Robert on Software Development

SharePoint 2010 and Beyond

I am not privy to the details of SharePoint 2010. But like an upcoming blockbuster movie or expansion to an MMORPG, it’s fun to dream about what might come.

Now I shall look into my broken crystal ball and share you with my prognostications of SharePoint 2010 and beyond.

STSADM becomes a web application
I don’t know how many holy wars this one will cause, but I expect there will be much rejoicing, especially among those who are new to SharePoint development and administration. STSADM is a powerful (and extensible) tool that requires some, well, getting used to, but once you wield its power, you can do anything.

A web-based version of STSADM would make some of the more basic operations a bit easier, such as restoring a content database or provisioning a site. Silverlight would be pretty great for this. A WPF STSADM would be gorgeous.

SharePoint Central Administration is an ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX application
Let’s admit it: SPCA is clunky. The workflow of setting up a server and applications inside it is, well, clunky. A modern, Web 2.0 version of Central Administration would be a wonderful thing. It’d also be nice if CA could recover from my mistakes, but that means I would have to upgrade.

SharePoint sites are containers
Someday, everything SharePoint hosts for you will exist as a container, a self-contained bit that can be easily copied (or moved) from one SharePoint farm to another. Each of these containers will be object-oriented, extensible via code. Yeah, I can dream. And I dream BIG.

Visual Studio supports SharePoint projects
We sort of have this already, but the way it’s implemented is not de facto from Microsoft and you have to get separate implementations for, say, Web Parts versus SPJobDefinitions. Visual Studio will support a fluent interface for SharePoint application development, and support SharePoint interactive debugging natively. It will be a day of much rejoicing.

I’ll add SharePoint Designer integration into Visual Studio (and thus Team Foundation Server) here as well.

Documentation is plentiful and meaningful
This isn’t meant to make a dig at Microsoft, but let’s be honest: SharePoint developer doco is quite anemic. As new versions of SharePoint are released, the documentation will drastically improve and will serve as a starting point for SharePoint developers. Quick Starts will be included as well.

SharePoint will have a brand new .NET 4.0 object model
This is wishful thinking (due to compatibility) but someday we’ll get an entirely new SharePoint object model built on .NET, possibly 4.0 or later. It’d be awesome to have something like LINQ to SharePoint, or even represent SharePoint functionality in the Entities Framework.

ASP.NET MVC will be available for SharePoint
Someday SharePoint will natively support ASP.NET MVC out of the box. You can do this now, to an extent, but I’d like to see SharePoint make its data available in the model (like lists), and give us a way to build web parts as views, and perhaps expose its object model in an MVC-fluent way.

These are just a few of the things I’d love to see SharePoint offer in future versions. I acknowledge that I’ve barely scratched the surface, but my crystal ball can only do so much!

In a future post, I’ll take a look at some of the more technical aspects of SharePoint development and what I’d like to see in the future.