Ravishing Features Of Sharepoint 2010 For Sharepoint Development

By Author: Marnie Pehrson
Total Articles: 9
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Business houses are growing they are entering into new ventures, recruiting new people and using different systems for managing data. All went on well but companies faced hard time when it was about data integration. SharePoint development which uses Silverlight technology to develop a custom made application to enhanced business information sharing came as a blessing to all such companies.

SharePoint 2010 is the latest introduction by the company for SharePoint development and includes advanced logging and debugging features to aid developers attain better monitoring and troubleshooting while working on custom application development projects. One of the best features of SharePoint which remains common here is that it allows SharePoint developers to create custom views of website. Views can be complex or simple depending on the version and type of product used and installed.

It considerably makes the task of finding characteristic log entries in the server easy by assigning a distinct ...
... identity to each log entry. This improvement came by gradually enhancing SharePoint 2007 feature where ULS log files and server event log were filled with logging information automatically written by the server. While more logging details are preferred over less it becomes difficult to find a unique log entry in the server farm due to this. SharePoint 2010 for Sharepoint development has come up with an amicable solution for this.

Another prominent change seen in SharePoint 2010 is in the area of logging database. It has introduced new database that is a single database to contain all logging details for different servers in the farm using some new timer jobs. Jobs are disabled by default and need to be enabled by SharePoint developers to add diagnostic logging data into a new SQL Server database. Enabling jobs would aggregate logs from different locations into one location. Logging database content can be displayed using BCS (Business Connectivity Services) external content types and lists.

If the SharePoint development project requires that the raw SharePoint log files created in the LOGS folder should be analyzed then this is also possible in SharePoint 2010. Very few utilities are available which can help a developer read the log files, a famous utility used is ULS Viewer on MSDN Code Gallery. A feature very much required by SharePoint developers was the ability to write own messages in the log files for troubleshooting SharePoint generated messages. Microsoft thus included SPDiagnosticsService class to help developers write their own messages.

Unluckily SPDiagnosticsService can be used only in fully trusted farm solutions and not within sandbox solutions. For writing ULS logs using SPDiagnosticsService SharePoint developer should create fully trusted proxy which the sandbox solutions can call into. Custom logging service can be created for writing to SharePoint ULS logs by overwriting one single method and including ways to the log files.

These are some of the amazing features of SharePoint 2010 which are used by SharePoint developers for custom application development using the platform. A developer will be able to find some more features in the platform through research and by constantly updating self with the latest happenings in the field.

Slowly and steadily Tatvasoft has climbed the ladder to be one of the best SharePoint development company providing services for custom application development.