Every six-months Microsoft Services hosts a technical readiness conference. I actually had some time today to attend a few sessions and got some very useful links to some resources for SharePoint development that I did not know about.

 

There is a new CTP for the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint. Version 1.3 now available from the Microsoft Connect site.  Improvements include installation support for x64 Windows Server (thank you!), and command line building.  I’ll need to spend some time checking these out!

 

Another cool tool that I would love to start using in our own projects is the SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool.  It works a lot like FXCop to analyze your SharePoint SDK code and make sure that you are properly disposing of the objects in the SDK.   SharePoint objects use a mix of managed and unmanaged memory that is allocated on the heap using malloc calls.  The objects that do this always implement the IDisposable pattern… however, a common mistake is to not call Dispose or to not put the objects in using statements.   This tool can be integrated into your build to help find those errors early before they bring down your SharePoint server.

 

Related to the new v 1.3 Extensions, there is a great blog post by Michael Washman that shows how to use the latest CTP to deploy Workflows. I’m definitely going to be walking through this sample later.

 

Finally, some more reading to pile up on your nightstand… the Patterns & Practices team has a site on codeplex that focuses on SharePoint Architectural Guidance.  Their last release was back in Nov. 2008, but I still have not gotten around to reading it.  One benefit of posting to my blog is that maybe I will get around to it…maybe. Here is the direct link if you find the time to download it too.