First Thoughts… Wrox Books: Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Way back in July of 2008, I saw “yet another book on SharePoint” publicized via Amazon and decided to add it to my ever growing collection and knowledge base of books on SharePoint and associated networking infrastructure technologies and development methods.

Nonetheless, yesterday, 2 January 2009, a mere six months after putting in my pre-order, Professional Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 arrived.  It’s a fairly hefty compendium of knowledge surrounding the SharePoint Designer Tool that allows for WYSIWIG “FrontPage-esque” interactions with the SharePoint Services platform.

The topics from the book look to be fairly interesting and include the following topics:

– Ways to create extensions to SharePoint and SharePoint Designer with examples in both C# and VB.net

This along is an interesting topic to me as there are several different methods and approaches in the SharePoint Community as to how to create such extensions.

– The anatomy of SharePoint master pages and themes

Both great topics that are near and dear to my heart as branding is something that clients typically will want to do first… the proverbial, “How can I make SharePoint look less like of SharePoint.”  Of course I’m not quite certain I would approach this topic with SharePoint Designer for an Enterprise implementation and deployment but would more over recommend the use of Visual Studio 2008 with the built in Designer view to provide for real time capabilities when creating and modifying master pages that will reside on the file system for optimal performance.

– Considerations for governing the use of SharePoint Designer in your enterprise

This is a topic that I’m definitely interested to read more about (and will be blogging about).  I’m thankful that the authors chose not to use the term “Best Practices” as their are several tradeoffs that exist when providing for the use of SharePoint Designer within an Enterprise.  As the Pragmatic Programmers would say, “Remember to consider the context.”

Overall, the book looks to be an interesting read and weighs in at a novel 517 pages.  Congratulations to Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips and Asif Rehmani for their contribution to the SharePoint Community through their time and dedication to sharing this knowledge with all of us.

Now Playing: Johannes Brahms – Classic Yo-Yo – IV. Allegro molto from Sonata for Cello and Piano in F Major, Op. 99