Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend and present at the SharePoint Saturday Belgium edition. The Belgium Information Worker Usergroup (BIWUG), who organized the event, deserves a big round of applause; they hosted around 200 enthusiastic SharePoint people on a free and fun event. Of course a big thanks also goes to the numerous sponsors: Xylos (for making their great infrastructure available), AvePoint, Beyond-it, Metalogix, K2, Microsoft, Spikes, Ventigrate, Aurelium, Axceler, CTG, Idera, RealDolmen, Webtrends, and Wrox.

I’m pretty sure everybody who is using SharePoint has sent a link to a document in a Document Library to somebody else (in an email message for example). So you probably know that links to documents (or list items) can become pretty long if the document is located in a Document Library on a site deeply buried in a hierarchy. SharePoint is of course not the only platform having this “issue” and the internet already solved it quite some time ago with URL shortening. From Wikipedia:

Check out the live agenda and find out why you should attend TechDays 2011. Review the sessions and speakers and build your own personalized agenda. Today we already have more than 1200 registrations. Don’t lose time and register now before the event sells out! If you are attending, feel free to drop by and say hi during my SharePoint & jQuery session. :-)

Last week was a very special week for me: I delivered my last course as a U2U trainer. I’ve been a full-time U2U employee for almost 7 years. During that time I had the opportunity to travel the world, meet lots of interesting people and make many new friends, while talking about Microsoft technologies. In the last couple of years my focus was mainly on SharePoint, but in my “early” years I was quite active with BizTalk, ASP.NET … as well. My career at U2U had many, many heights: having a drink while watching the sunset over the Kilimanjaro, strolling over Sunset Boulevard with my colleagues, speaking on large conferences in Belgium, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, seeing the Northern Lights in Iceland …, and many, many more. But probably what I’ll remember most will be my dear coworkers: I count each one of them as a personal friend and every single one of them is an expert is his or her domain. I was incredibly lucky to have the privilege to be one of the U2U gang. Of course my time at U2U also had some lows, especially the time after we had to say goodbye to our colleague and co-founder Patrick Tisseghem who suddenly passed away. But, while never forgetting Patrick, we continued with our work and I think I may say we did quite well (especially Wim, our Director who managed to lead us through some rough times)! So I’d like to conclude with a big thanks to all the people who attended one of my courses (I never counted them, but you are probably more than 1000!) and who I worked with in the past years. And of course a big thanks as well to the U2U gang: I wish you all the best and keep up the good work.

Yesterday evening Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft’s contributions to the jQuery Javascript library were accepted as Official jQuery plugins. One of those contributions is the jQuery Template plugin that allows you to do (up to a certain level) something like data binding similar to the approach we know from Silverlight. The idea is to create a template (think HTML snippet with elements bound to data properties) and data bind that template with an array of objects. You can find the API documentation over here, or you can check out Boris Moore’s excellent Getting Started guide.

If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you probably now that I’m quite a big fan of the jQuery Javascript library, especially in combination with SharePoint sites. For a while I’ve been trying to find a mechanism to deploy jQuery and add a reference to it on all SharePoint pages of a site, by just using a Sandboxed Solution. The first part, deploying the jQuery file, is really easy; this can be done in a Module in a SharePoint project. The second part was more of a challenge; making sure the jQuery file got referenced in all pages of a SharePoint site. My initial thought was to do this by using the AdditionalPageHead Delegate control, but it’s not possible in a Sandboxed Solution (you need to deploy the .ASCX to the SharePoint root). My second thought was to use the new ScriptSrc attribute you can use in a CustomAction (I wrote about this attribute some time ago). But initially I was under the impression that the ScriptSrc attribute could only target Javascript files loaded from the SharePoint Root (the \LAYOUTS) folder, resulting in a no-go for a Sandboxed Solution as well. Daniel McPherson stumbled upon this issue as well, but neatly solved it using Javascript to add the reference dynamically.

SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight is a fantastic combination, especially when you use the Client Object Model for Silverlight to access SharePoint data. But maybe you’ve encountered the following situation: your Silverlight application works great when it’s hosted in the out-of-the-box Silverlight Web Part, but when you build your own custom Web Part to show the Silverlight Application it just doesn’t work anymore: the browser tells you there is an Error on page. The details of the error are: Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

If you have developed Features for SharePoint 2007, you’re probably aware of a very serious limitation of Feature Development: upgradability. Deploying version 1 of your customization is no problem, but If you want to deploy a bug fix or additional functionality in version 2, you’re basically on your own. The good news is that in SharePoint 2010, this problem is solved: as a developer you can now build features that are upgradable. The basic concept goes as follows, you built your feature as usual, and optionally you’ve got the opportunity to specify what should happen when the feature gets upgraded from a previous version.