Application lifecycle management in SharePoint

Editor's Notes

• #2: Jeremy Thake, Enterprise Architect at AvePoint Inc and SharePoint MVP, will explain the principles of Application Lifecycle Management in SharePoint 2010. The session will suit SharePoint Developers, Team Leaders, Architects and Development Managers to understand how to approach ALM with SharePoint.The pillars of ALM will be discussed in detail and the benefits of each from a Solution perspective.The ALM maturity model will be presented to allow you to evaluate where you are in your own internal processes and how to mature these further.The NothingButSharePoint.com Project ALM approach will be discussed in detail as a case study, which involves global distributed development teams and designers. The pros and cons of this approach will be compared to the others. Common problems with promoting from Dev to Staging to Production will be discussed in detail.From this session you should walk away with:·         An understanding of what application lifecycle management is·         An understanding of the approaches to ALM with SharePoint Development·         An understanding of how to get started with baby steps as a SharePoint Developer, Team Leader or Solution Architect   
• #8: Like a human life, an application’s lifecycle is demarcated by significant events. It begins with an idea: Why don’t we build something that does this? Once the application is created, the next big event is deployment, when the application goes into production. And finally, when it no longer has business value, the application reaches end of life and is removed from service.
• #26: Devs“It works on my machine”“Can’t find the source control for this version”“Haven’t got the source control”“I’ve made changes in SharePoint Root”“I copied it to the GAC manually”Admins“We don’t know where to deploy it!”“What version is in Production?”
• #27: Automate building of WSPEnforce that all artefacts get deployed via WSP.No manual copying of files to SharePoint RootDisaster RecoveryCheck in policyBuild StampingBuild ServerSeparate serverDon’t install SharePoint on it!Get administrators to push to environments…or automate it (PowerShell 2.0 remoting)
• #28: We’ve discussed the operating system options, now let’s look at what needs to be installed. The developer’s PC will have Visual Studio and SharePoint 2010 installed. You will use unit testing, smoke testing, and leverage the capabilities of Visual Studio for F5 deployment. In a SharePoint 2007 environment, you can use a number of tools to enable this such as WSP Builder, VSeWSS 1.3, or STSDEV. In a 2010 environment, Visual Studio 2010 provides integrated development capabilities for SharePoint. (build)Once you have written and unit tested your code, you check it into a source code repository such as Visual Studio Team System’s Team Foundation Server. Team Foundation Server provides the enterprise source code repository and application lifecycle management capabilities to support an enterprise development team. (build)After the code is checked in, a nightly build or continuous integration server will create the WSP. Here, we see Visual Studio Team System’s Team Build installed on a server with only the SharePoint 2010 DLLs. The product team will be releasing guidance to show how to configure a build server with only the SharePoint 2010 DLLs deployed so that you do not need to install SharePoint on your build server. This allows you to perform unit testing and build operations in a clean environment. Further guidance will be coming from the SharePoint product team as we near RTM on how to achieve this. (build)Since the build server created the WSP, it should be checked into the source repository so that the installation can be repeated in the future and its version maintained. The next step is to install and activate the WSP. This can be achieved as part of the build process. (build)The staging environment is now ready for automated testing and warm-blooded user testing.
• #30: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd293540.aspx
• #35: SharePoint is now a part of the toolset out of the gates!
• #37: http://www.cruisecontrolnet.org/projects/ccnet/wiki
• #40: Sandboxed-compatible Visual Web Part This item template enables you to use a visual designer to create SharePoint web parts that can be deployed in a SharePoint 2010 sandboxed solution.Sandboxed Compilation This extension displays build errors when you use types or members in a SharePoint 2010 sandboxed project which are not allowed in the SharePoint sandbox environment.