TechEd 09 Day5. Lucky Friday Thirteenth

Today is the last day of TechEd.

A SharePoint Pattern Language

Non-Microsoft speaker Jim Wilt first made the assumption that we’re feeling like if our brains were about to leak through our ears. Good guess Jim!
He is presenting us an offshoot of the work he’s doing for Microsoft. He won’t be able to tell us everything about it as it is still pure research at this time.

There is a necessity to document SharePoint solutions that are repeatable, extensible, and reliable. But should we have a SharePoint specific pattern-language?

Jim thinks so because there are SharePoint specific concepts to take into account:

First the application level: component, solution site or template levels.
And secondly the tools to use: Out-of-Box, SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.

The demo pattern was Collecting anonymous user data securely. In this example, the pattern sits at the solution site level using out-of-box and SharePoint Designer.

Jim thanked us for attending this session at 9am on the last day.
A repository of SharePoint Patterns would be a great addition (at another level) to the existing SharePoint Guidance.

Rest of the Day

After that session, I spent some time at the Visual Studio booth. I spoke a little with Marian Luparu, Visual C++ Program Manager who reminded me that Microsoft is basically a C++ factory.

The last session I’ll be attending is about Pex and Code Contracts, which to me are the most interesting additions to .NET 4 and VS2010. I wonder how the automated test generation tool works.