1. Enhanced collaboration features – status integration with my sites,
   newsfeeds, my network, all that social media work around the my site.  This
   was totally hush hush.  I expect to see this area really expanded through the
   public beta in terms of best practices and community awareness.  I hope to
   see some real effort from the community around helping establishing how to take
   advantage of these features. There are a few mentions in the blogosphere including
   John Anderson’s summary from the
   SPC session on Social Computing, I’m sure there will be more as the presentation
   and bits become available.  Also make sure you get on the RSS of the
   SharePoint Enterprise Social Computing Blog. SharePoint 2010 supports tagging
   content as well as providing enhanced blog authoring capabilities. There’s a
   new group authentication feature that’s based on distribution list or organization
   and a new rich text editor for creating wikis. In addition, calendars from Microsoft
   Exchange Server can be merged with SharePoint calendars.
2. External lists – this was a great demo during the keynote.
   Showing a SQL table with contact information subsequently shown in a SharePoint
   external contact list, taken offline in the SharePoint Workspace, and contact objects
   shown in Outlook.  BDC becomes BCS (Business Connectivity Services) with even
   much easier systems integration. There’s some documentation on
   MSDN for creating an external list.  Also follow the
   Business Connectivity Services Team Blog
3. Large lists – the list throttling was shown off in SharePoint 2010,
   but the real list sizes showing real scale and control from the farm administrator
   was impressive.  This was definitely used by the competition in the previous
   version to suggest that SharePoint didn’t scale.  Despite the ability to scale
   to 5 million items in a list in the 2007 version, the 2000 item limit per view was
   often suggested as a limit for the list due to poor use by end users of the features
   such as indexed columns, limiting the views or using folders.  Now with multi
   column indexes, and better control over item limited views, you can ensure that
   the queries are optimized and the list throttling and viewing will be better managed
   for performance of the server and the list.  The happy hour controls is a happy
   medium for those needing to break out to do queries that are not the best.
   The SPDevWiki has some of the
   throttling screenshots and link to the ITPRO sneak peak video.  Watch
   the keynote
   video demos that Arpan does.
4. Better Network Differencing & SharePoint Offline in SharePoint
   Workspace – I stopped by the SharePoint workspace booth, and I think the
   biggest, best innovations are in the differencing algorithm between the client and
   server as well as offline (closer?) experience of SharePoint.  It’s still far
   from the 100% offline browsing experience, that may be a pipe dream with what can
   be done with webparts and search.  But now we get lists, and external lists
   offline as well as what we had before.  The peer to peer is still there, but
   the SharePoint uses are much more core to the product.  The licensing model
   pushes this tool mainstream with Office 2010 deployments.  What’s it missing…
   you gotta know:  Blogs, Wikis, Pages… Of course you can get Blogs RSS feeds
   in Outlook.  So really it comes down to Wikis and Pages. 
   SharePoint Workspace Team Blog
5. High Availability/ Disaster Recovery Innovation – While I can’t
   give this area a 10, I do give it a B for effort.  While replication is obviously
   a gap.  (I know you tried.) The now built in to be mirroring aware, and the
   removal of fault tolerance of the services such as scaled out indexing will make
   it TONS easier and more reliable to backup.  The configuration based backup
   is huge too.  If you’re not a SharePoint 2007 admin you don’t realize how crazy
   the backup and unreliable SSP backup/restore was. 
   SharePoint Solutions Blog on the 2010 Config Backup/Restore as well as
   Powershell with Screenshots on Disaster Recovery for 2010
6. Unattached Recovery – I think it’s pretty big deal that the
   product team decided to invest in the ability to recover from a restored database.
   I remember asking for this pretty much every version.  So I do have to give
   them big kudos for hearing me and others around the ability to recover out of the
   database.  The UI is in central admin.  This was shown in the IT Pro sneak
   peak video, but I wasn’t able to clearly talk about what they had to do to support
   this.  Essentially there is now an API for recovering data out of a database
   that isn’t in the farm.  This is huge for pulling data out of a snapshot, and
   really reduces the need for a recovery farm, while I don’t think it fully eliminates
   that need due to discovery, but that’s another blog. 
   SPDevwiki has some screenshots and TechNet now has articles on the Topic
   of Unattached
   2010 Recovery.  Illia Sotnikov gives us
   good overview of the evolution of the 2010 Backup/Recovery features
7. Admin Insights through the Logging & Usage database, and dev dashboard
   – The logging database with published schema!  Thank you!  That’s
   awesome.  The ULS logs were such a pain, definitely looking forward to seeing
   all the right stuff getting logged and throttled into a database that does know
   what filling up drive with pure chattiness means.  (I know that was a recent
   fix as well.) Those types of things do matter!  The developer dashboard, ok,
   I’m over it.  Call it developer, that’s fine, but we’ll benefit from it too!
   The dev dashboard is pure awesome. It’s like turning on debugging.
   I’d recommend setting it to “on demand” for Intranets.
   Making it easy for support to troubleshoot complaints on a portal page, or collaboration
   sites.  Why not?  For most environments I’d suggest turning it to “on”
   for dev, and “on demand” for test. On the internet you do likely
   want to keep it off.  (Use STSADM or powershell to toggle the setting.)
   Better to have people convinced the slowness is them or the wire, not the page or
   the server.  It would be over most heads of the people browsing an internet
   page anyway who would want to blame your server or SharePoint. 
   Phil Wicklund – how to enable Dev Dashboard,
   Bob Fox has a what is Developer Dashboard, the
   SharePoint 2010 Dev Sneak Peak Video has a great demo of it.
8. Service Applications – The service oriented architectures and the
   buzz words of what SOA has become get a huge boost in SharePoint 2010.  I’d
   like the search from the central portal, the profiles from the social media farm,
   the taxonomy and meta data from the ECM environment, and analysis and access services
   from the Finance deployment.  As farms have become more specialized in large
   enterprises so have the expertise of those that run them.  The one off custom
   farms that may end up departmentalized, don’t have to be limited in their services.
   They can get the richness of the global indexing and not have that be redundant
   indexing. Serge van den Oever
   SSP is dead, long live Service Applications,
   Spence Harbar has Service Applications Model Overview, and Andrew Connell’s
   
   New Service Application Architecture
9. SharePoint Designer Enhancements like portable workflows, and granular delegation
   – I didn’t hear the buzz I was expecting to about SPD during SPC.  The huge
   innovations in SPD are exactly addressing the feedback that they were asked to implement,
   but only the SPD fans heard it.  Portable workflows is huge, so is that ability
   to have people use SPD in the way you want them to.  Only want them to use
   the FREE, yes still free
   SharePoint 2010 is free, tool for workflows, fine.  Only want
   the design team to use it for design, that’s cool.  The NDA kept us from telling
   you that SharePoint Designer really makes some big moves in the right direction
   around portability, control, and delegation.  The same areas, that I thought
   it needed most.  Let alone the even further flexibility of further integration,
   and BCS integration. SharePoint
   Designer Team Blog.
10. Sandbox Solutions – now solutions built from the SharePoint Designer
    and Visual Studio are all .WSP.  Great to see that consistency, but beyond
    that now SharePoint administrators can control the resources consumed from these
    client deployed sandboxed solutions which don’t require the admin to deploy.
    While in the past SharePoint administrators needed to deploy any solution, this
    option, yep it’s an option, allows you to throttle the system resources and allow
    those who own/administer sites to deploy solutions.  The delegation and control
    is there.  I think we’ll see much more best practices from more usage of sandboxed
    solutions, but now custom farms can still run out of the box software.  It
    will be very interesting to see what can be done with these and how well the throttling
    of system resources works with these solutions. Eli Robillard’s
    Enhanced Security with Sandboxed Solutions, MSDN already has a
    Module on Sandboxed Solutions for Webparts
11. New SharePoint editions—In an effort to better unify the SharePoint
    lineup, Microsoft will make some big changes to the SharePoint editions with the
    2010 release. Windows SharePoint Server (WSS) is gone, and so is Microsoft Office
    SharePoint Server (MOSS). The free WSS has been replaced by the new SharePoint Foundation
    2010. MOSS is replaced by SharePoint Server 2010, which will be available in either
    the Standard or Enterprise edition as well as in editions for strictly internal
    sites and for Internet or extranet sites.
12. New hardware requirements—Like the majority of new Microsoft servers,
    SharePoint 2010 will ship only as a 64-bit product. If you’re deploying SharePoint
    on new hardware, this situation shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s definitely
    a consideration if you’re planning to upgrade an existing SharePoint server.
13. New software requirements—In addition to new hardware requirements,
    SharePoint 2010 will require an x64 edition of either Windows Server 2008 or Server
    2008 R2. It also requires a 64-bit version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server
    2005.
14. SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer—With the SharePoint 2010 release,
    SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer will be incorporated as part of the base SharePoint
    product. This tool provides Microsoft’s guidance for SharePoint implementation
    and troubleshooting. A Problems and Solutions page in the analyzer helps you solve
    common implementation problems.
15. FAST Search—The new SharePoint release will incorporate the FAST
    Search technology that Microsoft acquired from the Norway-based Fast Search &
    Transfer company. The FAST technology provides a superset of the original SharePoint
    search capabilities. As its name implies, FAST Search is designed for high-end scalability.
    SharePoint 2010
    can scale to 100 million documents and FAST search will take us beyond 100 million! It supports a number of enhanced capabilities, including a content-processing pipeline,
    metadata extraction, visual search, and advanced linguistics. You can have
    multiple index servers and index partitions can represent a portion of the index
    and live on the query server.  Partitions can be spread across multiple query
    servers but can also exist on multiple query servers for redundancy and load
    balancing.
16. Usage reporting and logging—SharePoint 2010 includes a new database
    designed to support usage reporting and logging. The usage database is extensible,
    allowing third-party vendors to create custom reports based on the information it
    contains.
17. Visio Services—Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 lets users share
    and collaborate on Visio diagrams. A built-in viewer lets SharePoint users view
    Visio files in their browser without having Visio installed on their system. Visio
    Services also retrieves and renders any external data used in the Visio diagrams.
18. New browser support—SharePoint 2010 supports an extended set of
    browsers. It’s designed to support XHTML 1.0–compliant browsers and will support
    Internet Explorer(IE) 8.0 and IE 7.0, Firefox, and Safari. Notably, IE 6.0 isn’t
    supported. So far, there’s been no official mention of Google Chrome or Opera.
19. The Business Connectivity Services —The Business Connectivity Services
    (BCS) used to be called the Business Data Catalog (BDC).  It provides access
    to your external data sources such as databases, external business systems and web
    services.  Using BCS, External Content Types can be created that allow read/write
    access back to the external data sources.  External lists, which operate much
    like normal lists can be created in SharePoint from these External Content Types
    so you can have access to these external systems right inside of SharePoint. The
    Business Connectivity Services
20. List Validations —List validations are a very powerful way to validate
    not just documents but any content before it goes into a list.  This feature
    improves column property entry, which in the Document Imaging is called indexing
    or in the collaboration world, often called tagging.  List Validations were
    very limited in SharePoint 2007, but have major improvements in SharePoint 2010
    that can be leveraged:
    • Hidden Columns – This setting is unique per content type, not just by the site column,
      which makes is very granular.
    • No Duplicate Values – This will enable lists to act like databases, forcing items
      to be unique.
    • Column Validations – Column validations will force column data to meet conditions
      before content is added to SharePoint.
21. Enterprise Managed Metadata — The Enterprise Managed Metadata Service allows you to centrally define taxonomies
    that can be leveraged across farms to quickly classify and find content.  There
    are two main features of the service, the first being the ability to publish content
    types to other site collections and farms and the other being the taxonomy term
    store.

    The Taxonomy Term Store allows two new columns to be used in lists.  The first
    being terms allows a static list to be created and used to validate during data
    entry.  The second is managed keywords, which allows freeform entry of multiple
    values using existing keywords as suggestions.

22. Remote Blob Storage — External BLOB Storage (EBS) has evolved into Remote Blob Storage (RBS), and helps
    provide a more scalable architecture.  RBS allows BLOBS (documents) to be stored
    in external systems in order to keep the database size smaller and more manageable.
    Transactional consistency allows for update capabilities and allows Write
    Once Read Many (WORM) mode devices to deny a delete or modify operation.  RBS
    is completely transparent to the SharePoint API so existing custom and third party
    code will continue to function as expected.
23. Audit Trail — Audit trails are not just for workflow anymore as they were in SharePoint 2007.
    The audit trail functionality applies to most events pertaining to documents
    and it is extensible.  The audit trail can be used to track all scanning events
    so documents will have a consistent audit trail from the moment of capture until
    they are archived.
24. Document IDs— Document IDs is a new capability that assigns a unique identification number to
    a document.  It is embedded with a special URL and can be used to retrieve
    a document regardless of where it is moved within a site collection.  This
    is very useful because in many third party scenarios it was very difficult to create
    links to documents as there was no permanent ID attached to content in SharePoint
    unless you added the data yourself or used searching scenarios.
25. Document Sets—A Document Set enables grouping of documents belonging to a workflow, project or
    other similar group together into a single working set.  Document sets allow
    these documents to have one consistent set of meta data, can be downloaded as single
    ZIP file and can be work flowed as one unit.

What are design patterns? More specifically, why should you care?

As with any technology, there may be one or more specific meanings that are commonly used to describe the technology. I feel that this is especially true when it comes to computer science, and the application of design patterns. To quote Wikipedia, “A design pattern in architecture and computer science is a formal way of documenting a solution to a design problem in a particular field of expertise.” What does this definition really mean? To me, it means that a design pattern is an abstract way to describe a problem through logic and structure in your code; i.e., you write your code in such a way that it reflects the idea behind what the design pattern is supposed to achieve.

To put it more simply, a design pattern by itself is not a solution to a problem; the only solution to a problem is the code itself. A design pattern is nothing more than an idea of how the programmer decides to look at a problem, which helps them determine the code that they will write. This is just as true as saying that it is good practice to encapsulate a piece of code through inheritance or abstraction. It is just another design principle of “good object-oriented design”.

Design Patterns just over-complicate code!

Actually, no they do not. If a correctly-implemented design pattern looks complicated, it is more likely because the person reading the code does not understand the design pattern, not because the design pattern is complicated. Every time that I think about this argument, I can’t help but to remember a time back when I was first starting out and I came across some code that used the Singleton design pattern. At this time of my career I had never heard of design patterns, and I didn’t even know what object-oriented was (remember, we are not born programmers; we are learned programmers). I remember cursing the original programmers for using such a “stupid and over-complicated” technology; in reality, I just never understand its purpose, and what benefits it gave to me.

Since then I’ve done everything that I can to learn about object-oriented design, and design patterns, and when I look back on that memory I can’t help but to laugh at myself because of my knee-jerk response to something that I had no working knowledge about. This type of response is a similar response that I’ve gotten these past few months at my current employer. It’s frustrating as a developer to hear this type of response, especially from colleagues who are otherwise very intelligent and responsible developers. I digress…

The use of design patterns are not meant to simplify (read: reduce) your code. They are meant to simplify the complexity of your ideas, and the expression of those ideas. For example, which is easier for you to read and repeat:

We need to collect a large amount of data from the Acme sources, parse those sources into a format that is understood by our system(s), and then run several different sub-applications to display results, store results, generate reports based on those results, as well as notify our users that we have updated our results. Additionally, we need to be able to add/modify this process at any time, without having to modify the code very much.

or…

We need to use the Observer pattern to distribute the results that we model from the Acme sources. Some observers that we will use will display, store, generate reports, and notify our users. Other observers may be introduced at any time.

As a developer, I can say that I prefer the second version of these requirements. It tells me everything that I need to know, without having to get too deep into the implementation details. And, if we needed to explain this system to a non-developer, we can simply omit using the phrase “Observer pattern” and “observer” to make it more generic and understandable.

While I understand that there is a semantic difference between complex code, and complex logic, I find that complex logic is less complex once that logic is understood. What I mean by that is if you, as a developer, understand another developer’s rationale, you are less likely to think of their idea(s) as complicated. With that said, if more developers were to understand object-oriented design, and design patterns, the argument that design patterns over-complicate code would dwindle. So, as a developer, you have to ask yourself: do I care enough about programming to continue to learn new techniques, or am I comfortable enough with my current level of knowledge to not bother putting in the effort?

If you aren’t willing to understand something, then what right do you have to complain about it? Certainly, how do you expect to argue for or against something if you are not willing to understand it?

References and Reading Materials

• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SoftwareDesignPatternsIndex
• http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfdp/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

Original Source:  http://dohpaz42.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/design-patterns/