The Developers Group London - 15.10.2008

Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak again @ The Developers Group in Microsoft Cardinal Place (London UK).

We discussed about Sharepoint and Workflow with three demos about the Out-Of-the-Box functionalities of Sharepoint (like Collect Feedback),

designing a workflow with Sharepoint Designer, and creating (and deploying) a sequential workflow with Visual Studio 2008.

In 1h and 15 mins I just can give a brief overview about those topics with the goal to "empower" the participants with a "big picture" of Sharepoint and Workflow to approach their customer settings the rights expectations.

The session presentation is hosted by the still empty TIQ-Industrial web site (obviously built on Sharepoint!). To get them go here

As I said during the event, the slides come out from 2 presentations I've seen at the 2008 Sharepoint Conference in Seattle:

• IBP309 - Sharepoint Workflows Out-Of-The-Box by Thomas Rizzo
• IBP301 - Managing a Workflow Environment by David Mann

While, if you want to try WinFX with Sharepoint take a look to this article.

During the post-meeting dinner, discussing at the table with a couple of friends I've got a new suggestion to Joanna for one of the next DG events: "Declarative Programming in .Net with Workflow Foundation" that could be interesting for any .Net developer and it's agnostic from Sharepoint!

For the upcoming sessions from DG Group take a look at http://www.richplum.co.uk/

As any good blog item I've some photos from MS Cardinal Place (...another cool MS office in UK):

Some more remarks from yesterday meeting:

• Sharepoint Designer didn't worked on the existing Document Library. Yersterday night I took same tests and... the library was corrupted! Creating a new document library everything was fine.
• Yesterday, during the pre-session I've seen that there is a lot of interest for security, encryption and so on. I just want to say that today's big challenge is mobility and how to protect data on mobile devices (smart-phones, rugged devices, mobile-phones and also lap-tops). A couple of years ago I used to work for consultancy for an enterprise company based in Switzerland for a feasibility project about mobile core solutions. I've found these solutions  www.credant.com has very valuable. Try taking a look!
• Regarding data-distribution on database and replications...
• For my perspective the "dba pattern" is that replication is good to distribute partioned set of read-only data (master data). 2-ways transactional replication is a nighmare and could be valuable just in mobile scenarios.
• To distribute data across server (with SQL-Server) you can also take a look to Log-Shipping (easy and economic), while the best approach for high-perfomance database is based on federated servers.