I apologize that I couldn’t blog on the last day.  I left my powercord at home and my laptop was dead.  But, I invite you to read my blogs that I posted directly from the conference.  Most were posted right after the session ended..

I recommend DevConnections and hope to go to another one.  The Visual Studio or Silverlight tracks look interesting to me.

Matt McDermott on SharePoint’s social API

I simply can’t wait for this session “Enhancing the SharePoint Social Experience with SharePoint 2010 Social API”.

There are other new items that have been integrated into SharePoint 2010 to support social computing (reference). There are new APIs about activity feeds, social data and user profiles. Activity Feeds API supports the sharing of data between users. Social Data is a new API that has been created to facilitate social tagging, rating and comments for content that is stored within SharePoint. The User Profiles API has been augmented to support both organization and user profiles.

The new social computing features of SharePoint 2010 support scenarios such as (this is not an entire list):

• The ability to find commonalities between two user profiles.
• Providing the ability for users modify profile data
• Adding links to your profile.
• Adding colleagues to your profile.
• Social Data Statistics Web Part that displays social statistics such as each URL that has been tagged and their terms, the number of times that term has been used in a tag, each user who has added a social tag.
• The ability to approve who is marking you as a colleague.
• Ability to send content to colleagues.
• Ability to pull in external social computing data like from LinkedIn.
• Ability to create organizational charts based on enterprise data.
• Ability to rank, tag and comment content within SharePoint and use that information to the most relevant information to users based on the data’s actual usefulness.

• changes to the about me property
• updates to titles
• manager changes
• birthdays coming up
• workplace anniversaries
• status updates

Once that data is given to HR or any other team, you no longer have to be a part of the data crunching process.  HR could pull it as an RSS feed, tie it to Outlook, and use it in a myriad of ways for back-offices tasks.

 Imagine being able to post a note automatically on your newsfeed congratulating a sales rep of a specific username for making a sale that was logged into your CRM system?  This is an example of how you can use the newsfeed to dynamically reinforce positive contributions to the social consciousness of the business.

Matt recommended a plan for success where you think about four things that are unique to each enterprise: scale, performance, caching, and your users.  He indicated he would share all of this code, so I’m going to email him and follow up on this offer.

Maurice Prather on BI and PowerPivot

• SharePoint as the visualization host
• PowerPivot as the data model – everything can be in SQL, but stage it in PowerPivot

Performance Point Services, Reporting Services, and Excel Services are all sitting and waiting to be tapped to their full potential in SharePoint 2010.  PowerPivot is the newest BI member in the stack.  What’s great is that it works with very large data sets (much more than Excel).  Maurice says he’s seen a billion rows as the data set in PowerPivot.  Wow.  It bridges the gap between the world’s most popular “self-service” BI tool (Excel) and more traditional systems such as Analysis Services, SQL Reporting, and etc.  It’s built exclusively to work with SharePoint.   

There are two operational realms:

Client

PowerPivot Add-In for Excel — Allows Excel clients to interact with and author workbooks.  And, it’s free!

Server

PowerPivot for SharePoint — Service application that works in conjunction with Excel Services and provides a monitoring surface.

There are over 30 million POWER users of Excel.  This is a great target audience.  PowerPivot is designed for all of IT’s BI customers, information workers, data analysts, and regular SharePoint users.

Traditional BI models, that typically take months to deploy, only fill about 5-10% of what business users actually need.  PowerPivot is self-service and spans the gap between traditional BI and agile BI.

PowerPivot extends core Excel concepts, but leverages SharePoint for security and services.  It has support for any data volume (the limit is your hardware memory), cross-data source mashups, and advanced calculation that reduces support and start-up costs.

PowerPivot is analysis services in VertiPaq mode (columnar storage), which takes your data and collapses it, making it small until you bring it back into view.  It’s designed to load and KEEP large data sets in memory.  With a theoretical processing rate of 1 TRILLION rows per minute, it’s awesome.

Here are some PowerPivot samples to download.  Here, too.  There’s some stuff in CodePlex as well.  And, here is a surprising example of PowerPivot data compression vs. Excel.  12x on disk on 8x on RAM.  and, it only gets better with larger data sets.  As an IT administrator of SharePoint 2010, it seems we would want to enable the PowerPivot service for our users.

PowerPivot is great at 80% of the use cases for BI — the dashboard.  What it is NOT:

• an ETL tool
• a suite of new controls (except for the slicer)
• designed for re-entry of data
• notification capable

It’s interesting to know that PowerPivot is not a claims aware application and must be in Classic mode to operate.  Also, the minimum requirements listed on MSDN (8GB RAM and 2 processors) don’t seem to operate in reality.  Unless you’re building a demo, you actually need a lot more.  Recommended settings for an enterprise deployment of PowerPivot for SharePoint are in the 64GB RAM and 2 dual core or 4 quad core processors range.

PowerPivot is a memory hungry hog.  It’s an in-memory database engine, so it’s important to plan your hardware, understand your data sets, and use the tools to monitor the system.  Good design techniques are extremely important. 

He begins communicating the quick and most accurate way to transform SharePoint from a glorified file share to its full potential as a business critical system.  These steps must be performed in the correct order.

• Gather requirements – from the business
• Create logical architecture – it helps to have an information taxonomy in place
• Design physical architecture – this is derived from the logical architecture
• Test and validate – one of the most important steps is often skipped
• Log and monitor – many administrators don’t even look at the logs, when they need to be experts here
• Adjust architecture as needed – the architecture will stabilize over time

He advises us to all STOP!  Learn. Test. Implement.  Stop and learn each application individually as a product.  Before you can design the logical or technical architecture, you must understand all target applications.  Each service application is implemented in a unique fashion to meet service requirements.  There’s so much to learn.  It took him 8 months to methodically understand the entire SharePoint 2010 stack.

The farm topology for SharePoint 2010 is very different from 2007.  The basic footprint is doubled and database work is done outside of 2010.  It’s a SQL activity.  I believe that if you have a SharePoint 2007 deployment, you should just wait for it to EOL.  Start over with 2010 and transform the way you use SP.

This is a demofest, so let’s feast. I expected actual SharePoint end solutions being demoed, but he is demonstrating how to configure SharePoint from the very beginning.

Advice:  any time you see “server farm”, remember that this means “configuration database”.  It has nothing to do with a farm.  Weird.  Hosting Central Admin on the configuration database doesn’t matter because you can manage the farm with PowerShell or CA.

Once a solution package is deployed to a SharePoint farm (.wsp file), SharePoint will manage all of this automatically.  Don’t get bad juju by manually attempting to change or move these solutions.  It will just make things out of synch if you have to change servers later.

He’s an expert administrator and he moves through the screens, folders, and demo effortlessly.  It’s a bit hard to keep up.  Remember that when you make a change in CA, you are ONLY chaging a field in the configuration database. Then, based on a timer job, the changes get cascaded out to the server / farms.  Important.

He’s showing the foundational way to build out a server farm, but this same technique can also be used to build large server farms.  It’s impossible for me to show you how to do this so I’ll just provide you a helpful link, but he’s giving us advice on each screen.

Kerberos is becoming the gold standard for security configuration over NTLM.  Why? Most conventional network systems use password-based authentication schemes. When a user needs to authenticate to a service running on a network server, they type in their password for each service that requires authentication. Their password is sent over the network, and the server verifies their identity using the password.

Transmission of passwords in plaintext using this method, while commonly done, is a tremendous security risk. Any system cracker with access to the network and a packet analyzer (also known as a packet sniffer) can intercept any passwords sent this way.

The primary design goal of Kerberos is to ensure that passwords are never sent across a network unencrypted and are preferably never sent over the network at all. The proper use of Kerberos will eradicate the threat of packet sniffers intercepting passwords on your network.

If you wish to support mutual authentication under Kerberos, an instance of SQL Server must associate a Service Principal Name (SPN) with the account it will be running.  You must register the SPN because the client must use a registered SPN to connect to the server instance. The SPN is composed by using the server’s computer name and the TCP/IP port. If you do not register the SPN, the SSPI cannot determine the account that is associated with the SPN. Therefore, Kerberos authentication will not be used.

To use Kerberos authentication, you must make sure that all the following conditions are true:

• Both the server and the client computers must be members of the same Windows domain or members of trusted domains.
• The server’s service principal name (SPN) must be registered in the Active Directory directory service.
• The instance of SQL Server 2005 must enable the TCP/IP protocol.
• The client must connect to the instance of SQL Server 2005 by using the TCP/IP protocol. For example, you can put the TCP/IP protocol at the top of the client’s protocol order. Or you can add the prefix “tcp:” in the connection string to specify that the connection will use the TCP/IP protocol.

Ok, this guy is good.  There’s too much content to put in here now, but if I find his slides, I’ll include them later.

Cher Point = SharePoint

The search architecture for SharePoint 2010 can seem a bit complex.  It’s also very elegant.  You must first decide which search is right for you.  I’m not interested in the single farm search tool or anything less simple than SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search and FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010. 

There are amazing improvements this year in Enterprise Search, but even thought its a great cross-farm search, my company will index beyond the limits of this product.  However, until we reach those limits and move our search topology to accommodate FAST, we might as well utilize this to its fullest potential. 

Scot is talking a lot about keyword query search.  I’ve just seen him bring back everyone in a farm who’s last name begins with “C” by entering “lastname:C” in the people search application.  This allows a developer to include an “A,B,C..” phone book type control to the UI.  Neato.

What’s great with SP 2010 is that, as an administrator/developer, you can intercept a query and modify it, changing the results returned.  You do this by editing a web part called the core results web part.  Then, use the GetXPathNavigator method to modify the results of the Query Pipeline.  Results are always returned as a big XML document (hello, RSS aggregation possibilities).  An example of the usefulness of this is when a user search for all tasks.  The search engine would normally return results by “relevance”, but most people would probably want to see tasks returned by due date.

There’s another interesting idea to federate search.  You can create a custom web part that searches in SharePoint and other search engines as well, like Bing, Google, Yahoo Search, etc.  This is especially useful if someone is searching for market intelligence.

If you consider all the different content types users could search on, you begin to understand exactly how much you can impact the usefulness of the search results, which can be developed separately as stand-alone solutions in SharePoint Designer (of all things).  Don’t forget to go to advanced mode or otherwise it can be a bit tricky. 

The possibilities are endless for search-based solutions.  Understanding keyword query search and how to edit the core results web parts is key to providing results your users actually need.

Robert’s latest book is The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users. You can find out more about the book at http://www.SharePointShepherd.com. Check out his blog to find out more:  http://www.thorprojects.com/blog. You can reach Robert at Rob.Bogue@thorprojects.com.

Because of enabling technologies and today’s pace of change, organizations are struggling to get the support they think they need.  More and more, IT professionals are being asked to create solutions for the business.  The Office 2010 System including SharePoint, Visio, InfoPath, Word, and SharePoint Designer are tools that the IT Professional can use to create solutions that don’t require any code.  That seems to be a theme for today’s sessions.

The core of this session is about Business Connectivity Services (BCS), which was formerly known as Business Data Catalog (BDC) in SharePoint 2007. BDC is a powerful feature used to integrate various line of business (LOB) systems like SAP, Siebel, SQL Server and web services. Now BCS is extended to support .NET assemblies and WCF services as data source(s).

Focusing on no-code, we’re viewing a demo of Visio workflows, SharePoint Designer and BCS.  The multiple crashes of the demo have me biting my nails.  Much of the content has already been discussed in previous sessions and I didn’t find any unique content here.  Check out this really good blog discussing this at length:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee819133.aspx.  Also, remember to read the BCS Security Overview.

Robert Skoglund

Creating Great Business Intelligence Solutions using SharePoint 2010 is the next session.  BI represents a major growth area in IT, and SharePoint and Office provide a great set of BI features to build and integrate data-driven spreadsheets and applications with SharePoint 2010.  I’m looking forward to hearing about PowerPivot, Performance Point Services, Excel Services, KPIs and such from the one and only Robert Skoglund.  He’s a solutions architect for Microsoft Consulting Services.

Enabling BI solutions is greatly misunderstood from a traditional IT standpoint.  Because the SharePoint product had to be installed on your machine, it was difficult to do BI in previous versions.  In 2010, this has been greatly improved.  In the SharePoint 2010 capabilities diagram, these are in the Insights slice: Performance Point Services, Excel Services, Visio Services, Chart Web Parts and Status Lists, Web Analytics and SQL Server Integration.

Visio Services are immensely valuable to provide real-time visual data and updates with data connectivity.   See the illustration below to understand the potential of blowing away your boss:

Performance Point Services enable visual scorecards integrated with SharePoint with details KPIs and decomposition trees.  A video is really the right medium to explain this further.  Here’s a bite-sized one:

The single most interesting thing about BI on this platform for me has to do with PowerPivot Services.  It’s important to know this consists of two products that must be downloaded and installed in order to work together:  PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint. 

You CAN use the Excel product separately. If you have the data on your local device, you can use PowerPivot for Excel to deliver a BI solutions that rivals something an IT professional would take weeks or months to deliver.  It’s for those of us too impatient to wait and need deeper business insight to shorten decision cycles.  But, cominging this with PowerPivot for SharePoint enables administrators a way to deliver this capability to everyone, helping lead to better, faster, more relevant decisions while avoiding the proliferation of spreadmarts and data silos in the enterprise.

Overviews, how-to’s, and linkes to demos and a hands-on lab are available here: http://www.powerpivot.com/videos.aspx

The other content was shared too quickly for me to be able to share here.  The rest of the session was spent doing a slow demo and fielding questions from the crowd.  I still don’t understand why he recommends separating your BI dashboard from user collaboration…I mean you could just add social web parts.  But, I’ll dork around with it and maybe achieve the same epiphany as Robert.  But, didn’t Microsoft mean to weave social into all of this?

SharePoint 2010 is a solution platform and has out of-the-box items that are valuable like site templates, user customizations and custom lists.  Declarative solutions can be created with SharePoint Designer 2010.  Examples are rules-based workflows, data view web parts, theming, page layouts, and LOB data integration.  More advanced things, obviously, must be done with Visual Studio and require code.  And, that code needs maintenance.  Yuck.

The no-code Excel Services solutions are really interesting.  Microsoft Office Excel is powerful but not perfect. For example if you want a colleague to preview the data they will need a compatible version of the Excel installed on their computer. In addition, if you send a spreadsheet containing complex calculations  you will probably reveal some internal information about your organization. Moreover, somebody may change these calculations and send the modified spreadsheet to a third party. But don’t worry – SharePoint 2010 Excel Services comes to your rescue. You can publish the spreadsheet on the web and other users will need only a web browser to view the data. If required they can change some of the cell values and this way you can publish templates which perform complex calculations but the end user will not be able to see how the calculations are performed.  Abstracting the complexity from the end user…sounds a little bit closer to nirvana to me.

If your workflow is complex, you’ll need to introduce Visual Studio 2010 into the mix.

Business Connectivity Services allow easy surfacing of external data into a SharePoint external list.  Besides that, other LOB external content type connections can include SharePoint Workspace data and Outlook forms and tasks.  If you were nervous about Access Services, you’ll probably want to read the BCS Security Overview. 

Solutions that are based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services can take advantage of the integration of client applications, servers, services, and tools in the Microsoft Office 2010 suites. Information workers typically perform much of their work outside the formal processes of a business system. For example, they collaborate by telephone or e-mail messages, use documents and spreadsheets from multiple sources, and switch between being online and offline. Solutions that are based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services can be designed to fit within these informal processes that information workers use:

• They can be built by combining multiple services and features from external data systems and from the Office 2010 suites to deliver solutions that are targeted to specific roles.
• They support informal interactions and target activities and processes that occur mostly outside formal enterprise systems. Because they are built by using SharePoint 2010 Products, solutions that are based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services promote collaboration.
• They help users perform tasks within the familiar user interface of Office applications and SharePoint 2010 products.

Here are some examples of solutions that are based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services:

• Help desk An enterprise implements its help desk, which provides internal technical support, as a solution that is based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services. Support requests and the technical support knowledge base are stored in external databases and are integrated into the solution by using the Business Data Connectivity service. The solution displays both support requests and the knowledge base in the Web browser. Information workers can view their current requests either in a Web browser or in Microsoft Outlook. Tech support specialists view the requests assigned to them in a browser, by using Microsoft Outlook, and, when offline, by using Microsoft SharePoint Workspace. Workflows take support issues through each of their stages. Managers on the technical support team can view dashboards that display help desk reports. Typical reports indicate the number of support issues assigned to each support specialist, the most critical issues currently, and the number of support incidents that are handled by each support specialist during a given time period.
• Artist tracker A talent agency integrates its database of artists into its internal Web site. The complete list of artists, their contact information, and schedules can be taken offline in Microsoft SharePoint Workspace or in Microsoft Outlook. Recording contracts can be generated and filled from the Web site, Microsoft SharePoint Workspace, or Microsoft Outlook, and a workflow guides each contract through its various stages. New artists can be added from the Web site or from Microsoft Outlook. By using this solution, agents always have the information that they need nearby and they can perform many key tasks by using familiar Office interfaces.
• Sales Dashboard A sales dashboard application helps sales associates in an organization quickly find the information that they need and enter new data. Sales orders and customer information are managed in an external database and integrated into the solution by using Microsoft Business Connectivity Services. Depending on their roles, team members can view sales analytics information, individual team members’ sales performance data, sales leads, and a customer’s contact information and orders. Sales professionals can view their daily calendars, view tasks assigned to them by their managers, collaborate with team members, and read industry news, either from a Web browser, from Microsoft Outlook, or offline in Microsoft SharePoint Workspace. By using Microsoft Word 2010, managers can author monthly status reports that include data from the external systems.

This chair is breaking my back, so I’m stretching now.  And, Keenan is demonstrating an HR apps that pulls in data from external sources and is used to do some back-office HR tasks, like view candidates for open positions, and enable new hires to move through the onboarding process seamlessly. 

Keenan will be posting his slide deck to his blog.

Chris Mayo builds no-code workflows for SharePoint 2010

Chris Mayo is a technology specialist focusing on Office 365 and SharePoint Online, and he’s going to take us through no-code workflows for SharePoint 2010 in this session.   He’s got a blog called SharePoint Development in the Cloud that I’m going to check out later.

Automating business processes with SharePoint is a powerful way to increase efficiency in any organization.  Using SharePoint Designer 2010, no-code (or declarative) workflows can be built to run in either SharePoint 2010 or in the cloud with SharePoint Online.  The thing to remember is you CANNOT do this in the SharePoint sandboxed solutions.  That’s really important to know so you don’t waste time building something in the sandbox that will never work.

Using SharePoint Designer is much simpler than those workflows created in Visual Studio.  And, you don’t have to bother with code maintenance or framework revs later.

When you develop workflows for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 using SharePoint Designer 2010, you follow these basic steps:

• Author your workflow by assembling and configuring the predefined activities and conditions available in SharePoint Designer 2010.
• Have SharePoint Designer 2010 automatically generate ASP.NET forms for workflow initiation and any custom task in SharePoint Foundation, if necessary.
• Customize the workflow forms, if necessary.

SharePoint Designer 2010 automatically generates the workflow definition template and deploys of the workflow to the specified list.

When you are creating a workflow in a declarative rules-based, code-free workflow editor, such as SharePoint Designer 2010, you are designing a workflow for the specific SharePoint Foundation site in which you are working. SharePoint Designer provides a user interface that enables you to create declarative rules-based workflows for the selected site. With SharePoint Designer 2010, you are in effect assembling preexisting activities into workflows.

You cannot create your own activities in SharePoint Designer; nor can you write code-behind files. Using SharePoint Designer, you create and deploy XML-based markup files, rather than an assembly that contains code.

Workflow authoring in SharePoint Designer is likely done by someone other than a professional developer, such as a web designer or knowledge worker who wants to create a workflow for a specific list or document library. In this case, the designer is limited to the workflow activities on their ‘safe list’, and the workflow cannot include custom code. The workflow author deploys the workflow template directly to the list or document library as part of the workflow authoring process.

In contrast, you can use the Visual Studio 2010 Workflow Designer to create workflow templates and custom workflow activities. You can include code in your workflow, as well as design forms to be used by the workflow to communicate with the workflow users during association and runtime. It is worth noting that when you are developing workflows templates in the Visual Studio 2010 Workflow Designer, you are not programming against a specific SharePoint site. 

Workflow authoring in the Visual Studio 2010 Workflow Designer is performed by a professional developer, who is creating a workflow template that can be deployed across multiple sites, and which contains custom code and activities. The developer then turns the workflow template over to a server administrator for actual deployment and association.

But, we’re not worrying about Visual Studio 2010 right now.  Back to no-code.

It takes a while to start the workflow the first time, but once it’s there you can see the task and status, etc.  If you’re using a Visio (a great way to make your workflows awesome), you can see the diagrams from the workflow view.

Workflows implement business processes on documents, Web pages, forms, and list items in SharePoint Server 2010. They can be associated with libraries, lists, or content types.

In document management, use workflows to route documents from person to person so that they can each complete their document management tasks, such as reviewing documents, approving their publication, or managing their disposition. Also, use custom workflows to move documents from one site or library to another. For example, you can design a workflow to copy a document from one site to another when the document is scheduled to be archived.

SharePoint Server 2010 includes workflows that address the following document management needs:

• Collect Feedback   Sends a document for review.
• Approval   Sends a document for approval, often as a prerequisite to publishing it.
• Disposition   Manages document expiration and disposition.
• Collect Signatures   Routes a document for signatures.
• Translation   Manages the translation of a document into one or more languages.
• East Asian Document Approval   Routes a document for approval by using stamp signatures and a group-oriented consensus process.

Associate a workflow with a content type when you want to make that workflow available whenever that content type is in use. For example, a purchase order content type could require approval by a manager before completing the transaction. To ensure that the approval workflow is always available when a purchase order is initiated, create a Purchase Order content type and associate the approval workflow with it. Then add the Purchase Order content type to any document libraries in which purchase orders will be stored.

To plan workflows for your document management solution, analyze each document content type you plan to implement and identify the business processes that need to be available to run on content of that type. Then identify the workflows you will need to make available for that content.

Workflows can automate interactions among the people who participate in a process to improve how that process functions, increase its efficiency, and lower its error rate.

Many processes can benefit from automated support for human interactions. Examples include the following:

• Approval   A common aspect of human-oriented business processes is the requirement to get approval from multiple participants. What is being approved can vary widely, ranging from a Microsoft Word document that contains next year’s marketing plan to an expense report from a trip to a conference. In every case, some number of people must review the information, perhaps appending comments, and then indicate approval or rejection.
• Coordinating group efforts   Whether it is preparing a response to a request for proposal (RFP), managing the translation of a document into one or more languages, or something else, many processes require people to work together in an organized way. By defining the steps of the process through an automated workflow, the group’s work can be made more efficient and the process itself more predictable.
• Issue tracking   Many business processes generate a list of outstanding issues. An automated workflow can be used to maintain that list, assign issues to the people who can resolve them, and track the status of that resolution.

Prototype workflows in Visio 2010 so you can get approval, implement them in SharePoint Designer 2010, and do more advanced stuff in Visual Studio 2010.

Thanks to the many web sources I kluged this content from as I was in the back of the room feeding my hungry laptop some power.

Crash Course in SharePoint 2010 Development, delivered by David McNamee

He’s a collaboration technology specialist with a background in application debugging and development.  And, he’s giving us a 60 minute crash course in environment tooling for SharePoint 2010.

Although I’ve already taken 10175A: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development, I’m still interested in what this guy has to say.  After all, every instructor has a different view of the world.

This guy is really into virtual machines.  It’s a personal choice, of course, but setting up virtual machines with server images and hosting SharePoint for your developers is a quick and easy way to accelerate innovation.

SharePoint has an easy setup with an automated developer workstation build.  All of the apps you need are installed with it.  Just make sure your Windows 7 image is current. 

Written in Windows PowerShell these scripts will install and configure all the pre-requisites & products to get you up and running with SharePoint development.

Additionally they will download evaluation copies of the products it installs (or use fully licensed product bits you supply), install them either locally or in a user supplied Windows 7 VHD & set that VHD up for dual boot using the Windows 7 VHD native boot feature. It also allows you to configure what products are installed via a configuration file, so you can add or remove products.

All the source is included for your use. If a particular aspect of the setup isn’t right for your requirements then you have the ability to change it. A good example of this might be to configure the SharePoint installation to fit your organizations standard deployment.

Out of the box it will help you install:

• SharePoint Server 2010 + pre-requisites (Standalone)
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition
• Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio
• Expression Studio 4 Ultimate
• Open XML SDK
• Visual Studio SDK
• Visual Studio SharePoint Power Tools
• Office 2010 Professional Plus
• SharePoint Designer 2010
• Visio 2010

Download the kit

To get around the agony of code maintenance, take advantage of no-code solutions for SharePoint (like workflows and SharePoint Designer).  If you do code, Visual Studio is great at making packaging of solutions simple.

Remember, in SharePoint your developer dashboard is off by default.  You can turn it on in the upper right section of the page and it will provide clues about where the bottlenecks are on your page.  It also shows you the database queries that are being invoked.  Quick note: you are not allowed to mess with the stored procedures that are shipped on SharePoint.  Your stuff will be destroyed in a future service pack and you will get no developer support.

In Visio, you can create custom workflows, then add advanced features in SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio.  The top 3 things used to develop SharePoint solutions are workflows, web parts, and AJAX.

SharePoint is on .NET 3.5, so no Entity Framework.  But, maybe next rev.  However, you can use Silverlight 4 in the client.  Be sure to download the Silverlight extension you need.  Sweet.

SharePoint inherently has weakly typed lists.  So, if you write strongly typed code, you’ll have a problem with this.  Check out Linq, which is new in this version.  Fortunately, the list-throttling capability prevent apps from behaving badly.

InfoPath is a faster, easier and declarative way to do forms.  Even though there are great OOB (out of the box) forms already in SharePoint, InfoPath is an interesting way to go.

My laptop died as I was finishing this post, about 10 minutes before the workshop ended.  My apologies, David, for ducking out of your great session to find some power!