SharePoint Reflections
Plus, saying good-bye to RDN.
VSM
readers respond to the March 2009 cover story on the changing face of SharePoint development.
The tools are abysmal. The best examples I've seen come out of Ted Pattison. His commentary in the SDK videos pretty much sums it up. He says that someday Microsoft will produce some great and wonderful tools, but until then you need to learn the hard way.
Mike, California, posted online
The tools, quite frankly, stink. The documentation for those tools is also very, very poor. The SharePoint developer SDK is full of examples that don't work. Many examples are trivial, too. The fact that you have to use the tools on the SharePoint server is just icing on the cake. Virtual PC is a real dog with a full MOSS installation. On the other hand, so many of our clients are turned off by the high cost of licensing SharePoint that they decide to go in another direction instead.
JP, Kansas, posted online
Good-bye Redmond Developer News
VSM sister publication RDN published its last print issue in February 2009. A reader shares her thoughts.
I'm disappointed that RDN is going away. When it was created I thought it was different and better than anything else for what it covered. The columns about technology, the interviews and DevDisasters, too, were all good to have. I work in a data warehouse development group so we are especially interested in SQL Server and data access and data presentation. Often I would tear a page out and put it on my manager's desk so he could read it and be aware, too.
Visual Studio Magazine is OK, but it's different. RDN will be missed.
Laura Granstedt, Bridgeport, Conn.
About the Author
This story was written or compiled based on feedback from the readers of Visual Studio Magazine.