Avoid unnoying authentication requests to WHS

This helped me.

My Powershell Profile

I updated my profile in .\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 to include SharePoint:

function prompt {
$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle=$(get-location)
"$ ";
}

#Set environment variables for Visual Studio Command Prompt
pushd 'c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC'
cmd /c "vcvarsall.bat&set" |
foreach {
if ($_ -match "=") {
$v = $_.split("="); set-item -force -path "ENV:\$($v[0])" -value "$($v[1])"
}
}
popd
write-host "`nVisual Studio 2010 Command Prompt variables set." -ForegroundColor Yellow

& ' C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\CONFIG\POWERSHELL\Registration\\sharepoint.ps1'
write-host "`nSharePoint environment set." -ForegroundColor Yellow

Kill Projects and Develop Agile Programs

http://ctotodevelopers.blogspot.com/2011/06/kill-projects-and-develop-agile.html

Best practices of the past

Looks like SharePoint faithfully following the best practices of 10 years ago. Lots of XML files, XSLT - some of younger developers don't remember the hype surrounding these at the turn of the millennium. When I experienced pain of setting up BCS in SharePoint 2010, it reminded me of EJB as they were around 2000: lots of duplication in various XML and code files, typo-unforgiving environment, etc.

Come on! It's 2011! Everyone is talking about "convention over configuration", "view engine", Razr, code-first Entity Framework, etc. Are we going to see these in SharePoint 2020?

Evil security in Win2008R2

On Windows Server 2008 R2 there is no way to install assembly into GAC. Drag and drop - get "Access denied". Gacutil is not installed!

Had to copy gacutil.exe and gacutil.exe.config from my Windows 7 workstation to the server, then can install assemblies without any problems. Evil security again???

Development experience in SharePoint still sucks!

Struggling through BDC Model creation in Visual Studio: what a tedious and unforgiving process. Almost no feedback or error messages...

To create a List I have to edit an XML file...

Aspect-oriented programming

AOP and policy injection has low adoption because the use cases suggested are not that important. After all, security and logging has already pretty robust frameworks in both .Net and Java, and other use cases seem just lame...

Instead, where AOP can actually help is to enforce the Open-Closed principle, because it gives you a better alternative to subclass the classes trying to avoid modification. Rather than create derived classes a developer can create aspects or policies that extend the behavior of the class without having to modify it or create a string dependency through rigid inheritance structure.

SQL Sentry Plan Explorer

Really good tool for exploring SQL Server execution plans.

http://sqlsentry.net/plan-explorer/sql-server-query-view.asp