Random - Mike Ammerlaan's Blog

6/15/2007

Been a while since I've blogged -- sorry about that! Things have been busy around here, but I'll try to get back into the swing of things and post a bit more regularly.

Recently I was at TechEd and did a session on AJAX and SharePoint. The samples for this session are here, and cover the basics of how to work with things like MS AJAX Extensions, UpdatePanels, Extenders, and script. Sorry for the delay in getting this out.

Posted at 1:57 PM by REDMOND\mikeam | Category: Random | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/25/2007

At VSLive! 2007 In San Francisco on Tuesday

I'll be at VSLive! 2007 in San Francisco on Tuesday.

I'll be doing this session:

Extending Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Web Parts, Event Handling, and Workflow

Tuesday, March 27, 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.

(not sure what the room is, yet.)

Basically, I'll be talking about ways to extend SharePoint: the technologies you need to know to add new functionalities to existing things inside of SharePoint.

If you're at VSLive! and interested in some of the best techniques for making your additions light up inside of SharePoint, please drop by! I'll be looking to post slides and samples after the session.

Posted at 5:57 PM by REDMOND\mikeam | Category: Random | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/6/2007

The SharePoint Developer Map - a useful overview of SharePoint

One of the things I've wanted to pull together is a way to understand the SharePoint platform in a nutshell. Towards that end we created a developer map (hosted from here; look for WSS Platform.pdf.) The idea behind this was to try to bucket and organize the list of tools that SharePoint provides for web application developers.

This is an abstracted overview:

Small Developer Map

Basically, this breaks down the SharePoint platform into several large buckets:

SharePoint Data Store. The data store is the core of the SharePoint platform. This consists of the site model (an SPSite is a hierarchical collection of SPWebs) plus the lists and libraries infrastructure that is part of every SPWeb. A security model is integrated with this, and content management capabilities are built on top of this infrastructure as well.

Provisioning. One of the strengths of SharePoint is the ability to support many, many sites based on particular site definitions. How those site definitions are defined – and deployed to SharePoint servers, is described in the Provisioning bucket. In some ways, provisioning is the most exciting to me because the site definitions and XML files really define the heart of what a SharePoint application looks like (well, to a developer).

Administration. This area describes how to integrate your central administration components and infrastructure in with SharePoint.

Services. Services deliver some important bits of the value of developing on top of SharePoint – things like the notion that lists have RSS feeds or alerts. This is the stuff you get "for free" when your data is hosted in SharePoint.

Pages and User Interface. Of course, almost all applications built on top of SharePoint will likely have some web based user interface. The Pages and User Interface bucket discusses things like web parts, the page model, and more.

Anyway, hopefully over the next few months I’ll be able to add some posts on the more obscure topics in each of these areas.

If you haven't had an opportunity to take a look the developer map, and familiarize yourself with all of the technologies and features of the SharePoint platform, please take a look!

Posted at 8:40 AM by REDMOND\mikeam | Category: Random | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/19/2007

Welcome!

Now that we have this nifty hosted SharePoint server, I figured it's a good time to start a blog.

Hello! I'm Mike Ammerlaan, a Program Manager on the Windows SharePoint Services team. I focus on the developer platform, including things like web parts, ASP.NET integration, features, solutions, object model, and the like. Before working on SharePoint for v3, I also worked on Excel and Combat Flight Simulator 3.

Hopefully over the next few months I'll be able to post some more information on interesting SharePoint features and capabilities. Thanks for stopping by!

Posted at 8:27 PM by REDMOND\mikeam | Category: Random | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)