Sharepoint Conference 2008 - Day 3

Attended to the following sessions, after the Keynote with Greg Lemmond (his life is interesting, really great man).

Best of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 for SharePoint Deployments

New features from Windows Server 2008 (mainly leveraging PowerShell for MOSS deployment and IIS tracking).

Regarding SQL Server 2008 they said that you've database encryption (how?!) and fastest data backup. I expect somethink more from SQL....

SharePoint Tools for Style: Advanced Techniques for Branding SharePoint

Best practices on CSS and Master-Page management. For tips&tricks http://www.heathersolomon.com/blog/

Rendering Data in SharePoint Using AJAX and LINQ

Great opportunity for me to see Linq in action.

I was very impressed by data abstraction which could be done with LINQ. I think that the best use could be to implemente feedback model where a lot of inputs are collected by etherogeneus datasources and loading them into an object model which could be queried using LINQ.

I'm thinking to fields tag in an industrial plant which using Linq could be joined with alarms stored in a relation database and it would be very easy and quicker to extract the information you need. The requirement to have performance in this scenario is having the objects in memory (well it's the default using Linq on objects). During the presentation this approach has been used to query MOSS but is's high risky because in the same way all the lists must be in memory and the processing could be very dangerous.

Regarding AJAX I've seen how to plumb it into MOSS. Default MOSS WebService aren't AJAX compliant (they are'not scriptable) so they were wrapped by another Web-Service. Fine but you can leverage ASTORIA in an easy way.

Creating Solutions with the MOSS Single Sign On Service

This was one the most crystalline speech that I ever attended Todd Baginsky is a great presenter (http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski/default.aspx).

The most intersting stuff was the integration of SSO with ASP.Net Form Authentication. In Todd's blog there is a sample.