Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 SharePoint Labs

Just a quick followup to my latest post, Microsoft just announced the availability of new HOLS that includes a dedicated lab for the SharePoint support in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 which includes a practical step-by-step exercises over the following features:

1- Unit testing SharePoint development artifacts using SharePoint Emulator assemblies. Microsoft SharePoint Emulators basically intercept the calls to Microsoft.SharePoint dlls which reduce the testing/maintenace time of SharePoint development.

2- Intellitrace support for SharePoint Improvement.

3- Web and Load testing SharePoint applications.

You can download the lab directly from here.

Visual Studio Update 1: The New Update Model

If you happen to be a developer or working in the development field, you probably know the pain of keeping the development environment up to date, and the headache caused by patches which sometimes requires another update rollup, but the real pain arise when wanting to prepare a fresh Development environment machine, and facing the necessity to download  and install a lot of updates.

Like other vendors, Microsoft has it’s own mechanism of releasing updates for their software’s and products, for example: in SharePoint and Office world, usually they release a cumulative updates (CU) every two months which is a downloadable package contains the hot-fixes for either a certain product or family of products, and on annual basis, they release service packs; which usually contains the whole set of previous hot-fixes in addition to some core engineering enhancements, rarely they provide additional features, such as the latest SharePoint Service Pack which introduced some additional features to the product.

As for the new Visual Studio update mechanism, VS team is committed to continuously provide the product with additional capabilities and added-values, in addition to the hot-fixes and security updates.

SharePoint Developer Capabilities:

The most exciting capabilities for me within this update pack for Visual Studio 2012 is the new SharePoint capabilities (As you may know my major specialization is SharePoint Technology), which includes the following:

1- Supporting the testing and QA aspects in the SP development in the application lifecycle by allowing the SP developers to do unit tests, coded UI tests, and incorporating Microsoft Fakes Framework to simulate the SharePoint complicated DLL dependencies, which means testing SP development artifacts is not a headache anymore 🙂

2- Load/Stress testing is fully supported, these kind of testing’s usually require different set of tools in order to get an accurate results.

3- Intellitrace logging support for SharePoint, Intellitrace is a very interesting debugging feature, it requires a dedicated blog post to explain the benefits of it, you can read more here if you are interested to know more about it.

I will be blogging more in the next days about these features and how to utilize them in SharePoint development.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Offline Installer:

One more thing to add here; is the offline availability of the VS2012 Update 1, by default VS2012 U1 is delivered through web installer which requires a decent internet connection, in order to download it offline and distribute it internally within the development team, you can do the following steps:

1- Download the Web Installer from here.

2- Use the command prompt to launch the web installer with a parameter which indicates that you want to download the update 1 package to a certain folder instead of installing it to the windows programs temporary folder as the following:

vsupdate_KB2707250.exe /Layout

after downloading the package you can create an ISO file and distribute it internally within your development team.

 

Fore more information about the Visual Studio 2012 Update 1:

– Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Download Page

– Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Capabilities

Speaking at Amman Arab University–Jordan

As part of the course “Software Engineering” at Amman Arab University, I’m speaking in the Information Technology Faculty on May 22, 2012.

This session will be about “Understanding ALM And Custom Development”, and the topics include:

1- The importance of Custom Development.

2- Understanding Application Lifecycle Management.

3- ALM Practices from the field.

If you’re interested in attending, contact Dr. Mohammed Nassar(moanassar@aau.edu.jo).

SharePoint Server MVP Renewal – 2012

It’s an honor that I have been selected again for the fifth year by Microsoft to receive the MVP award for 2012 in SharePoint competency.

Yesterday, I also received a mail from my MVP lead saying that I’ve been awarded with a custom disk to add to the MVP Crystal Wedge Award, this milestone disk was provided for achieving the MVP award for 5 years straight.

I would like to thank Microsoft and all the community fellows.

If you are interested in learning more about the MVP Award Program, check the following program links:

1. Microsoft MVP Award Program.
2. About MVP.
3. How to become an MVP.

And finally congratulation for all the new and renewed MVPs for this year.

I’m speaking at Microsoft TechDays 2012 in Gaza

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m very excited that I have been invited to speak at Microsoft TechDays 2012 in Gaza.

It’s the first official Microsoft event ever in Gaza, I’ll deliver a couple of sessions at two universities.

The first topic is my favorite cloud computing session “Understanding Cloud Platforms: A Rational Comparison” , and the second topic is “Composite Development: A New Paradigm in Software Development Productivity” which is about composing software’s using the modern tools in SharePoint Development Platform, Visual Studio 2010, and Visual Studio Light-Switch.

This Two-Days event will be launched on the 14th of March at Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), and the next day will be at Al-Azhar University, 4 More speakers will be there:

– Naseem Tuffaha: General Manager for Microsoft MEA Business Marketing Organization.

– Ayman Al-Dahleh: Senior Development Manager at Office Team.

– Husni Khuffash: Microsoft Jordan Country Manager

– Ali Nimer: Windows Phone and SharePoint Products Unit Lead at MASADER Technologies – Jordan.

I’ve never been to Gaza before and I can’t wait to meet everyone there!