I’ve been keeping hundreds of subscribers updated on what’s going on in the SharePoint 2013 news scene over the past few months. In addition, I’ve been deep diving into the released protocol documentation to describe new features of SharePoint 15.

If you’re interested in obtaining a subscription, priced at $14.95 for the entire series (monthly issues, 25-35 pages each), head over to http://sharepoint2013beta.com/.

Regardless of the paid options, I’ve been posting information on SharePoint 2013 on my blog too, so feel free to check out the SharePoint 2013 tagged articles for updates.

This excerpt appeared in issue 4, published in early April 2012.

SharePoint 2013 uses .NET 4.0 Runtime – Prepare Yourself!

In the previous issue, I wrote about my thoughts and findings around the .NET version of SharePoint 2013. As you may remember, my conclusion was that I thought Microsoft would leave the current .NET version alone and go with the 2.0 runtime.

(Web note: In the March issue, I speculated that Microsoft would want to maintain a single .NET runtime version for all its SharePoint versions. At the time, I did not have any hard facts, so I elaborated on the reasoning behind the argument)

Right after I published the previous issue, a reader tipped me that, although the reader thought my reasoning was correct, the conclusion was wrong. According to the tip, SharePoint 15 runs on .NET 4.0.

Now, I considered emailing all subscribers immediately, but I wanted to verify the claims of the tipper. Sadly, I haven’t been able to accurately do so, and the people who know are keeping their lips more tightly sealed than ever.

Note: Since publishing the April issue, several other readers have said the same thing, including one person ‘in-the-know’ confirming that SharePoint 2013 is based on .NET 4.0 Runtime.

Assuming that my reader is correct, and I have no doubt that this is the case, this is a huge deal for SharePoint developers, both for those that work on projects and for component developers.

If you’re completely foreign to development, you can view the following discussion as one of compatibility between two versions of the .NET runtime. The .NET runtime is responsible for executing the code that developers write to interact with SharePoint.

Despite there being numerous .NET Framework versions, there are only two runtime versions, .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0. The problem arises from the fact that .NET 4.0 is backward compatible, with some major caveats for SharePoint developers, and that .NET 2.0 is not forward compatible.

Let’s look at what this means for future developers.

First, because SharePoint 2013 requires .NET 4.0, and .NET 2.0 won’t run .NET 4.0 code, this means that any code written to interact with SharePoint 2013 will not work on previous versions. This means that developers who want to support both current and future versions of SharePoint will need to maintain two sets of code.

So, why can’t you just run the current .NET 2.0 code in the .NET 4.0 runtime? After all, I did mention that .NET 4.0 is backwards compatible. If you write your code for .NET 2.0, you could simply load that code into the .NET 4.0 runtime and you’d be set, right?

It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has added code to explicitly prevent SharePoint 2010 to work with .NET 4.0 runtime. SharePoint 2007 simply won’t work and you will not be able to connect to any site if you use .NET 4.0.

Finally, because .NET 2.0 can’t load .NET 4.0 code (it’s not forward compatible, remember?) you also cannot write.NET 2.0 code to connect to SharePoint 2013.

These conditions mean that you will have two distinct development platforms; one that targets SharePoint 2010 and 2007, and one that targets 2013 and future versions. (At least until Microsoft puts a new runtime version out and upgrades SharePoint 2016 to that )

Obviously, this impacts the cost of development of new code that attempts to work on both SharePoint 2013 and earlier versions. Technically, you can write code that is simple to switch between .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0. If you wrote only code that worked in both versions, it would simply be a matter of changing the target framework in Visual Studio and recompile.

However, reality won’t be that easy. If you start doing development on .NET 4.0, you want to take advantage of the added benefits of that version. Otherwise, what would be the point? Well, if you do, you’ll have to maintain two different versions of your codebase and make sure that any changes you make are added to both versions. Although there definitely are methods you can use to make your code more portable, it will still increase the burden on developers and ultimately the cost to customers.

Of course, it may be that Microsoft has some tricks up their sleeves, but considering the minor but significant incompatibilities between the various .NET runtimes and SharePoint, I’d much rather prepare for the worst and assume it will be two separate target environments from now.

.b

This has been an excerpt from the SharePoint 2013 Beta series of USP Journal. To pick up a subscription that costs $14.95, including access to all back issues, head over to http://sharepoint2013beta.com/

As always, treat any unofficial information as pure speculation and don’t make any important decisions based on this.

Of course, I’m blowing this slightly out of proportion, but really the message remains the same. Microsoft touts the next version of SharePoint as a breakthrough in social computing, but then turns around and say that they’re not really expecting to get it right and that you’ll need something else to really get social going. In fact, social in SharePoint 2013 won’t be good at all so you might as well just buy SharePoint 2010 now and then get the third-party add-ons that you’ll need to get anyway.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you what I’m talking about.

Last week, I picked up on an article citing Jonathan Barrett, a Microsoft employee in Australia, in which the main message was that if you want to get going with social in SharePoint, you want to buy Newsgator (and thanks to Alex Machester for reminding me)

Mr. Barrett said, according to the article, “We do have basic social features in SharePoint; they will be improved in [SharePoint 15], but that will not be at the level of feature richness that Newsgator has.”

Further, he said “I would say as a customer don’t wait for Wave15, unless you’ve got a really slow social media strategy or unless you want to use some really baseline features, I would start going ahead with our platform and Newsgator on top”

Now, this was said at an event heavily influenced by Newsgator, but unless Mr. Barrett really has no idea what he’s talking about, it’s a great message from Redmond. As late as March this year, Jared Spataro was chatting about the virtues of SharePoint as a social platform, and although he did mention the importance of third-party vendors, it was pretty clear that the next version would be oh’ so great on its own.

Spataro’s message rhymes with the official marketing chit-chat we would expect to hear at this point, which is essentially “Yeah, what we said a couple of months ago regarding how great SharePoint 2010 is, well, that’s bollocks. What you really, really want is to get the next version, which is going to be amazing and come with small cute kittens”.

Speaking of which, I’m also anticipating Spataro’s 2015 chat on to be something like “Yeah, we know SharePoint 2013 social features suck, but just wait to see what’s coming in the next version”.

Hold on, did you just say ‘a great message from Redmond’?

Yes, I did, and thanks for picking up on that. You see, I think Microsoft is on the completely wrong track with social. SharePoint has a three year product cycle, and before that at least two years of development, and the companies need at least a year for upgrading. Essentially, what customers get when they open up their newly upgraded SharePoint site is what was current five to six years ago. That’s why, when we got ‘social in SharePoint 2010’ we essentially got a glorified RSS reader and an innovative idea of tagging content (you know, like we did back in 2003).

So, if Mr. Barrett is right, he may not be the most popular guy in Microsoft these days, but he’s also sending a very important message of good news: Microsoft realizes and publicly says that it sucks at social and that you need to get something else if you want anything but the basics.

If this can be the start of a trend in which SharePoint becomes a platform first and product last, then the focus should shift from selling licenses to providing a stable and viable platform for long-term evolution. Today, because of Microsoft’s focus on selling licenses for SharePoint, the product cycle has become a ‘run like hell for one year, speculate about what’s coming for one year, be a newbie like everyone else for one year’.

Want to learn more about my thoughts? Check out my article on why SharePoint Server isn’t ready for the enterprise.

.b