How We Did It: SharePoint.Microsoft.com- So the recipe is out!!

Microsoft launched the SharePoint marketing Website on SharePoint Server 2007 last month. What’s interesting is the website interfaces a simple and an elegant look and feel, with Silverlight adding a jazz to the overall user experience.

From the manageability perceptive, the publishing infrastructure allows the content to be published and managed more quickly.

Our wonderful team Todd, Jomit, Meeta and Ritu and me - worked together to design and developed a whole bunch of components that fulfilled the overall requirements. Microsoft has also published the How We Did It article on MSDN highlighting the goals for rebuilding the website, the overall architecture and components used in the Website.

Making your SharePoint environment ready for Silverlight development

SharePoint and Silverlight can be integrated together to provide an interactive user experience. The data within SharePoint and various LOBs can be delivered to the end user in a compelling manner using Silverlight.

But making SharePoint Server 2007 environment ready for Silverlight development is a bit challenging and a time consuming process. There are several updates and components needed on the development machine before you can actually begin Silverlight development. For instance, to see a Silverlight application in action on a SharePoint Web page proper configurations need to be made in the web.config of the Web application.

To address the same challenges, Advaiya has developed a tool Advaiya Development Scanner which analyzes a target machine for the necessary components, and reports what is already installed and what needs to be installed or updated in order to support Silverlight 2.0 development. Along with this it also makes the necessary web config modifications on the targeted Web applications.

The demo of the tool can be seen here in action.