Developer Keynote

The developer keynote was kicked off with the venerable Lars Nielsen whose presence implies Sitecore has been able to maintain its brain trust through it's explosive growth over recent years.

Getting into the nitty gritty, enhancement and stability are what Sitecore is focusing on this year. 

The integration with InDesign seems to be more on the enhancement side of the coin where marketers will be able to merge their print materials into their work stream.

Foundry: another technology that hasn't really received much vocal attention largely because of its targeted use for franchise syndication. 

Marketplace: This is the new and improved shared source modules destination. You can find it at http://marketplace.sitecore.net

Sitecore rocks: Sadly not a lot of developers are using it. It is a really great, free product that has a ton of power. If you haven't yet, check it out. 

6.6: I'm seeing the MVC support going to be a feature that will drive more developer interest than anything else. This could really expand the developer base by driving interest by developers of other languages like Java. There's really a lot of good use-cases for it and it has a ton of features that allow efficiency-focused developers to devise all sorts of new design patterns for solutions going forward.

Lucene: Sitecore's hidden gem. Upgraded and optimized, we're going to be seeing an even more powerful search solution. Since the first time I watched Alex Shyba give his presentation on the new Lucene I remember flexibility and speed being hallmarks of its usage. 

Page editor: what we're going to see is a much more refined UI. Inclusive with those improvements is a device simulator. This is definitely something I'm excited about this. Mobile has obviously arrived but the tools to manage this new world are only just starting to mature. Now I'm realistic about how accurate a simulator can be but it's a step in the right direction. 

Dictionary domains: Finally, mainstream multi-lingual text support within the CMS.

Version support for archive and recycle bin. Clearly the focus is on clearing up some of the pain points with the deeper management of content versioning.

Rules and workflow for user groups: What we're seeing is a deep maturation of the targeted marketing tools that have been growing over the last few years. 

Executive Insight Dashboard: This may prove to be a great tool but I can't say I've been able to spend enough time with it to judge one way or the other.

Database mirroring: Anyone relying on global scaling will be happy to know their replication needs have just gotten easier. The web.config will be the place where this is managed as you'd largely expect. 

Componetizing Sitecore's core product: They made a point to say that MVC can be added to the system as a module to prove the flexibility of the system as a whole.

Sheer UI: we're seeing a migration from a core legacy technology. I'm not shedding any tears.  The amount of control specifically built for Sheer UI that you needed to use to gain access to the powerful tools like the DropTree and MultiSelect fields are hopefully going to be ported to more readily accelerate API methods. The future looks a little brighter. New Media Library: Really not a full fledged application but more of an introduction to the new types of frontend UI code libraries that are in development and what's going to be possible in the future. This is a bit of a sleeper. I'd really like to see a lot more about this than almost anything else. Customization is, after all, the most important thing to me, as a developer.

Massive scaling: We haven't heard much about the scalability and key-value pairs for Sitecore since "Massive" being talked about a year or two ago. I'd be interested to know who's driving the support for these features and what they're using to do it. Sitecore is going with NoSQL for what they're saying is a gain in speed for these massive data sets but I'd bet you could change it given its controlled in the pipeline which is easily customizeable. 

This developer keynote was promised to be the "coolest" presentation and they pulled out all the stops. I can barely keep up with the amount of technology being talked about here. If I missed anything forgive me considering the deluge of information.