In late January / early February (when I first started at MicroTech, LLC.) I began to learn all about SharePoint 2003 development. I read the SharePoint MVP blogs (Eugene, Brad, etc.) of our sister-company (MicroLink, LLC.) hit Google, and began to learn all about ASP.NET (1.1) ServerControls and SharePoint.WebPart's. Every day I was learning more... and trust me - it was an uphill battle the whole way. One after another of my understanding of the basic's of ASP.NET 1.1 were brought into serious question. For instance, try writing a table with out HTML or a design view! Or how about wiring up an event in a completely different way from standard ASP.NET! Or even try persisting a simple value if the SharePoint webpart factory seems to kill it! And what about using MSDAAB? Nope, sorry. Or try configuring remote debugging over sharepoint! I dare you! I imagine much of this was due to the fact that the "dev" box I was given was actually a "production" box which has had numerous undocumented dirty hands all over its insides.
Ahh!!! And try having all of this happen without VERSION CONTROL!!! I almost lost it.
But then I came across SmartPart (for ASP.NET 1.1) and Son of SmartPart (for ASP.NET 2.0). Within days I was able to create a ASP.NET 1.1 UserControl with database access (using basic ADO.NET) - whereas building the same part as an ASP.NET ServerControl would have taken 1.5-2 weeks!! Rapid prototyping at its best BABY!
And that's just the beginning! Now that we have a WSS2.0 site on ASP.NET 2.0, all dev's have VS2005 installed, and we know have a VSS 2005 box setup - I'm going to play with ADO.NET 2.0 and the new Enterprise Library for ASP.NET 2.0 (January 2006). With the new database reflection builtin to the new EL's DatabaseFactory (for strongly typed DataSets and stored procedure / parameters) and the new connectionStrings section of the 2.0 web.config's - I'm going to be in hog heaven. Oooh, I can't wait!
posted @ Sunday, March 05, 2006 8:09 PM