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New SharePoint 2010 Books from Wrox

Reza Alirezaei

Pictured above is Reza Alirezaei giving a presentation on SharePoint at last year’s TechDays conference in Toronto. Reza’s one of our go-to guys for SharePoint, and I’m pleased to announce that a book he co-authored has just been published by Wrox: Professional SharePoint 2010 Development.

Cover of "Professional SharePoint 2010 Development"

I don’t have the book just yet, but here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Learn to leverage the features of the newest version of SharePoint, in this update to the bestseller

More than simply a portal, SharePoint is Microsoft’s popular content management solution for building intranets and Web sites or hosting wikis and blogs. Offering broad coverage on all aspects of development for the SharePoint platform, this comprehensive book shows you exactly what SharePoint does, how to build solutions, and what features are accessible within SharePoint.

Written by one of the most recognized names in SharePoint development, Professional SharePoint 2010 Development offers an extensive selection of field-tested best practices that shows you how to leverage the vast power of this multi-faceted tool to build custom workflow and content management applications. Plus, you’ll discover how to take advantage of the new features to roll out new SharePoint sites or upgrade existing sites.

  • SharePoint guru Tom Rizzo offers broad coverage of the newest version of SharePoint, Microsoft’s popular content management solution
  • Addresses how the new version adds enhanced developer support for ASP.NET, Ajax, LINQ, and Silverlight
  • Demonstrates how to take advantage of new features, including improvements to offline and mobile client capabilities, social networking additions, and more
  • Covers user experience development, platform services, social media features, event handling, the business data catalog, forms and workflow, business intelligence, and more

With this book, you’ll get exhaustive coverage on the many possibilities that exist with SharePoint.

Congratulations, Reza, on the release of the book!

Cover of "Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development" In addition to a professional-level book on SharePoint, Wrox have a beginners’ book due out in June: Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development, which is probably more suited to SharePoint newbies like Yours Truly. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Discover how to take advantage of the many new features in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint provides content management (enterprise content management, Web content management, records management, and more), workflow, and social media features, and the new version boasts enhanced capabilities. This introductory-level book walks you through the process of learning, developing, and deploying SharePoint 2010 solutions.

You’ll leverage your existing skills and tools to grasp the fundamental programming concepts and practices of SharePoint 2010. The author clearly explains how to develop your first application for SharePoint 2010 and guides you through the many aspects of a SharePoint 2010 development project.

  • Explains how SharePoint is more than simply a portal and is capable of providing content management, workflow, social media features, and more
  • Details the new features and functions of SharePoint 2010 and provides a thorough look at the fundamental programming concepts and practices of SharePoint 2010
  • Walks you through how to perform common developer tasks in SharePoint and the tools required to do so
  • Reviews building and deploying Web parts, integrating Office applications with SharePoint, interacting with data in SharePoint 2010, developing Web Services for SharePoint, and creating enhanced user experiences for SharePoint

Covering everything from developing applications for SharePoint 2010 to securing those applications, Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development is an ideal introductory resource.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Games, News, Maps, Social and Music are the Most Downloaded Mobile App Types: Nielsen

What Types of Apps are People Downloading?

The surveying company Nielsen recently posted some mobile app figures from its report, the App Playbook, whose data is based on a survey of 4,200 people who downloaded a mobile phone application in the past 30 days. Here’s their chart showing the downloaded apps by category:

Graph: Categories of Applications Used in the Past 30 Days

I reworked the chart to list the categories from least to most downloaded (I also gave it a more accurate title). You can click the revised chart below to see it at full size:

Graph: Phone Apps Downloaded in the Past 30 Days

As you can see, the top 5 mobile app categories are (from most to least downloaded):

  1. Games
  2. News/Weather
  3. Maps/Navigation/Search
  4. Social Networking
  5. Music

These top categories, once boiled down to their essence, would seem to indicate that mobile app users want to:

  • Be entertained
  • Find out what’s happening
  • Know where things are

Perhaps it’s time to come up with an app that combines all three of these. I’m leaving that as an exercise for the reader.

Smartphone Penetration

Graph: 1 in 5 wireless subscribers

In the fourth quarter of 2009, 21% of American wireless subscribers – a sliver over 1 in 5 – had a smartphone. That means that there are still 4 our of 5 U.S. wireless subscribers who have yet to make a smartphone purchase.

This figure is up from 19% in the previous quarter and a significant jump up from 14% at the end of 2008. I don’t know whether the Canadian figures are similar; while we’re similar to the U.S. culturally, they get much better deals from their mobile companies, which may affect usage patterns.

Who’s Downloaded Apps, and How Many?

Graph: 1 in 6 downloads

According to Nielsen’s survey, 14% of American wireless subscribers – a shade under 1 in 6 – downloaded a mobile app in the last 30 days.

Smartphone users had an average of 22 installed apps, while feature phone users had 10. Here’s the count of installed apps for smartphones broken down by OS:

Graph: Number of Installed Apps (iPhone 37, Android 22, Palm 24, Windows Mobile 13, BlackBerry 10)

There are more figures in the NielsenWire article covering mobile app use – be sure to read it!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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My Photos from Make Web Not War 2010

I’ll post a more detailed write-up of the Make Web Not War conference later, but I thought that those of you who were there (or wished they were there) would like to see some photos as soon as possible. I’ve posted my photos at full resolution to my Make Web Not War Flickr photoset, which you can view either on Flickr or the slideshow above. The photos all have titles, and I promise I’ll finished the remainder of the descriptions over the next couple of days.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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At Make Web Not War

The business of helping out with the NerdTrain, the Make Web Not War conference, associated activities and participating in a team offsite meeting has kept me a busier than I expected to be – in fact, this has been my first chance to post a blog entry! Stories and pictures are forthcoming, but in the meantime, enjoy this video that explains what I’ve been working on for the past couple of days.

As I write this, the chaos typically associated with getting a conference set up has subsided and I hope to squeeze in a couple of posts later today as well as tomorrow.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Dan Pink on What Motivates Us

Here’s a great movie which takes the audio from a presentation by Dan Pink based on the research for his latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and augments it with video of a whiteboard cartoonist illustrating what Pink is talking about. I have no idea how long it took to film the illustration sequences, but I love the end result – I think it makes for better internet viewing of a presentation than simply watching a video of the presenter on the podium, even when accompanied by slides.

The movie covers the part of Pink’s presentation that talks about an experiment to determine whether higher pay led to better performance. The results:

  • For turnkey, mechanical, just-follow-the-instructions tasks, larger rewards do lead to better performance.
  • For tasks that call for cognitive skills, conceptual and creative thinking — even at a rudimentary level — larger rewards did the opposite: they led to poorer performance.

The sort of work we do calls for cognitive crunching certainly falls into the latter category – as Andy “Pragmatic Programmer” Hunt says, making software is one of the hardest thing humans do.

Money is a motivator, but when it comes to people who do the sort of work we do, it requires more than just money to motivation. Pink’s recommendation is to pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money, but thinking about their work instead. Once you’ve done that, there are three factors that lead to better satisfaction and performance:

  1. Autonomy: The desire to be self-directed, to direct our own lives
  2. Mastery: The urge to get better at stuff
  3. Purpose: The reason we do something

In the end, what Pink suggests is that if we treat people not like “smaller, better-smelling horses” with carrot-and-stick incentives but like people and set up the appropriate motivations, we’ll make our work and the world a little bit better.

If you enjoyed this portion of Pink’s presentation and want to see the whole 40-ish minutes, I present it below. Enjoy!

If Pink’s name rings a bell, it’s probably because you’ve heard of his other books, A Whole New Mind and the manga career guide Johnny Bunko.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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We’ll Be in Montreal This Week

Montreal: photo of poutine

Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team is headed to Montreal this week, where we’ll be getting together for our annual team meeting as well as to help run the Make Web Not War conference on Thursday.

We’re not travelling in the usual way either. We’ve hired out a VIA Rail car to take us and a lot of Make Web Not War attendees to Montreal in style. The car’s rigged with power, wifi, Xboxes, Rock Band, monitors and other goodies to make the five-ish-hour trip even more enjoyable for all that nerdy brainpower on board. The train leaves Toronto on Tuesday morning and returns on Friday – watch this space for reports from the train as well as from Montreal!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Prairie Dev Con 2010: Regina, June 2 – 3

prairie dev con

prairie provinces It’s not too late to register for Prairie Dev Con, the prairie developer conference, which takes place in Regina next week on Wednesday, June 2nd and Thursday, June 3rd – in fact, you can still get a discount on the registration fee! Register before next Monday, May 31st, and save 20% off the ticket price.

darcy lussier Winnipeg-based developer D’Arcy Lussier put together Prairie Dev Con with the goal of providing techies in the prairie provinces a developer conference with great content without having to deal with the high cost of travel and hotels. It’s a two-day conference with four tracks:

  • Web/Rich Internet Applications
  • Development Foundation
  • Application Lifecycle Management
  • Database/Business Intelligence

with fifty sessions in total.

donald belchamDonald “Brownfield Application Development in .NET” Belcham will lead a post-conference workshop, Making the Most of Brownfield Application Development, on Friday, June 4th. There’s an additional fee to attend this workshop, which you can attend either as a follow-up to the conference, or on its own (see the registration page for full details).

If you’re a developer in The Prairies and looking for a conference that provides a lot of knowledge but is close by and won’t drain your training budget, register for Prairie Dev Con!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.