SharePoint Guidance is Live

After lots of hard work by the team, advisors, and product group we decided it would be best to upstage the election today by releasing the SharePoint Guidance. Given the importance of the guidance, we are confident that everyone will be more excited about our guidance than any historic election in the US. Given the fact this is the first time that patterns & practices created SharePoint Guidance, we have had all the major television networks ask for interviews so stay tuned to a webcast near you. We also heard from many voters that they changed their vote based upon this guidance.

Ok I will be serious. We did complete the SharePoint Guidance which focuses on Windows SharePoint Services. The guidance can be found on MSDN. There is a community for this guidance on Codeplex. We believe that it will help you know how to:

  • Make architectural decisions about feature factoring, packaging, and the appropriate usage of design patterns.
  • Determine design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
  • Design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
  • Set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
  • Manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.

This guidance includes a Reference Implementation, 2 QuickStarts (Debugging and Data Access) and 3 Patterns (Model View Presenter, Service Locator, and Repository). I do want to mention the unit testing, deployment and upgrade sections as there is lots of good knowledge in these topics. 

We use the Reference Implementation as a way to demonstrate the guidance in action. The written guidance was developed by experiencing the challenges of developing the Reference Implementation Application with SharePoint. We then validated the guidance with both the product group, MVP's, and other external advisors.

Here is one of the screens from the Reference Implementation.

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The guidance can be found on MSDN. There is a community for this guidance on Codeplex. Checkout the guidance and give your feedback. We are now capturing requirements for what we should focus on next with SharePoint.