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Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Developers

I recently gave a talk at the local .NET User Group in Kingsport, TN on SharePoint 2010, generally what it is (for those that have never used it), and all of the features that are available to developers in this newest version.  Right off the bat, the best thing about it is that you can develop for SharePoint 2010 using your Windows 7 machine, which is a huge improvement over 2007 (It forced you to develop on Windows Server! *shudder*).

If you didn’t get a chance to attend, I’ll try to give you in one paragraph why I’m excited about using SharePoint 2010 as a development platform.  Basically: it makes my life as a developer not suck as bad.  Like Visual Studio 2010 generates code for me that I would have had to write myself 5 years ago, SharePoint 2010 gives me CRUD screens, reports and deep analysis on ALL of an organization’s data, gives me a way to offload tedious one-off requests from uses by empowering them with SharePoint Designer and SharePoint Workspace.  Generally SharePoint 2010 makes my life as a developer simpler, so I can focus on writing code that provides direct business value and makes money!

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How To Install SharePoint Server 2010 RTM on Windows 7

When developing SharePoint 2010 Applications, you must have an instance of SharePoint 2010 installed on the same machine to both allow for access to SharePoint .dlls as well as for easy deployment and debugging purposes.  One of the problems with this is that SharePoint 2010 has always been solely supported on Windows Server operating systems.  With SharePoint 2010 you can now install and develop on Windows 7 (x64 versions only)!

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"Enabling SessionState for SharePoint 2010" OR "This report failed to load because session state is not turned on."

SharePoint is a configuration nightmare.  There are so many settings that the more configuration settings you learn, the more you learn there are more settings that you’ve not even discovered yet.  For reporting, and specifically for me, running reports under an Issue Tracking site, SessionState must be turned on for the SharePoint 2010 web application.  If you don’t, you’ll get the error:

“This report failed to load because session state is not turned on. Contact your SharePoint farm administrator.”

To enable SessionState, follow these steps: