Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Sometimes, checking permissions on a SharePoint site is quite a hassle and I several times had permissions issues especially when working on an anonymous access enabled application (see one reference here) and you don't know where it is coming from.

I found a tool that can be very helpful in discovering the permission details for an item or a page.

See the article on the Rodney Viana's blog, and the tool download on Codeplex

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Title : Professional SharePoint 2010 Development

Authors : Tom Rizzo, Reza Alirezaei, Paul J. Swider, Scot Hillier, Jeff Fried, Kenneth Schaefer

Summary :
This book was the first one available talking about SharePoint 2010 development. Therefore, as it was available soon after the RTM version of SharePoint, we could expect that some points would not have been perfectly addressed.
Nevertheless, it covers almost the whole range of topics that a developer may face.
It starts by, of course, an introduction to the new platform, an overview of the developer tools and the list of enhancements for the IT Pros. After that, collaboration, social computing, search, ECM, through workflows and business intelligence are described. One of the last topic is about the promising SharePoint Online.

Book Review :
Very honestly, the whole introduction can be skipped. It means the first 4 chapters as they are too high level. I found them also too long.
After these chapters, it goes well in the details, with many examples besides code illustrating the notions explained. On the other side, and with the experience of the platform, I found two points where the book is not going enough in the subject. The first one, even if packaging and deployment is explained, after a bit along the book, this is no longer addressed and sometimes leave the reader at "how can I deploy this ?".
The second point is in regards to SharePoint Online which is not covered enough. Maybe because the platform was not ready, but this topic deserves to be more developed.
Overall, this book is a very good one and will be very useful for the developers.