Hope everyone has had a great Christmas/New Year celebrations and holidays, I haven't been able to blog as much lately due to various reasons and will try and get into the habit of doing at least one useful post per week. Last year was an interesting one during which I travelled to Seattle twice (SharePoint Conference 2008 and MVP Summit) and did quite a bit of travelling around New Zealand as well. It was also when I decided to become my own boss and started life as an independent consultant. So far so good, it has been an interesting 8 or so months with some exciting projects and great clients. Thanks to everyone who has helped me in various stages.

So what's been happening in the SharePoint world then?

WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint

Microsoft Released the WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) Toolkit for SharePoint back in December. (On 15th December it was announced on the SharePoint team blog). This provides a framework and the API capability for SharePoint sites and lists to expose data to other enterprise portal applications. To learn more about the WSRP toolkit visit the availability of the WSRP toolkit for SharePoint announcement post on the SharePoint team blog.

If your organisation has existing investments in other portal platforms the WSRP toolkit gives you the ability to leverage SharePoint and integrate from various different data sources. Also check out the Interoperability Resources Center for SharePoint on TechNet which provides a lot of information about how SharePoint can be used in various business systems integration scenarios.

You can also download the WSRP toolkit from here.

SPDisposeCheck tool for SharePoint Developers

Now if you are a smart SharePoint developer you would most definitely want to use this tool to ensure that all the whizzy code you write is not going to bring down your whole SharePoint farm. And believe me I have seen enough of these to make sure that this tool should be a must have in a developers toolkit.

Microsoft wants to help developers build better quality code that manages available memory better. We are now building a console tool that will help to evaluate customer code against the guidance that is provided. The tool, called SPDisposeCheck, will open your custom compiled assemblies recursively and validate them against the Microsoft published guidance. The output from the tool will contain messages that may indicate the SPSite and SPWeb Dispose() methods guidance are not being followed in the customers source code.

You can get the tool from the following links and if you are new to SharePoint development make sure you read the MSDN articles why it's important.

Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects

Best Practices: Common Coding Issues When Using the SharePoint Object Model

Developer Guidance for SharePoint white paper

And be sure to check out my buddy Andrew Connell's whizzy bang Visual Studio Project Utility add-in for SharePoint developers. (Enough said he's the guru when it comes to SharePoint dev)

New MVP in our neck of the woods

If you already don't have this guy's blog bookmarked and haven't set your RSS reader to read his posts then you should. I am talking about our own Matt Smith from Christchurch who has been awarded MVP for SharePoint this year. Matt has done an extraordinary amount of work not only locally in the community but also working with the SharePoint project teams back in Redmond helping shape the next version of Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint (VSeWSS). Matt is also the co-coordinator of the Christchurch SharePoint user group.

Well done and congrats to Matt!