One of the new things in SQL Server 2008 R2 is Remote Blob Storage (RBS) which allows admins to setup SQL to save data that would normally go into a BLOB field to be stored somewhere else using an RBS provider. This provider could store data on a cheaper disk solution (compared to the expensive disk solutions usually selected for SQL Server), to a SAN or maybe even into the cloud… it really doesn’t matter where. The point is that BLOBs can be kept out of a SQL Server DB.

For SharePoint this has big implications because as a document/attachment centric product, it stores a LOT of data in BLOBs generating large content databases. For a while people have asked if you could store that data outside of SQL which was pretty much not the case. OK, we did have External Blob Storage (EBS), but it was not recommended.

SharePoint 2010 when combined with SQL Server 2008 R2 allows you do RBS so you can keep everything in your content DB’s except the BLOBs. However this shouldn’t be a knee jerk decision…

One thing I’m seeing in many developer sessions I do are developers asking this same question and when you explain what RBS is and how it works, many folks jump on it. However this should be something that is discussed and debated with your SQL Server admins & server admins. Why?

Think about the backup & restore story. You need to make sure the backups of both your SharePoint servers, content databases and now, if you’re employing RBS, the place where the blobs are stored. Considering SharePoint is a collaborative solutions and those who are looking to employ RBS are usually those with heavy SharePoint investments & high usage. Therefore you need to carefully coordinate the availability of the SQL Servers as well as the underlying BLOB storage as well as the backup strategy.

We at Critical Path Training announced a handful of free one-hour webcasts over the next three months devoted to SharePoint 2010. All webcasts are delivered by our premier SharePoint professionals such as David Mann, Asif Rehmani, Scot Hillier, Wouter van Vugt, Ted Pattison and myself. Topics include:

• PowerShell Boot Camp for SharePoint Professionals
• Exploring the New Service Application Framework in SharePoint 2010
• Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010: Top 5 Great Things to Know!
• SharePoint 2010 Introduces Feature Upgrade Enhancements
• Developing with SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions
• Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint Server 2010
• SharePoint UI Extensibility
• SharePoint Workflow: From Napkin to Business Process
• Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Visio 2010
• Fun with the ECMAScript Client Object Model

If you’re interested, hit our site (www.CriticalPathTraining.com), login and register for a free webcast today!

» Critical Path Training Free Online Webcasts

Going to the SharePoint 2010 Pro Summit Conference in Las Vegas the week of March 16-19, 2009? No? Well, are you a SharePoint person that’s going to be in the greater Vegas area? We’ll be doing another SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night in Las Vegas the night before the big show starts (or in the case if you’re one of the pre-conference session attendees, unwind): Tuesday, March 16, 2009 from 7p – whenever. Come join other SharePoint professionals for a good drink and banter at the Carmel in Bellagio. They say they are an ideal venue for 150 people… let’s overrun the place! :)

Like all SharePint’s, we don’t reserve the venue… it’s just a place to unwind before the show. You never know who you’ll run into or how crowded it will be. It’s a perfect place to meet up with people you only know virtually via their blogs or on Twitter!

If you plan on attending, please drop a comment on this post for an idea of how many folks will be around. And don’t forget to follow SharePoint on Twitter @sharepint as well as on Facebook!

Arpan Shah of Microsoft announced last Friday that they SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will RTM next month, in April 2010 & the official launch date is on May 12, 2010.

This marks a big milestone… after a year of SharePoint and Office being in beta and available to many internal testers under the TAP program and a public beta late last year, we’re now on the cusp of a public release of the final version.

After working with SharePoint 2010 for over 1.5 yrs I’m looking forward to the final version and being able to teach SharePoint 2010 on the final bits and seeing customers start their roll outs. Should be an exciting time!

» SharePoint Team Blog: SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 Launch

MSDN has been hosting chats on various topics such as Windows CE, SQL Server, Office development, .NET Development… you name it. In just over a week’s time they will be hosting another on SharePoint… co-hosted by myself and fellow SharePoint MVP Rob Foster (who’s also a co-host of the SharePoint Podshow). Here are the details:

Chat with the SharePoint MVP Experts
Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you're seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN forums. This is the first time we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live. So please join us and bring on the questions! This chat will cover WSS, MOSS and the SharePoint 2010 beta. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general questions.

March 15, 2010
9a – 10a PT (GMT –0800)

Interested? Mark you calendar (heck, go ahead and add it to your calendar) and I’ll see you there!

» MSDN Online Chats

Got word this week that I’ll be presenting two sessions at TechEd 2010 North America speaking on SharePoint 2010:

• Developing Document Sets in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management
  In this session, learn about a new capability in SharePoint Server 2010 that allows users to create a single work product that is comprised of many components: Document Sets. This session begins with an introduction of the out-of-the-box capabilities of document sets and then moves into how developers can customize and extend document sets for unique solutions.
• Upgrading and Improving Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 WCM Sites to SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management
  SharePoint Server 2010 delivers a rich new environment for managing and authoring Web content, along with a wide range of platform improvements. In this session we demonstrate a live upgrade of a SharePoint site from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Along the way, we discuss key upgrade considerations, review the changes required to implement the fluent UI for content authoring and show how to enable new features like video streaming, tagging, ratings, and wikis in a publishing scenario.

Critical Path Training will also have a booth with some cool giveaways and I’ll put together another SharePoint by Day, SharePint by night… stay tuned for more details on that.

Are you looking to learn how to leverage SharePoint Designer 2010 to customize and create robust solutions with no code or physical access to the SharePoint 2010 server? We at Critical Path Training have a new course devoted to using SharePoint Designer 2010 written by a leading SharePoint Designer 2010 expert and SharePoint MVP Asif Rehmani.

Asif has been teaching, presenting, writing and consulting on SharePoint since 2002 spoken about SharePoint Designer 2010 at numerous major conferences including last fall’s SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. He’s also one of the authors of WROX’s Professional Office SharePoint Designer 2007 & is currently working on a SPD 2010 book as well. Check out a sampling of Asif’s work from the stuff he’s posted to YouTube!

This class, Creating No-Code SharePoint Designer Solutions for SharePoint 2010, is being offered for a limited time at 30% off the regular pricing while SharePoint is still in a pre-release beta (note this is a limited offer until SharePoint hits the big release date we’re all anticipating). Here’s a list of our upcoming dates:

• March 8-12 : Chicago, IL
• May 3-7 : Tampa, FL
• June 28 – July 2 : Redmond, WA

We’re also offering this class in an online format. The agenda is slightly different (two modules are exclusive to the hands-on in person class), but it’s a great way to get the same class for those of you with limited travel budgets:

• March 29 – April 2
• May 24-28
• July 19-23

Interested? Register today!

Over the last few months I’ve fielded quite a few questions in person at conferences, via email or via Twitter from folks who were interested in what my plans were for my DevExpress CodeRush & Refactor extensions I wrote for Visual Studio 2008 for SharePoint developers.

If you aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, back in 2007 I created a few extensions for those customers who had bought a copy of DevExpress’ CodeRush & Refactor Pro! products. These were aimed to make SharePoint development a bit easier. One was a suite of plugins and templates (which was dependent on a licensed and installed copy of CodeRush), the other was a tool window that only required the free DXCore Visual Studio AddIn.

After working with new SharePoint tools in Visual Studio 2010 for the last year+, I’ve come to the conclusion that my tools are no longer really necessary. The stuff Microsoft gives us OOTB are so robust and extensible using MEF, it’s better to extend them that way than to base off a commercial product. Therefore I’ve decided to not upgrade or port my extensions to Visual Studio 2010.

I still love CodeRush & Refactor Pro… I just don’t plan to upgrade my my tools for the latest release of SharePoint or Visual Studio. I do have some ideas around how to extend Visual Studio for various things… I’ll post those here on my blog.

Recently I ran into a little challenge recently on a Silverlight 3 project using the SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model (ClientOM). I wanted to bind a collection of list items I was getting back from SharePoint to a list box. I wanted to have a way to easily use the elegant data binding syntax in Silverlight without having to write managed code… something I could reuse over and over in a few projects.

The challenge is that the data in a SharePoint list item as seasoned SharePoint developers know is in a named collection. For instance, if you want the DueDate field, you access it using the SPListItem[“DueDate”].Tostring() syntax (ListItem[“DueDate”].ToString() with the ClientOM). Unfortunately the binding syntax in Silverlight isn’t very friendly for this type of data.

Thankfully there is a capability in Silverlight (and WPF) that allows you to create converters. Basically a converter takes in an object, the thing being bound to the control, and returns back another object. Once this converter is registered, you can then reference it in your data binding syntax in XAML.

Custom Converter

The first thing I did was write the code for the converter and drop it in the project. As you can see from the code below, I first check to see if there is content passed in during data binding and also default the field to show as “Title”. This is done by checking a parameter that is passed into the method (more on this in the XAML data binding in a moment). I then check to see if the name contains the prefix of “Lookup.”. If so, I do some special stuff to get the value from a lookup field, otherwise I just grab the data and return it back as a string.

In order to use this converter, you need to register it in the XAML page you’re going to use it in. Since I use it in multiple places in this project I’m doing, I did this in the App.xaml file:

Data Binding XAML

With everything in place, I then write the pieces that fetched the data from SharePoint using the ClientOM and then bound it to the page’s DataContext property. Nothing fancy there… what I want to show you is the data binding syntax. When I data bound the ClientOM ListItem object I want to use my custom converter. I also want to pass in a parameter telling the converter which field to use.

In the following screenshot you can see how I’ve registered the converter for the Text property on both TextBox controls. Notice how one is using the Price field (which you’d get on the server like this: SPListItem[“Price”]) and a lookup field in the second (SPListItem[“Category”]).

Brief reminder if you’re interested, there’s a free SharePoint virtual conference going on today for the North American folks. There’s a European version (timing is different from the NA one). Register now… it’s free!

The folks who bring you SharePoint Connections, and this spring’s SharePoint 2010 Pro Summit in Las Vegas, NV, are putting on another free online virtual conference. There are two dates, February 16th for the North American crowd and February 18th for the European crowd. This one day show has a killer price point – it’s FREE!!!

I’ll be presenting one session, Exploring the New Custom Service Capabilities in SharePoint 2010, on the new SharePoint 2010 service application infrastructure for developers. Hope to see you there!

» SharePoint Connections - SharePoint 2010 Developer Virtual Conference