Our goal

During the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Social Fest, Murano’s programmers had to create seven applications for the new SharePoint Server 2010. This article will show how Amazon Web Services helped us to get results in just seven days.

Why did we choose Amazon?

We had few days before the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Social Fest to test the new SharePoint server. Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2010 is in beta status and has strict hardware requirements. You must have 4GB of RAM to start working with it. Also, the best way to use SharePoint Server 2010 is to install it on a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.

So we had to upgrade some of the developers’ PC hardware and OS or find another solution. There also was another problem – how to prepare the environment for the new developers on SharePoint Social Fest’s team very quickly. We decided to check Amazon services.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a Web-based service that provides compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 presents a virtual computing environment, allowing you to use Web service interfaces to launch instances with selected operating systems. Fortunately, MS Windows Server 2008 is available to use on Amazon. We chose “Large Instance” with 8GB RAM and 4 EC2 Compute Units to handle our tasks.

How to start using Amazon Web Services

Getting to Amazon’s cloud is simple. You have to go to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2 and register a new account if you don’t have one. After registering for service and filling out your card data, you can create a new instance by wizard in EC2 AWS console:

After passing several steps, you will get new instances in the console:

Now instances on Amazon EC2 use ELASTIC BLOCK STORE (EBS) to store data volumes. This is good news because your data will stay alive after instance shutdown.

Our results

Virtual servers on Amazon have a good performance level. We used Visual Studio 2010 on it with hosted SharePoint 2010 sites, and the machines worked very promptly.

As we selected Amazon EC2 as our platform for the SharePoint 2010 Social Fest, we had to find out how to multiply the development environment in a short time.

The “Snapshot” function could help. It will take a snapshot from the selected data volume. Then you can create a new volume from the snapshot and attach it to the instance. But I found that instance’s Amazon Machine Image (AMI) creation is more applicable for our task.

You can install any software you need, make your changes to the system configuration and then create an image of your instance. Then you can use this image for creating new instances. Using AMIs instead of snapshots gives you an advantage in time because you will already get a configured instance right after the launch.

Thus we prepared AMI with Visual Studio 2010 beta and SharePoint Server 2010 beta installed on it, and we used it any time our developer needed a new environment.

Benefits of using Amazon

Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud gives all our programmers the possibility of working with the demanding SharePoint Server 2010 without OS reinstallation and hardware upgrade.

Also, we find that Amazon EC2 is very convenient if you need to increase the quantity of servers very quickly.

You could use Command Line Tools to automate some tasks with EC2 instances. We used it to enable programmers to shut down and start their instances.

By Alex, a Senior .NET Developer on Murano Software’s team

Murano Software is becoming a permanent participant in the Microsoft Incubation Week events. Last week (Jan 25-29), our company participated as a development partner in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Social Fest at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. We provided seven top Microsoft BizSpark startups with outsource development support, SharePoint expertise and advice. Just as it was during other Microsoft Incubation Weeks, the mission of our team, led by Dimitri Nikouline, this year was to create working solutions for our clients in the shortest terms of the event. Our developers and startup representatives were working day and night, in a warm and competitive atmosphere, being eager to try the new features and implement their ideas. .

This was even more challenging, since the products - Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 - are Betas now, and there was no strong knowledge base, except samples in Microsoft blogs and related Internet resources. But our company, always being on the cutting edge of the development technologies, successfully defeated all of these challenges. In addition to the true interest in the newest technologies and software development passion, we got through these challenges because of intensive communication and team spirit. Working with the different startup clients, we established a single workspace for all involved to resolve issues faster and exchange tips, ideas, and links.

Although these startups work in different areas of business intelligence and communications, they all are looking forward to the integration with SharePoint as an opportunity to upgrade their working and beneficial products to the enterprise-level applications. This wide range of interests resulted in a large variety of integration tasks successfully resolved by our guys during that week, from the UI widgets customization to search, synchronization and user profile management.

Huddle
The winning project, Huddle, is helping businesses across the world to work online in a common workspace, share and edit the documents, involving the external users in their workflows. Our guys did a great job using Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 features, customizing the UI and the back-end logic by means of timer jobs.

Calinda Software
Calinda Software, the second winner with their MindUp product, are focused on making e-mail communications structured and easy, so no attachment gets lost, and the history of sent and received messages can be seen on a visual map. With SharePoint 2010, the e-mail environment transparently becomes integrated with document libraries and lists in MOSS. Our commitment to their success was a service, allowing users to search for people with specific skills and give the relevancy estimates for these search results.   

GetConfer
Confer is a company that offers a microblogging Web application to simplify communications between employees of a big company. In order to extend its functionality on the enterprise SharePoint installation, we worked together on mechanisms to map Confer's users to SharePoint users.

Cortex Intelligence
Cortex Intelligence provides a market intelligence service for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 users, letting them access external data, such as market data, news and so on. During the event, our guys worked on integrating the microblog functionality of SharePoint with external data providers, allowing them to post blog articles and put links to external articles into the user's microblog.

Leverage Software
LeverageSoftware's DesignSpace platform transforms sets of e-mail threads into a social workspace that the users can share with other colleagues in their company. We helped them to integrate with the people search functionality of SharePoint 2010.

Liaise
Liaise allows SharePoint 2010 users to transparently update their SharePoint items (tasks, lists and so on) with the information parsed from the e-mail messages they send, save attachments in document libraries and so on. We made a prototype solution, putting task summary information in the calendar, automatically updating any change to the task list.

Loqu8
Loqu8 Prelude is a tool that’s integrated into Microsoft applications (Office, Media Player, Control Panel, etc.), showing users contextually relevant information when they are hovering a word. During Microsoft Incubation Week, we worked on the integration of their tool with SharePoint’s platform.

By Vladimir, a .NET developer on Muranosoft’s team.

The new Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 raises the development of SharePoint projects to an absolutely new level. You won’t need to install any special extensions like those in Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2010 supports all the necessary tools, which really help to improve the development process.

So let’s take a look at the new SharePoint development features that Visual Studio 2010 offers.

New Project Templates

First of all, the VS 2010 supports many different templates for the SharePoint projects, such as:
•    Blank Site Definition
•    Content Type
•    List Definition
•    State Machine Workflow
•    WSP Import
•    Business Data Catalog Model
•    Deployment Module
•    Event Receiver
•    Sequential Workflow
•    Web Part

After selecting any of these templates, you have to go through some steps to configure your development environment, of course.

SharePoint Solution Architecture

Any project type will include two key nodes that you can’t remove, relocate or rename. There are Features and Package nodes. These ones will be available in a project, even if your project doesn’t contain any feature or package definition.

The “Features” node contains all your project features. If you want to add a new feature, just right click on this node and select “Add Feature.” You can use the new Feature Designer tool to manage a corresponding feature.

The “Package” node contains only one *.WSP file, which describes the deployment rules of your SharePoint project. Double clicking on this file affects the Package Designer tool, which allows you to configure all deployment aspects.

In addition to these nodes, the VS 2010 contains the package explorer, which also allows you to manage your SharePoint items. For example, you can group files into features or packages, raise the Features/Packages designer, or move files from one feature or package to another.

Changes in the Server Explorer

Now the Server Explorer supports a new node called SharePoint Connections. This node contains the URL to all your SharePoint sites. You can add the new site by clicking on the SharePoint Connections node, clicking “Add Connection” and entering the URL to the SharePoint site. This will allow you to browse the contents (such as features, lists and sites) and configure the SharePoint server settings.

Development

Some few features are directly linked with a development process.  These include the new Client Object Model, LINQ to SharePoint, Sandboxed Solutions and “External Data Lists.”

• Client Object Model allows us to have direct access to the object model by using JavaScript, Silverlight or .NET code without calling Web Services.
• LINQ to SharePoint provides  an ability to use usual LINQ-queries to manipulate with SharePoint lists. Now we can forget about foreach’es and other redundant code in many cases.
• Sandboxed Solutions allow us to deploy our Web Parts without having an administrative privilege. It was one of the biggest problems in previous versions of the SharePoint environment. This is achieved by running solutions in a separate process that is restricted by .Net CAS policy. So the framework can control solutions and shut down any of them automatically.
• External Lists (formerly known as the Business Data Catalog) is a powerful mechanism to organize collaboration your SharePoint project with other applications or data sources. You should describe an entities structure and link with a data source. After that, you can use received data in your SharePoint project.

Debug and Deploy Process

As you may know, the debug and deploy processes were quite difficult in the previous versions of Visual Studio. The newest one dramatically changes this work, offering us an absolutely new way. Now you shouldn’t deploy your package on the server, deactivate and uninstall all features, retract the solution manually, etc. You shouldn’t install an additional Visual Studio on your SharePoint server, either, just to debug your code.

After configuring your SharePoint solution, you just press the F5 button and the installation of your package will be done automatically, even if an old solution has been installed on the server. All work (deactivating, retracting, etc.) will be done automatically. Amazing, isn’t it?

After installing the new package, the Visual Studio’s debugger will be attached to the Windows SharePoint services process. To enable this, you should run you project in the debug mode (when you first debug, VS suggests to modify your web.config file accordingly). Please note, you could use it on your development side, not on the SharePoint server side!

Resources

If you want to get more information, you can watch this video or follow this link to read the official documentation. There is another great article about new tools for SharePoint development in the VS 2010, written by Steve Fox, senior technical evangelist. Also, I suggest you take a look at the short training courses provided by Channel 9.

Enjoy!