Mike and the SharePoint Web Part storm of 2004!

Here is some excellent news, Mike Fitzmaurice (Fitz), the man in the middle of the biggest SharePoint controversy  (see post comments) since the “removal” of folder level security in SPS V2 has kicked off a Blog.

Mike Fitzmaurice's WebLog

In my view this really is the best way to have a conversation in the Blogosphere, and Mike starts contributing straight away with his post on SharePoint training courses. This was Patricks main concern in his “fire starting” post, and I would really encourage all of you out there with feedback on training to post a comment, constructively please, telling him how we can do better.

Along these lines I would like to respond to a little more “cage rattling” (Hello to Mads Nissen at #region /* mads's thoughts */) who said the following in his beautifully titled post “SmartPart is rattling the MSFT Sharpoint cage” <very big grin> (which also has a nice positioning slide on the various approaches to SharePoint web part development):

“yet there are no public product roadmap”

I agree on the “Public Roadmap” stuff (Mike, could this be your next post? <grin>), it would be nice to have a bit more information out there. I can’t tell you when we are going to get such a beast, but there are a couple of reasons why such documents aren’t always here quick enough for the technically addicted like ourselves (remember that “us” out here are probably the earliest of early adopters):

1. We are always receiving feedback that Microsoft focuses too much on the next version and not enough on the current version. When you think about it, the current version hasn’t really been out there that long.
2. It is still very early in the development cycle for the next version of SharePoint and lots can change, the last thing we want to do is make promises that we can’t deliver on. Other teams at MS have had this problem, and when it happens everyone shouts “vapourware” from the rooftops. <grin>

So it’s a real balancing act.

With that said there are some critical pieces (there isn’t much more critical than what is happening with Web Parts), for example we have the following articles:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/aspnet-meetwebpartfrmwrk.asp
https://www.gotdotnet.com/team/PDC/4086/WSV322.ppt

And from the community:
Fredrik did a post in Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0 

As for “Longhorn has got a cooler developer center at MSDN”

Unfortunately for us SharePointers the number of developers working on Longhorn based technologies simply dwarves anything we are doing with SharePoint, I know it would be great if our products were as well catered for, but, the fact is that “Longhorn” is the next version of Windows, and that will always have a lot more developers than SharePoint.

For completeness, pmurphy has some interesting things to say over here (even calling it a “battle”, which makes it sound more like a post about “Age of Empires”), contributing to the ongoing controversy…ummmm I mean conversation.

Anyway, the final thing to say in this post, is that it’s been great “talking” to you all, if nothing else this shows there is a great deal of enthusiasm out there!