A link which I reference often over at MSDN is the Best Practices: Common Coding Issues When Using the SharePoint Object Model. I wanted to share it with any readers that may be unaware of its existence, and, an easy place for me to find it if I ever lose the bookmark. I generally browse it before jumping into a new project, just to make sure I am following the best practices when writing custom code against the API. At the time of writing a web part, event receiver, or workflow, it may be for a small set of data, but, you need to plan for growth.

Example: If you hear “this list will never have more than one or two hundred items in it”, you better plan for having several thousand, or tens of thousands. Needs change, it is a fact of life and business. By following some simple coding practices as outlined above, you can be ahead of the game, and not have to iterate through thousands upon thousands of list items you are querying for only a small subset, then you will not have to worry about angry users wondering why a page takes 45 seconds to load with only a single web part on it – yours.

Finally, I am on vacation, but wanted to share a few tidbits of information this week from the Microsoft world that should be of interest to my readers.

MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 Service Pack 2 Released on 4/28/09
That is correct, the next service pack was released for SharePoint, with many updates and fixes and updates in the ways of performance, compatibility, and additional functionality. There are several pages at Microsoft for this information, but Joel Oleson has put together the best post I have seen so far about aggregating information for WSS SP2, so I will send you over there for download links and other information: WSS & MOSS SP2 is Available – 5 No Brainer Reasons to Install

MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 SDK 1.5 Now Available
The next release of the MOSS and WSS SDKs have been released! Here are links to both the online versions and the downloadable CHM versions.

Online Versions
Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK
WSS 3.0 SDK

Downloadable CHM Versions
Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK
WSS 3.0 SDK

Windows 7 RC Now Available
And finally to end my “SharePoints” for this week, Windows 7 Release Candidate is now available through MSDN.

Hope you have found these useful! Back to vacation for me…

I told myself that I wouldn’t just post links on this blog, I wanted to load it up with some good content first, as I didn’t want to become one of “those” blogs, and think I have done that pretty well to date.

However, I enjoy passing along good information when I find it, and do not like to make single posts about a single link here and there, so, every so often, I will be posting “SharePoints”, which will be a roundup of newsworthy-news, SharePoint links (current, and not so current), and other tidbits of SharePointy information. This will not be a weekly, or even monthly occurrence, so fear not. Most likely as some “filler” to pass along information when I do not have much else to post, a great example being that over the past several weeks I have been heads down on several big projects, and have not had the time to get much out there other than client work, and giving my home office a complete makeover.

Now, onto the Points…

First, the biggest news items to come out of the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog (if you are not reading it – you should) this week. If you are reading this blog, I even have a little widget on the left side of the page that displays posts from them.

Microsoft SharePoint “14” is now Microsoft SharePoint 2010
That is correct, "Office" was dropped from the naming convention for the next version of SharePoint. Rest in peace odd acronym, we’ll miss you.

Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 due to ship April 28th
The long awaited Service Pack 2 for SharePoint is due out later this month! This Service Pack is loaded with fixes and performance improvements, as well as additional browser support (IE8, FireFox 2.0, FireFox 3.0). This post however is just a link to the Office Sustained Engineering blog, which has the real meat and potatoes. Go directly to it here: http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx

To add to that, as I know you will no doubt see the FireFox support in there, this is just adding level two support into the browser compatibility matrix for SharePoint, this still means that not everything will work as good as it does in IE, however, they are providing better support. IE8 is, of course, going to be in the level one support browser compatibility matrix.

And the last bit of information I wish to pass along at this time, is a link to a new CodePlex project I came across, SharePoint Solutions Manager – WSP Manager, that allows for SharePoint solution package management from the desktop. No more needing to fuss with STSADM (is it deletesolution or removesolution?) or go into Central Administration to manage your solutions, this can all be done from the desktop. More information and to download the project (source and executable) here: http://solutionmanager.codeplex.com/

This tool uses the object model to manage solutions, so this is required to run from the SharePoint server itself, not on your client machine.

And that’s a wrap for the first “SharePoints” from me… hopefully I will have some more time in the near future to post some additional content.