I had a good discussion with Joel, an MS SharePoint product manager, the other evening regarding one of my latest development projects I've completed with the great folks over at B&R Business Solutions. You can read more details at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/01/25/case-study-amd-deployment-on-windows-server-2008-and-sharepoint-server-2007-is-faster-and-more-manageable.aspx .  Although this project has largely consumed my time since November its a real testament to MOSS that we could replace a system that was developed in Java\MySql over a considerably longer period of time, fewer features, more developers within a couple short months (lots of holidays in nov,dec,jan) and only one full time developer to boot!

The focus of Joel's post was largely around our choice to use Windows Server 2008. AMD was very much interested in being an early adopter and several of us on the team had been working with the beta bits and we felt comfortable going forward based on our experiences. Even early betas were showing a lot of promise from a management and performance standpoint and the fact that much of Microsoft's production environment is already running Windows Server 2008 just reinforced that. That being said I still had my doubts. I've spent the last couple of years developing against a lot of betas and its typically a painful experience for developers so I was expecting some issues. To my surprise the initial install and deployment was very smooth. I ran into no significant compatibility issues. One minor issue related to MOSS & Windows Server 2008 is to remember to install the II6 compatibility options. MOSS works against the IIS6 object model for site creation and automation and isn't aware of IIS7 specifically. Now for you Vista fans it has a very similar user interface experience and the beloved User Access Controls are present, royal pain but a good thing on your production servers (don't you love that apple commercial hehe). From the management perspective I enjoyed some of the new dashboards for management and event filtering which comes in handy when MOSS is having a bad day. One thing I'd still like to see is some better integration with SharePoint logging, those text files will make your eyes bug out after a while. I have a feeling that as I spend more time in the next couple months on the production support side of the house that I'll probably be singing even more praise.

So although Joel's article was focused on Windows Server 2008 (an obvious focus for MS atm) there was still some interesting things going on with the dev side. Of particular interest was the requirement to manage multiple paged articles. Much of AMD Developer Central relates to technical articles.  Generally speaking most implementation you'll see for this pattern on the web involve template pages that are driven by query string parameters such as http://www.example.com/articles.jsp?ID=3&Page=4 (as was the previous AMD Developer Central site). In our case we wanted to take advantage of all the features of MOSS publishing pages but also be able to tie multiple pages together and deal with them as a unit when it comes to scheduling and publishing and additionally dealing with some controls that are aware of these relationships and render the appropriate navigation. We wanted to avoid a scenario where we had articles containing a couple dozen pages having to be managed independently of each other.  Fortunately this was an issue I was addressing prior to the project and I was able to use some early bits in a community project of mine that I'll be releasing for public consumption (and likely abuse lol) in the next couple weeks.

All in all it was a great project. B&R has a great knack for keeping me busy with interesting projects that keep my on my toes and this is one for the books. Look more for some of my experiences on this project coming soon.