<Disclaimer>This is personal notes of what I retained during the session. This can be incomplete, partially right or wrong. It is just  part of the notes I took and what retained my attention. Nothing prevents the user to get more information on their favorite web site.</Disclaimer>

This interactive session held by Andrew Connell was mostly about the SharePoint development. There are two possible ways to develop with SharePoint : Customization, which is about changing columns and content types, but also modifying the pages in the SharePoint Designed. Then, there is Development using features along with code. The problem is how to reconcile the two ? Some content is in the content database, some other is in the source control. And, unfortunately, it is difficult to move the modification from one environment to the other. What needs to be known is that as long a file is not customized, it is taken on the file system, from the templates. What Andrew proposes is to do only development. Of course, doing this can be tedious, especially when dealing with features, because there is no designed and a lot of CAML to write. Moreover, provisioning files requires double development. On the other side, the developers stay in Visual Studio, it is easy to package the changes and fully leverage the existing source control.
To make the developer’s job easier, there are couple of goods. First, it is possible to add IntelliSense to Visual Studio when writing CAML, via the Visual Studio XML Schema Cache. Then, when developing content types and site columns, do it using the browser and SharePoint Designer to finally extract the assets using PowerShell and the STSADM custom commands in order to “featurize” everything. Of course, the WSP building process should be automatized.