A blog by Pilothouse Consulting
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Designer Workflows and Event Handlers
Jun 16th
A savvy student in a SharePoint 2010 class today asked about event handlers and Designer workflows. As I am wont to do, I just “did it” to see exactly what happened.
When having a Designer workflow (associated with a list) kick off automatically, an ItemAdded and ItemUpdated event handler are attached to the list in question to handle said kickoff. If you want to have some code run via event handler before the workflow starts, your best bet is to use ItemAdding, as ItemAdded won’t be guaranteed to run before the workflow starts.
This is one of those cases where the term “asynchronous” with regard to the ItemAdded event handler can be taken to mean what the actual word means, instead of as a substitute for “after.”
Top Five Improvements in SharePoint 2010
Jun 14th
- Using InfoPath to edit list forms – no longer there is a need for a developer to design form layout, logic, and conditional formatting.
- List navigation based on metadata – the best of both worlds: hierarchical navigation by folder, or metadata navigation based on column values.
- More consistent terminology and cleaner pages – for example, permissions management pages are no longer confusing.
- Clean and fast SharePoint Designer – it’s easier to make improvements when you start from scratch and that’s what SharePoint team did here. Better workflows and ability to create external lists and content types are a great plus.
- Cleaner Central Administration and PowerShell – No need to develop .net console applications, script anything using PowerShell
Overall the trend continues to configuring more out of box and only developing functions that add immediate value.
Thoughts about Microsoft’s future
Sep 24th
In 2000, when I picked up a book about ASP.NET Beta, I was impressed with Microsoft’s ability not only to copy Java, but make it simpler and better. In the next couple of years I switched from doing Java/Oracle projects to .NET/SharePoint projects. It turned out to be a great call. SharePoint is a product that Microsoft got right even with all of the problems it has. .Net has practically became a standard within the enterprise and now promotes all of Microsoft server products.
I am fairly loyal to Microsoft products even outside of the corporate world. I have an Xbox and a Zune (and this is after a couple of IPods).
So why I am writing this? Microsoft is clearly losing the battle on the consumer side and it’s only a matter of time until Google/Apple make a much stronger case in the corporate world with Google documents/Gmail/Iphone/Android etc.
Why is Microsoft losing the battle? Steve Ballmer’s ineffective leadership and poor execution.
Some of the major execution failures under his watch:
- Zune (F) – failed to copy Apple feature set; horrible desktop software.
- Live.com (C-) – took too long to roll out; did a couple of reactionary to Google/overpaid acquisitions.
- Vista (B-) – perceived performance is bad; lied about system requirements on the initial roll out (I like Vista with 4GB of RAM, but XP was still faster).
Shareholders should demand a better track record from a CEO of the largest software company in the world. Microsoft still has a lot software power and a few simple adjustments would really help the company and likely the stock price:
- Get a new CEO – somebody from a successful Microsoft business unit such as Xbox or SharePoint.
- Lay off hordes of contractors and limit frivolous hiring. In the last year, the number of employees Microsoft hired is equivalent to 55% of Google’s total workforce. And I though Google hired too many. Contractors make Microsoft more and more like IBM.
- Focus on performance. Stop assuming that the hardware will get better and better. Deliver products that require less RAM and CPU.