Develop Real World Apps with S+S Blueprints

Building Software-plus-Services (S+S) applications is getting easier with S+S Blueprints. S+S is about providing your customers with choices of on premises or hosted applications.

The S+S Blueprints are a series of open source frameworks and guidance packages to make it easier to build real-world S+S applications. Blueprints include source code, utilities, guidance, structured step-by-step workflow-based guidance and tools delivered within Visual Studio 2008.

Each Software-plus-Services Blueprint is focused on specific application areas such as: media/community, eCommerce, Office Business Applications (OBA), mobility and more. They range in complexity from rapid development packages to complete end-to-end scenarios.

You can start with the S+S Blueprints Manager that loads into Visual Studio. It's a Visual Studio extension delivering the code, tooling and guidance within the Visual Studio experience and includes auto-updating features which download updates and new Software-plus-Services Blueprints via RSS. You can get the S+S Blueprint Manager from Codeplex.

Here's some of the S+S Blueprints currently available:

• Outlook + Services. You can expose data and functionality from external services to your users via a custom Outlook user experience.
• Video.Show. Build a video sharing application using Silverlight.
• Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint. How to incorporate Silverlight into your SharePoint application.

Other Blueprints to be available later this week:

• Multi-Tenant Data Access Blueprint.

The following S+S Blueprints will ship shortly:

• Desktop Services Host in July.
• Sync Framework Blueprint to ship with SQL Server 2008.

To learn more, see Michael Lehman's series of webcasts on Channel 9.