Introduction

We’ve waited a long time for this! The first rough early preview release of ASP.NET MVC was made public in December 2007, and immediately the software development world was filled with eager enthusiasm for it. Could this be the most exciting advancement in Microsoft web technology since ASP.NET itself was born way back in 2002? Would we, at last, have a web development framework that encourages and supports high-quality software engineering?

Since then, we’ve had five further community technology preview (CTP) releases, one beta release, two release candidates, and now at last in March 2009, the finished 1.0 release. Some releases were just incremental improvements on their predecessors; others were sub-stantial shifts in the framework’s mechanics and aesthetics (e.g., the whole notion of model binding, covered in Chapter 11, didn’t appear until preview 5). At each stage, the ASP.NET MVC team invited feedback and guided their development efforts according to real-world usage experiences. Not all Microsoft products are built this way; consequently, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is much more mature than the average 1.0 release.

I started work on this book in December 2007, foolishly anticipating a summer 2008 pub-lication date.With every new preview release, the whole manuscript was updated, reworked, expanded, polished even more—sometimes even whole chapters became obsolete and simply had to be discarded. The project became so ingrained into my life that every conversation with friends, family, or colleagues began by them asking “How’s the book?” shortly followed by, “Tell me again—what’s the book about?” I hope that this finished manuscript, created in par-allel with ASP.NET MVC itself, gives you not just a clear understanding of what the framework does today, but also why it was designed this way and how the same principles can improve the quality of your own code.

Introduction

We have been working with SharePoint technology since the beta release of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and have seen the product evolve to SharePoint 2007. The sheer number of new fea- tures added to this product line is huge, and we are pleased to note how popular this product has become, since we love working with it.

You should read this book if you want to expand your knowledge about developing solutions for both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. A few sections only apply to MOSS 2007, but those have been clearly identified.

Unfortunately, nowadays SharePoint is such a big topic that you cannot cover every available topic and still provide in-depth information, so we had to choose which topics to include. Since we have started working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have noticed time and again that all SharePoint developers seem to share a common interest in four topics: building workflows, improving business intelligence, using InfoPath, and creating interactive web environments using Ajax techniques. Therefore, when we decided to write a new book about Share- Point 2007, it was crystal clear to us that we needed to dedicate a considerable portion to these Big Four topics.

That is not all we discuss in this book. With the passage of time, we have seen that new and interesting topics related to SharePoint technologies have arisen, and we have made sure to include a bunch of them. These topics will not be found in the typical SharePoint book you might have lying about, and we hope you will have fun learning about them.

Introduction

With SharePoint now in its third release, many developers and users are well familiar with its core functionality. However, this version of SharePoint is truly astonishing in its scope. Not only does this version have the familiar sites, documents, and lists, but it also supports vast new capabilities in content management, document management, records management, and business intelligence. Along with these capabilities, this version of SharePoint has many new ways to integrate data and create customized solutions. For me, the combination of business-oriented capabilities and advanced solution-development techniques has always been the basis of my enthusiasm for SharePoint. In fact, this is the perspective that I have tried to bring to this book; I want to combine business needs and technical skills to create solutions that truly impact business. You can be the judge of how well that vision has been reached.

Introduction

Over the past 20 years object-oriented programming languages have evolved to become the premier tools for enterprise application development. They've been augmented by frameworks, APIs, and rapid application-development tools. Yet what's been missing is a way to intimately tie object-oriented programs to relational databases (and other data that doesn't exist as objects). The object paradigm is conceptually different from the relational one and this creates significant impedance between the objects programs use and the tables where data resides. ADO.NET provides a convenient interface to relational data, but not an object-oriented one.

The pseudocode shows an object-oriented approach to data management; no query or SQL statement is visible to developers. You need to think about only what you have to do, not how to do it. This approach to combining object-oriented and relational technologies has been called the Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) model.

Although Microsoft has embedded ORM capabilities in its Dynamics CRM 3.0 application server and should soon do the same in ADO.NET 3.0, it doesn't yet provide this programming model to .NET developers. To run a simple SQL query, ADO.NET programmers have to store the SQL in a Command object, associate the Command with a Connection object and execute it on that Connection object, then use a DataReader or other object to retrieve the result set. For example, the following code is necessary to retrieve the single row accessed in the pseudocode presented earlier.

Introduction

Linguistic (language-based) searching has long been a staple of web search engines such as Google and high-end document management systems. Many developers have created custom utilities and third-party applications that implement complex search functionality similar to that provided by the most popular search engines. What many people don’t realize immedi-ately is that SQL Server provides this advanced linguistic search capability out-of-the-box. Full-Text Search (FTS) has been included with SQL Server since the SQL Server 7 release. FTS allows you to perform linguistic searches of documents and text content stored in SQL Server data-bases using standard T-SQL queries. FTS is a powerful tool that can be used to implement enterprise-class linguistic database searches.

SQL Server 2008 increases the power of FTS by adding a variety of new features that make it easier than ever to administer, troubleshoot, and generally use SQL Server’s built-in linguistic search functionality in your own applications. In this book, we’ll provide an in-depth tour of SQL Server 2008’s FTS features and functionality, from both the server and client perspective.