One of my biggest complaints about SharePoint 2007 is that as a developer, it is virtually impossible to employ professional development techniques when building SharePoint solutions. I’m talking about source control, continuous integration, test driven development, etc. Obviously you can use these techniques when it comes to custom web parts, event receivers, and other “code only” solutions, but when you’re talking about larger projects that include content types, SharePoint Designer workflows, custom lists, in addition to custom code, it simply isn’t practical to try and cram everything into source control. It’s just too much effort.
From what I’ve seen so far, many of these issues will be resolved with SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. I’m looking forward to digging into a real project so I can find out where the “gotchas” are (and I’m sure there will be plenty), but so far I’m optimistic. I am hopeful that as a developer, I will be able to bring professional development techniques to all areas of a SharePoint project.
In my opinion this is critical if Microsoft wants to make SharePoint a true application development platform.
Clint Simon | 18-Aug-09 at 1:36 pm | Permalink
Hey man, you do these things in SP 2007 with SPDeploy. We’ve been using it for 2+ years:
http://consulting.ascentium.com/blog/sp/Post29.aspx
glenc | 19-Aug-09 at 2:19 pm | Permalink
No totally – what you guys have put together is great. But I’m talking about things like List Definitions, Content Types, SharePoint Designer workflows, etc. And I know you *can* pull out the XML for all of those, but it’s just backwards. And building them as XML from the beginning is just too time intensive. Those are the things I’m hoping get better with 2010.