Scott Guthrie, Keynote at SharePoint Connections 2010
Scott is speaking on Microsoft’s web platform. Guess what? He began by talking about the themes for this year. None of them matter more than encouraging Open Source. Microsoft isn’t really known for this and I’d like to see this change. Fast. And, I don’t mean the search product.
I came to HP from Sun, where open was everything. Moving into IT at HP, I was compelled to learn everything I could about Microsoft. I have to admit, I was more than a skeptic at first. However, Microsoft has proved to be a broad and deep vendor, as proven by the entire 2010 experience. There is incredible value to any company that runs Lync, Office 2010, Outlook 2010 with the social connector and SharePoint 2010. Aggressively encouraging open would be icing on a very tasty cake.
Scott is showing us how to build applications quickly on Visual Studio 2010. There are definite improvements to SP1, in ease of use and intellisense, so download that service pack today.
The next section of the keynote is about oepn source. He introduced us to Nuget. NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. NuGet is a member of the ASP.NET Gallery in the Outercurve Foundation (see the press release). Dowload, learn, and contribute. That’s the open source way.
Once you install the Nuget extension manager in Visual Studio, you don’t have to go to the Nuget site. And NuGet automates all the common and tedious tasks for a package as well as its dependencies. It removes nearly all of the challenges of incorporating a third party open source library into a project’s source tree. Of course, using that library properly is still up to the developer.
To get started creating websites, just download and install WebMatrix using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Microsoft says it takes 5 minutes. Once WebMatrix is installed, it’s simple to get and install the latest version of your favorite free web applications such as WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, Drupal (blech) and Orchard. Any project you create in WebMatrix can be opened and edited in Visual Studio. Awesome.
Scott went on to talk about Silverlight 4 development for Windows 7 apps. This makes for great eye candy. But, Silverlight 5 is coming out soon. What’s that all about?
Silverlight 5 builds on the foundation of Silverlight 4 for building business applications, premium media applications and applications that reach beyond the browser. Silverlight 5 introduces more than 40 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications with desktop features in the browser, dramatic video quality and performance improvements, and features that improve developer productivity.The Silverlight 5 beta will be available sometime in the first half of 2011, and more information will be available at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/.
This keynote was very demo driven and immensely valuable. Scott speaks often, so be sure to catch him at your next conference.
