Did some testing with SharePoint Guidance

I found this out on the MSoft patterns & practices site.

Similar to the MVC thing it is designed [one hopes] to motivate SP programmers to greater productivity levels.

One thing it does for sure is show:

• how a real application can be integrated into SP
• how many pieces-and-parts [at the code level] are frequently required to accomplish this
  

There are some gotchas that I found. For an experienced SP developer, these are easy to work-around. I have not dug in to fix all of these, but for sure fixing some of these would not be easy. They are listed here along with the perceivable symptom:

• does not work on non-port 80 webapp - instantiating the site just hangs
• workflow build issue - second project will not build complaining about feature scoping; the fix is straightforward although you also run into some Visual Studio bug fixing it (maybe this is related to the original bug)
• workflow run-time issue - could not get this to run correctly when set to the original site instantiated for the application; may be related to the fact that it must be instantiated in a site collection
• theme selection issue - the theme project does not install into the Site Settings location; so the customer cannot test it out with built-in themes
• install to more than one webapp does not work - this is because of GUID collisions
• workflow DLLs not installed in the Contoso VPC - so when you open the workflow source code, Visual Studio complains and cannot open it
• the directions talk about error checking, but when I schedule a course with the end date before the start date it spits out an ugly ASP.NET exception screen

So it is some distance from best practices. Rather than 1.0, I would call this a 0.7 version of guidance. Many of the issues above could be put into the destructions. Then someone does not have to stumble over the problems one-by-one.

Of course, it is more fun that way.

Regards..