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Ghosting, Schmosting!

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This is one item I’ve been holding back for a while.  FrontPage “12” will be a great SharePoint site designer on many, many fronts.  Like the current version, using it to edit a page in a SharePoint site will cause the page to become unghosted.  Unlike the current version, ghosting will cease to be much of a problem.  Here’s why…

There are two reasons why we don’t like unghosting:  (1) it makes caching a lot harder and increases the number of database fetches, having a negative impact on perfrmance, sometimes by as much as 20%, and (2) it makes managing those unghosted pages very, very difficult.  Enforcing an update to a template just isn’t something that’s workable.

Good news: (1) a combination of caching improvements done by the ASP.NET team and the WSS team will result in unghosting having little if any performance impact, and (2) thanks to WSS’ ability to use ASP.NET 2.0 master pages and given that FrontPage “12” supports their design and use as well, you can use master pages to keep your unghosted pages organized.

Want to know who’s responsible for this feature?  Maurice Prather.  Want to bet he’ll expand on this over at his blog sometime soon?

So, after the second quarter of next year, those of you who’ve been afraid of FrontPage needn’t be.  FrontPage loves you — get ready to reciprocate.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 05, 2005
    this is awesome!

  • Anonymous
    October 14, 2005
    And I suspose VS 2005, the flagship for developers will have this equal support for developing Sharepoint Portal sites/branding?

    If not, are you asking developers of .NET applications who use VS to now become FrontPage users?

    Will Frontpage have code behind and a debugger like VS?

    Will Frontpage offer all the .NET server controls as well?

    I personally don't understand why Frontpage exists, why don't they extend VS - it's obviously a rich developer tool which could use a better html editor - take the best of Frontpage and play nice?

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2005
    Where does this leave the ONET.XML and SCHEMA.XML changes?

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    I finally managed to get into the o12 beta about a week ago and have been using the new FrontPage fairly exclusively ever since.

    I would just like to take a second to assure anyone unable to preview the next FrontPage yet that there has definately been some HUGE strides made in this application for SharePoint editing.

    I am not exactly sure on what I can/cannot say on my own blog about it due to NDA's so I'll comment here ... I will say I am so far very impressed with the fact that there has obviously been a huge amount of effort put into making this application more feasible as a tool to for FrontPage customization.

    The really funny thing is - 2 things I have actually written functional specs for, for 'powertoy' releases were actually included almost exactly as we had scoped them!

    Good job guys!

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2006
    This whole pile of information come from me being emailed the following question after telling someone...

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2006
    This whole pile of information comes from me being emailed the following question after telling someone

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2006
    UI / UX Built-in breadcrumb trails, Quicklaunch on every page, Tree-view navigation of sites built-in

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2007
    Updated: For a comprehensive list of new features, along with links to the original source, check out