AgileDash, our flagship product which is an Agile project management tool which we be capable of running in multiple platforms. The first platform AgileDash will be available on is Microsoft SharePoint, which we are naming AgileDash SP. AgileDash SP was originally planned to be released for the new and powerful Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform. However, as much as I want to develop against SharePoint 2010, most people and potential customers are still using 2007 and they will be for the near future. There are several reasons for this, the main reason is that SharePoint 2010 is 64 bit only. This is a good thing since it gives 2010 the ability to be more powerful by being able to scale vertically as well as horizontally. This also comes with a price to pay that a lot of customers are running 32 bit hardware still, they have heavy investments in this hardware and it will take time for them to convert over.
Now with all of that said, this was not a light decision on our part. SharePoint 2010 offered a rich client API for us to develop against with Silverlight and jQuery. SharePoint 2007 however does not offer this, and its extremely difficult to develop against when it comes to client side applications, in particular rich interface applications such as Silverlight. I ran across something that changed my decision drastically, Marc D Anderson has been working on a jQuery framework called SPServices that acts as a proxy to the SharePoint 2007 web services that lets you easily and naturally program against. He is actively developing this framework and it supports a large degree of functionality. I plan on working closely with Marc to develop and get this framework working in Silverlight.
I plan to start testing several scenarios in Silverlight calling out to the SPService jQuery library immediately. I will be posting about my findings on how this is working, what the performance is like, etc.
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