SharePoint 2010 Overview

I went to an SP 2010 Seminar today in at Microsoft led by Mick Badran from Breeze consulting sponsored by EXCOM and MS.

Beta 2 office 2010 SP 2010 VS.NET 2010 available for download been up for about 4 weeks
here are the points I took away.

Planning (ok you should plan)
Layers (what layer should things be happening in, at)
Significant change and improvement (SSP replaced by application services more flexible and configurable)
WSS 3.0 now is SP foundation services basically WSS 4.0
Groove now sharepoint workspace - local copy of a site offline my site (idea) synch up in the background when connected.
SSP changes service apps in farms share across site colls apps farms cotent types meta data synch across various levels (farm level down to web) fine granular control over sharing info can write your own services that you plug in the back end like a timer job in 2007 equivalnet of but better
Publish access db into sp whole thing front and back end a quick dirty way to create small apps (I know I was shuddering also)

(BDC ) Integration services read write
a lot less postbacks and round tripping b/c of Ajax UI
An Ajax dialogue box built in you can reuse as developers (remember how much pain I went through with this one at ET appears MS felt my pain (although obviously a common problem for all dev's))
Also good client side dev support through json jquery model is much better
sp2010 ajax ribbon office style (basically ribbon you get in sight edit mode for editing pages looks the same as office 2007)
Workflows can be tied to site collection level web level
Tagging every where improved meta data content type services and so on (farm level)
Document Set - like a zip or a cab file a container for a set of documents within a document library sort of group together without a folder.
Ajax info path forms same issue with businesslogic complex validation can export all content and customisations as wsp files v3 Custom Master pages will need to be re designed with support for v4 (XHTML CSS2-3 no more table layout)
v3 UI with no change supported in v4 once ready flick over to v4 combine diff features combine export out to vs.net build up a wsp file.

Concept here is you can rip stuff from the fabulous 40 templates or existing custom stuff and cobble into new site defs through the use of VS.NET 2010 and SPD 2010. Basically gives you a way of reusing templates and code for SP folk it is a bit like conceptually how .net folk re use 3rd party components and controls but inside SP's framework or architecture this was already there for us but CAML based sites defs you really had to work for it, it is a hell to debug, this model appears to allow you to do it in a more automated less error prone fashion. XML is meant to be tooled as is XSLT and now the tools appear to be there that were lacking. Which hopefully will take the hump out of the CAML.

Proper full integration between VS.NET 2010 and SP 2010 for WSP site def deploy whatever you want to wherever you want you can see the 12 hive tree in VS.NET 2010 site colls etc and target it easily, basically do everything you can through the UI or SPD in terms of customisation but obviously compile code event receivers,web parts features and so on, good support for AJAX.

Ok this is a huge point for me rather than create site defs you have a smooth easy way to build with SPD 2010 and reverse out to VS.NET or straight to wsp solutions (say for branding simple workflows ets) greatly reduces dev time in terms of deployment. Also (ms felt more of my pain and everyone elses) if you have delta change application templates that you can't pin features to via stapling you can save/export these out as WSP's features lists wf's the whole lot and coble together a site def this is huge if you have 100's of subsites and do not have site defs and you are having trouble applying features retrospectvely via code in the object model after an app template is used to create a new site. There is not a straight forward method to do this but it can be done to enable this mess in v3 to be fixed.

You can use content types and meta data to build top level nav as sites are added.
SP 2010 much tighter integration with SPD reusable workflows and workflow designs can be created basically a round trip b/w business and developers through Visio and SPD looks impressive good for simple wf's devs can do the complex bits (looks like nirvana for the BA's / BPR folk)
Vs.net 2010 import reusable workflow impersonate users and user context built in
SP as a data repository has come a long way in 2010

Developer dash board on demand on the page so you can see everything happening even in production pages using the on demand setting.
Better analysis, monitoring and throttling tools for admins. An Admin can block an errant web part if it displays too many list items or uses too many resources that are available to the farm for example exceeds a certain % of the resources available to the Farm.

Also heads up on SP 2010 Internet (or Portal or whatever they are calling it) and SP 2010 Enterprise Collaboration is that they are the same thing but basically different licensing models.