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.

While working on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Web Content Management (WCM) Solutions you might have relied on the fact that the name of the Pages Library was always Pages. Well almost always, because in some languages, like German, it was translated along with the Title. Given that fact, changed the way we had to deal with the Pages Library in code. Instead of hard coding the URL part of the Pages Library, all of a sudden we had to retrieve it dynamically, just because someone accidentally translated the URL of the Pages Library. But looking at SharePoint Server 2010 tells us otherwise. Now the URL parts of Pages Libraries in all languages are translated. So was it a mistake in MOSS 2007 that in German the Pages Library was called Seiten or was it a mistake that the Dutch one was called Pages instead of Paginas?

When working on SharePoint Solutions one of the common requirements is delivering multilingual solutions. Depending on your scenario you might either need to localize a single Web Part or a complete Solution. Thinking of multiple languages you have to take into account not only the development but also the packaging process for all the different assets in your Solution. One of such assets, where implementing support for multiple languages in SharePoint 2010 might seem complex at first sight, are Site Definitions. However you can easily create a multilingual Site Definition using nothing more than the standard capabilities  of the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools.

When SharePoint 2007 shipped with the Features and Solutions framework we thought we had it all sorted out. We were able to package our work and deploy it in a structured and repeatable manner. Using Feature Activation Dependencies we were able to ensure that all the functionality that our components require are available prior to provision our custom functionality. And while Feature Dependencies are definitely a great concept they are unfortunately incomplete. If all the different pieces come from a single Solution then Feature Dependencies are sufficient. However if your resources are spread across different Solution the only piece of feedback you will get from Feature Dependencies is message saying that a Feature with some id is missing in your Farm. Luckily this situation has changed with SharePoint 2010 and the introduction of Solution Dependencies.