Last May I’ve taken the beta versions of the two SharePoint 2010 Developer exams: 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development and 70-576 PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications. Today I received an e-mail saying that I successfully passed both exams and received the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer SharePoint 2010 status.

Defining custom Site Columns and Content Types is the very basis of almost every SharePoint project. Using Site Columns and Content Types you can define the information architecture of your Solution. And although this process is something that is very important and something you do very often, it is surprising how little support there is for it from the development point of view that would allow you to do it in a productive manner. CKS:DEV has already had some support around Content Types and Site Columns but still it was far from ideal, so including some improvements in that area was something we couldn’t really leave behind…

Creating custom Site Columns is something you do in almost every single SharePoint Solution. Unfortunately even in spite of great SDK documentation and intellisense for SharePoint XML files, it’s still a tedious process to create new columns directly in the XML. Using the SharePoint web UI is way easier but then again: how would you get that out of SharePoint and put into your Solution? There is an answer to that question and it is: use CKS:DEV!

A picture is worth a thousand words. In many situations images help illustrate and explain thoughts. Without images the Web would be boring and colorless. And while we all are convinced about the power of image and how it enhances telling a story, it is surprising how complex it is to get it right on the Web. Many large images on your website make it download and display slowly. No matter how great the content is, the odds are high that your visitor will not take the time to wait for it. Large images is not something specific to SharePoint. Many Content Management Systems suffer from not being able to automatically provide resized images. And while in many cases there are solutions to that, they are either complex, expensive or both. However the great thing with SharePoint 2010 is, that using its extensibility capabilities you can easily change this…

One of the great capabilities of SharePoint Server is the ability of including reusable content: standard snippets of HTML which you can use in different places over and over again without having to copy & paste it. The great thing about Reusable Content is that you have the option to insert a reference instead of the copy of the content so that if the content snippet ever changes, you won’t have to manually check every single page in your site to ensure that the content is correct: SharePoint will do this for you automatically. While this piece of functionality is really great you wouldn’t believe how inconvenient it is to get to this list to add new content snippets in there.