represent things I found interesting or useful.

Where Does SharePoint Designer 2010 fit in to Your SharePoint Application Development Process?

Asif Rehmani – SharePoint-Videos.com

My Notes:

• Always use browser first when possible
• Anything Enterprise wide should be VS or buy
• DVWP also called Data Form WP
• DVWP multiple sources to XML with XSLT
• LVWP specific to SP lists
• Browser limits in views don’t apply in Designer (Grouping, Sorting, etc.)
• Import Spreadsheet is only through browser – NOT SP Designer
• Conditional Formatting in views including icons (put all icons in cell and change content conditional formatting on each).Pictures automatically go in SiteAssets
  • Sometimes img uploads retain local path (switch to code and correct src url)
• Formulas: select parameter and double click the function to have the selection become the 1st parameter
• DVWP can easily be changed to do updates: switch from text to text box, then add a row and insert a form action button and choose the commit action (save)
• Parameters for all sorts of stuff (username, query string, etc)can be used all over including in conditional formatting
• SPD was designed and intended to be used in production – not a lot of support for working in Dev and moving to Production
  • WP can be packaged (DVWP) for import elsewhere
  • Reusable workflows can also be packaged

Key Insights:

• SharePoint Designer is fine to be used in production (and in fact requires it in certain cases). However, there are things you can do to minimize the amount of work done in production.
• SP Designer is pretty powerful and can replace a lot of extra VS development

Overall Impression:

Just as in his videos, Asif was a great presenter. He was very personable and knowledgeable. The session ended up being less about when SP Designer should be used in your environment and more a broad demo of what can be done with Designer. This was a little disappointing but I learned enough tips and tricks that I really didn’t mind too much. Interestingly, some people in the audience asked about an intermittent error they’ve been receiving in SP 2010 for some Web Parts they’d applied conditional formatting too. This was almost certainly the XSLT Timeout issue and I was able to provide them a solution.

Data Visualization: WPF, Silverlight & WinRT

Tim Huckaby – Interknowlogy

My Notes:

• WPF is great at 3D, cool demo of scripps molecule viewer (codeplex)
• Silverlight is dead
• Winforms is dead
• HTML 5 hysteria is in full swing
• HTML 5 has a canvas and SVG support
• ComponentOne has neat HTML 5 sales dashboard demo

Key Insights:

• Silverlight has lost to HTML 5 and we shouldn’t expect another version.

Overall Impression:

This was obviously a recycled workshop from several years ago (he actually said so) that he added a couple of slides to. In his defense, he planned to show a WinRT demo but the Bellagio AV guys were unable to get the display working. Regardless it seemed more like a bragging session. He showed pictures of him with top Microsoft people, showed his company being featured in Gray’s Anatomy, and alluded to all the cool things he’s involved with that he couldn’t mention.

This was pretty disappointing. I am already aware that .NET can do some pretty awesome things including some neat visualizations. I was hoping to get some actual guidance on getting started. Instead I got Microsoft propaganda from 3 years ago about why .NET (specifically WPF) is awesome. Tim Huckaby is obviously a very smart guy and has a lot of insight to share. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend a workshop from him in the future on a topic he cares a little more about.

Building Custom Applications (mashups) on the SharePoint Platform

Todd Baginski – http://toddbaginski.com/blog/

My Notes:

• Used Silverlight but recommends HTML 5
• Suggests that all mashups should be Sandbox compatible
• Bing Maps has great examples requiring little work
• SL to SL: localmessagesender use SendAsync method. In receiver setup allowedSenderDomains list of strings. Use localmessagereceiver and messagereceived event. Be sure to call the listen() method!!
• Assets Library great for videos
• Silverlight video player included in SP 2010/2013. 2013 has an additional fallback HTML 5 player.
• External Data Column: Works as lookup for BCS
• OOTB \14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUT\MediaPlayer.js: _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push(‘mediaPlayer.createOverlayPlayer’); after you’ve made links hook ‘em up: mediaPlayer.attachToMediaLinks((document.getElementById(‘idofdivholdinglinks’)), [‘wmv’,’mp3′]);
• OOTB \14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUT\Ratings.js: ExecuteDelayUntilScriptLoaded(RatingsManagerLoader, ‘ratings.js’); RatingsManagerLoader is huge, see slides. Then loop through everything you want to attach a rating to.
• SL JS call: HtmlPage.Window.Invoke(“Jsfunctionname”, new string[] { parameter1, parameter2})
• JQuery twitter plugin
• SP 2013 has geolocation fields. Requires some setup & code. He has app to add GL column & map view to existing lists.
• Even in SP 2013 the supported video formats are really limited
• AppParts are really just iframes.  Connections work different. Not designed to communicate outside of app.

Key Insights:

• Silverlight to Silverlight communication is pretty simple but will be pretty irrelevant in SharePoint 2013
• Getting the Video Player to show your videos when using custom XSLT takes some work
• Adding a working Ratings Control when using custom XSLT is even more complicated and convoluted
• New GeoLocation columns in SP 2013 will be really cool, but adding them to existing lists is going to be a pain.

Overall Impression:

Todd had a lot of good information and you could tell he knew his stuff. Unfortunately he has a very dry style. Regardless, I enjoy demos that show actual architecture and code and there was plenty of that.

I do wish he’d updated his demos to use HTML 5 as he recommends. It’s very frustrating to hear a presenter recommend something different and then to spend an hour diving into the non-recommended solution. Additionally, although I prefer specific examples (and his were very good) I prefer to have more general best practices/recommendations presented as well. But despite all that he gave a few key tips that I will be using immediately and that is the primary thing I’m looking for in a technical workshop.

Creating Mobile-Enabled SharePoint Web Sites and Mobile Applications that Integrate with SharePoint

Todd Baginski – http://toddbaginski.com/blog/

My Notes:

• AirServer $14.99 shows iPad on computer
• Mobile is much better in SP 2013
• Device channel panel allows content to target specific devices

Key Insights:

• Mobile is important. You can struggle with SP 2010, but you should probably just upgrade to SP 2013

Overall Impression:

I enjoyed Todd’s other session (see above), but this one was too focused on SP 2013 to have any real practical value for me.

Getting Smarter about .NET

Kathleen Dollard – http://msmvps.com/blogs/kathleen/

My Notes:

• Lambdas create pointers to a function
• LINQ creates expressions that can be evaluated everywhere
• int + int will still be an int even if larger than an int can be. No errors, but addition will be wrong. (default in C#, VB.NET will break for default)
• There is no performance gain by using int16 over int32, some memory is saved but is only significant when processing multimillion values at the same time
• VisualStudio 2012 will be going to quarterly updates
• Static values are shared with all instances – Even among derived classes!
• LINQ queries Count() does full query
• Func last parameter is what is returned
• Closure is the actual variable in a lambda (not copy) so multiple lambdas can be changing the same variable
• Projects can be opened in both VS 2010 and VS 2012 at the same time

Key Insights:

• Despite all the new and exciting things that keep getting added to .NET, a firm grip of the basics is what will really make a difference in your code and ability to make great applications
• Static sharing even among derived classes makes for some potential mistakes, but also for some very powerful architecture
• LINQ and Lambdas are some crazy cool stuff that I should stop ignoring
• .NET is very consistent and following it’s logic rather than our own assumptions is key for truly understanding what your code is doing

Overall Impression:

I really enjoyed this session. It was the most challenging workshop I attended despite it’s focus of dealing with things at the most basic level. Kathleen kept it fun (although she could be a little intimidating) and continued to surprise everyone in the room both with the power of .NET and the dangers of our own misconceptions. She pointed out several gotcha areas and provided the reasoning behind them. This was a last minute session, but it was also one of the best.

Wish I’d Have Known That Sooner! SharePoint Insanity Demystified

Dan Holme – Intelliem

My Notes:

• SQL alias: use a fake name for SQL server to account for server changes/moves. Use CLICONFIG.exe on each SP server in the farm. Do NOT use DNS for this (CNAMEs). Consider using tiers of aliases for future splitting of DBs: content, search, services – all start with the same target and changed as needed
• ContentDB sizing: change initial size and growth. Defaults are 50mb and 1mb growth. Makes a BIG difference in performance.
• ContentDBs can be up to 4 TB. Over 200 GB is not recommended.
• SiteCollections can be same as ContentDBs but 100 GB is as high with OOTB tools
• Limit of 60 million items per ContentDBs (each version counts)
• Remote BLOB storage: SP is unaware. Common performance measurements are mostly inaccurate because they are based on single files. Externalizing all BLOBs is significant performance boost. 25-40%! Storage can be cheaper too but complexity increases. Using a SAN allows you to take advantage of SAN features (ie deduplication – which really reduces storage footprint). RBS OOTB is fine, but you can’t set business rules.
• Office Web Apps no longer run on SP servers in 2013. These are great, test on SkyDrive consumer.
• Get office365 preview account
• Nintex highly recommended over InfoPath. InfoPath is supported but unenhanced in 2013, likely indicator of unannounced strategy.
• AD RMS allows the cloud to be more secure than on-premise. Allows exported documents to have rights management that restricts actions regardless of location. Very difficult to setup infrastructure. Office365 has this which is compelling reason to migrate.
• User Profile DB is extremely important and becomes much more so in SP 2013
• Claims Authentication is apparently a dude pees on a server and then gets shot with lasers:

Pee on a server

LASERS!

• Upgrade to 2013 should be done as quickly as possible. Much easier than 7-10. Fully backward compatible. Both 14 & 15 hives.
• Governance is very important!

Key Insights:

• Preparing for growth up front with SQL aliases is a great idea
• Nintex and Office 365 both need more investigation by me
• Remote Blob Storage is a good idea for nearly everyone – very different perspective than what I’ve previously been told!

Overall Impression:

This session was full of great tips and best practice suggestions tempered with practical applications. This was exactly the kind of information I came to hear. Dan did a great job of presenting a lot of information (despite a massive drive failure just previous to the convention) while keeping it interesting. The only thing that was probably a little much was his in-depth explanation of Claims Authentication. His drawings were pretty rough and his enthusiasm for the topic didn’t really transfer to the audience. Regardless, this was a great session.

SharePoint Data Access Shootout

Scot Hillier – http://www.shillier.com

My Notes:

• LINQ cannot query across multiple lists (unless there is a lookup connection)
• SPSiteDataQuery can query all lists of a certain template using CAML within a Site or Site Collection
• SPMetal.exe generates Object Relational Map needed for LINQ  (in hive bin)
• LINQ isn’t going to have much support in SP 2013
• SP 2013 has continuous crawl
• Keyword Queries are very helpful
• KQL: ContentClass determines the kind of results you get. (ie STS_Web, STS_Site, STS_ListItem_Events)
• Search in 2013 provides a rest interface to use KQL in JavaScript
• CSOM is very similar to Serverside OM
• CSOM is JS or .NET

Key Insights:

• Keyword Query Language (KQL) needs more consideration as an effective query language for SharePoint.
• LINQ isn’t actually a great way to access SP data despite Microsoft’s big push over the past couple of years.

Overall Impression:

This was a strange session. He didn’t go into enough depth about any one data access method to provide any real insight to those of us familiar with them and he moved so quick that anyone new to them would just have been overwhelmed. This session would have been better if he’d given clear and practical advise on when to use these methods rather than just demoing them. My guess is that he was trying to cover way too much information in too little time. However, I did enjoy hearing more about the Keyword Query Language since this is something I haven’t done much of and is rarely mentioned. Those tips alone made the whole session worthwhile.

HTML5 JavaScript APIs: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Christian Wenz – http://www.hauser-wenz.de/s9y/

My Notes:

• HTML5 is a large umbrella of technologies
• Suggests Microsoft WebMatrix is a good Editor
• Semantics for HTML elements is a powerful new feature: input type = email, number, range, date, time, month, week, etc. These customize the type of editor and adds validation
• Suggests Opera Mobile Emulator is a good testing tool
• Additional elements: aside, footer
• Requesting location: navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(result){console.log(result)});
• to debug local cache use Google Chrome by going to: Chrome://app cache-internals
• Worker() web worker allows messaging for functions
• CORS allows cross domain requests
• Web sockets do not have full support yet but will be very cool

Key Insights:

• HTML 5 is going to dramatically change how we think of website capabilities – eventually.
• Although exciting, HTML 5 has a long way to go and several of it’s most compelling features have little to no support in main stream browsers.

Overall Impression:

Christian did a good job of keeping the energy up about HTML 5 and showing off some of the cool features. Unfortunately he seemed to lose site of the big picture in favor of really detailed samples. I enjoyed the presentation but would like to have had more guidance about how to get started and what to focus on with this new style of web development.

Roadmap: From HTML to HTML 5

Paul D. Sheriff – http://weblogs.asp.net/psheriff/

My Notes:

• Lots of new elements – but they don’t do anything. They make applying CSS easier and allow search engines to parse through a page easier.
• Browsers that don’t understand new elements will treat them as divs – but styles won’t be applied.
• Lots of new input types (color, tel, search, URL, email, number, range, date, date-time, time, week, month)
• New attributes (autofocus, required, placeholder, form validate, min, max, step, pattern, title, disabled)
• CSS3 has huge style upgrades but there are still a lot of browser incompatibilities
• JqueryUI, Modernizr = good tools, use VS 2012 with IE10 or Opera
• Modernizr allows you to use HTML 5 with automatic replacements in incompatible browsers. Uses JQuery and is included automatically with VS 2012.
• This stuff is not ready for the prime time except for mobile browsers. Modernizr fills in those gaps.
• Box-sizing can be either border-box or content-box, which helps with the div width interpretation problem
• Dude appears to hate JavaScript and HTML 5, sure love hearing a presenter complain about what we all came to learn about!

Key Insights:

• Use Visual Studio 2012 with Modernizr to make HTML 5 websites

Overall Impression:

This session really annoyed me. Paul was very knowledgeable and had a lot of information to share. Unfortunately, he was so busy bashing the technology we all came to see that it was hard to know why we were even there.

Scaling Document Management in the Enterprise: Document Libraries and Beyond

Dan Holme – Intelliem

My Notes:

• Can store up to 50 million documents in a single document library
• SP 2013 allows documents to be dragged onto the doc library in the browser to upload – no ActiveX required
• When a User is a member of the default group for a site they get the links in office and on their mysite. Site Members is the default group by default, but this can be switched in the group settings. Suggests creating an additional group that contains everyone on the site and has no permissions, then this can be the default group.
• Email enabled document libraries can be very helpful for receiving documents outside of your network
• Pingar is a recommended product he briefly mentioned
• Big improvements in navigation using managed metadata service in SP 2013
• Content type templates can use the columns as quick parts in Word

Key Insights:

• Separating Site Membership from Site Permissions by creating an additional group just for managing memberships is a great idea.
• A lot can be done with SP 2010 but SP 2013 will add a few key features to make things easier (drag and drop on the browser will be awesome).

Overall Impression:

The tip about site membership was worth the whole session. Additionally he reviewed a lot of the basics of content types and the content type hub. While this wasn’t particularly helpful to me, I can’t wait to get ahold of his slides for both this and his other sessions. He had way too many slides for the amount of time he was given.

This session reminded me of how powerful SharePoint is at so many things. Document management is not a particularly exciting topic to me but it is one of the key reasons we are using the SharePoint platform. A review of the features available to maintain the integrity of our data and to simply the classification of that data was very helpful.

SharePoint in Action: What We Did at NBC Olympics

Dan Holme – Intelliem

My Notes:

• Keep SharePoint simple. Use OOTB features as much as possible
• 300 hours of content broadcasted per day
• NBCOlympics.com streamed every competition live
• Most watched event in TV history
• 3,700 NBC Olympics team members
  • 1 SP admin/support
• PDF viewing was turned on despite security concerns
• Set as default IE page – very difficult to do, they used a script to set a registry entry to account for multiple OSs and browser versions
• All additional web applications were exposed through SP using a PageViewer WP
  • Phone Directory, Calendar application
• WebDAV was used to allow other apps to publish documents
• Global Navigation on top site using tabs (drop down menus)
  • Quick launch had contextual items to site
  • Navigation centric homepage, kept navigation as simple as possible. Only homepage had global navigation.
• No real branding (put picture on right and used a custom icon). They set the site icon to go to the main web page because it’s what users expected.
• Did not use lists or libraries as terms instead used Content (libraries, other lists) and Apps (Calendar, Tasks, etc.)
• Suggests hiding “I like it” and notes since they are not helpful and deprecated in SP 2013
• Site mailboxes for teams using OWA
• Embedded documentation: Put basic instructions right on the homepage of team sites as needed. Also above some document libraries – basic upload and open instructions.
• Focus on usability since there was no time for training
• Took out All Site Content link and all other navigation was on homepage of site. Sub sites had tab links to parent site.
• Used InfoPath to customize List Forms mostly to add instructions (placed below field title on left)
• Lots of calendars. Conference room calendars were very popular. Didn’t use exchange for this in order to accommodate outside users.
• Used InfoPath lists and workflows to replace paper processes. Kept them simple but effective. Although not used in this case, he recommends Nintex for more advanced needs.
• Self-service help desk: printer/app installs, FAQs. Showed faces of team.
  • PageViewer web part and point it to \\servername to show all printers and put instructions on right to get those installed directly out of SP
  • Kept running FAQ to show common solutions
• IT Administration site: ticket system used issue tracking list highly customized with InfoPath list forms.
  • Inventory lists in IT admin, also DHCP lease reports using powershell to dump that information.
  • List for user requests. WF for approvals, then Powershell took care of approved memberships directly in AD.
  • Used a list for password resets. Powershell would set password to generic password as requested (scheduled task every 5 min)
  • Powershell script to create team sites through list requests
• SP will never be used to broadcast the Olympics but very effective to manage those teams
• You must understand your users and build to what users really want/need
  • Don’t overwork, don’t over brand – It just clutters.
  • Don’t over deliver or over train.

Key Insights:

• Keeping global navigation centralized in a single location (without including everything) and providing contextual navigation as needed can keep things simple from a management perspective while still allowing things to be intuitive.
  • Ensuring all navigation needed is exposed through the Quick Launch eliminates the need for All Site Content (except for Admin) and ensures your sites are laid out well
  • As long as you allow users to easily return to the global navigation from any sub site (Using the site icon is very intuitive) there is no need to clutter every site with complicated menu trees.
• Request lists and Scheduled Tasks running Powershell Scripts can be used to create easy to manage but very powerful automation.
• Removal of “I like it” and notes icons is a good idea
• Embedding instructions directly on a given site/list using OOTB editing tools can increase usability dramatically
• InfoPath List forms can go a long way towards improving list usability by making things appear more intuitive and providing in line instructions.
• There are so many cool things in SP it can be easy to forget all the amazing things you can do using simple OOTB functionality. It is far too tempting to over deliver and over share when end users really only want to get their job done in the simplest way possible.

Overall Impression:

This was the best session I attended and made the entire conference worthwhile. It is unfortunately rare that you can see SP solutions in the context of an entire site. Seeing how SP was used to help manage one of the largest and most daring projects I can imagine was both inspiring and reassuring.

Besides the several tips of things they did (many of which will soon be showing up in our environment), he was able to confirm several things we were already doing that we were a little unsure about. Even better was his focus on simplifying things. I get so excited about SP features that sometimes I overuse them or forget the real power of simple lists. It was a fantastic reminder that we are often over delivering and therefore complicating things that just make SP scary and hard to use for end users.

Convention Summary

DevConnections 2012 was great. I had a great time in Vegas and I brought home several insights that have immediate practical value. Really, there’s not much more you can ask for in a technical convention.