Claims based Authentication in SharePoint
If you are looking for a good intro into claims based Authentication, check out the session by Nauzad Kapadia here http://www.microsoft.com/india/teched2011/tech-sessions.aspx
Select Chalk talks; Its the first session. I attended the session in person and found it really useful.
SharePoint 2010 Patterns and Practices released
Get the guidance here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff770300.aspx . A lot of resuable components and guidance available. A must-check-out for any SharePoint 2010 developer.
Set the default publishing page layout in SharePoint 2010
So we have heard a lot of the one click page creation available in SharePoint 2010 which would enable authors to create pages without having to enter lots of info. What is happening here is that on selecting the Create Page option from Site Actions, the page that comes up for authoring is the default page layout set for the site.
One drawback here is that to set the default page layout, you would need to modify the Onet.xml file in the site definition; there is no direct way you can do this from the UI. Even if we restrict the page layouts available for a site from the UI, the default always points to the property set for DefaultPageLayout under the publishing feature in the Onet.xml.
Now if only they came up with a UI to set that…
SharePoint 2010 Books
Check out this site that has a list of SharePoint 2010 books, categeorized and with reviews.
Naming Conventions in SharePoint 2010
One of the small.. change that I like of SharePoint 2010 is the naming convention that really clarifies things. One is WSS changed to SharePoint Foundation. I knew some people though that SharePoint, MOSS and WSS where totally different things. Now Microsoft has removed “MOSS” – although I have heard some people say MOSS 2010, and named to SharePoint server and SharePoint Foundation. Sweet, clear and unambiguous.
Yet another improvement was the so called ”SSO” in SharePoint 2007. People used to think that SharePoint provided the SSO engine that could enable them to have seamless browsing experience between SharePoint and SAP 
. Thankfully it’s named to Secure Store in 2010, so that misconception does not arise, freeing us from discussions with customers as to why they would have to purchase a separate SSO solution even they got SharePoint which has SSO as a feature.
Prescriptive Architecture
A colleague of mine, Vinod Sarma along with Javed Sikander from Microsoft had created a white paper on prescriptive architecture for Electronic commerce and Digital Marketing and we have also created a reference application using the concepts explained in the paper; pretty interesting stuff. You can get the white paper at www.microsoft.com/retail
We will be presenting this in the stall at TechEd 2010 so if you have any questions on the architecture do drop by.
TechEd India 2010
Tech-Ed India is Bangalore from 12 to 14th April. We have our own stall for this.. and guess what the theme for the stall is going to be.. SharePoint . Will be demoing some of the solutions we have built in SharePoint
Planning to have cool prizes so do drop by to say hi .
SharePoint 2007 Vs 2010
Have moved this post to http://jacksonc.wordpress.com/sharepoint-2010-vs-2007/
Interested in buying good books on SharePoint 2010? Check out the list of SharePoint 2010 books available here http://sharepointbooks.web.officelive.com
Retail solution at NRF, New York
We are presenting a BI Solution on SharePoint 2010 at the NRF. Lot of learnings of working with the new version; trying to create an actual solution is quite different from just trying out POCs .
More details of the solution here.
SharePoint 2010 installation on Windows 7
From a SharePoint development environment setup perspective, one of the best things that SharePoint 2010 has to offer is the ability to install on Windows 7. Till now I have used a Windows Server 2003 server on my Dell Vostro laptop (I dont have enough patience wait for a VPC to start up ) and there are a few drivers that are unsupported / unavailable.Now with this release I can finally get a supported OS on my laptop and also install the software I use a lot.
If you thought that installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 was going to be a breeze, you are in for a shock like I did one morning where I sat down and started doing just that. There is an article in MSDN that explains how to do it.. scripts to be run, config files to be modified the whole works. No next, next, finish for this.
BTW make sure the SQL Server version you are running is atleast 2005 SP3 CU3 (9.00.4220.00) or 2008 SP1 CU2 (10.00.2714.00) which you can download from the MSDN support site.
