Contents tagged with SharePoint
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Creating Hierarchical Menus with a CustomAction in SharePoint
It’s a fairly known technique to make use of CustomActions to add elements to the out-of-the-box user interface of SharePoint: you can add menu items to the Site Actions menu, you can add links on the Site Settings page, etc. The following piece of XML is the manifest of a feature that will add a new menu item to the Site Actions menu:
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Creating Custom Application Pages that look like OOB Application Pages
Juist a quick post so I won't forget this link: http://graegert.com/?p=505
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Introducing the Autocomplete Text Field for SharePoint 2007
Yesterday I finally had some time to finish a project I've been working on for some time: the Autocomplete Text Field for SharePoint 2007. Click here for a small demo screencast on Soapbox, or download the high resolution video from the CodePlex site.
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The What's New Web Part for SharePoint 2007
A long, long time ago, back in the SharePoint 2003 days, I created some pretty popular web parts which filled in some gaps the out-of-the-box functionality left open. In SharePoint 2007 most of those web parts are obsolete; for example the Breadcrumbs web part is not necessary anymore since SharePoint 2007 has breadcrumbs by default. But a lot of people contacted me to ask for a SharePoint 2007 version of the What's New web part. This web part displayed a list of new and changed items on site. It's arguable that this functionality is not needed anymore because in SharePoint 2007 we have RSS feeds, the Content Query Web Part (MOSS only) etc. But apparently some people like the simplicity of the original What's New web part so much ... and just for those people I've create a new SharePoint 2007 What's New web part! :-)
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SPWebConfigModification Best Practices and Guidelines
The SPWebConfigModification class allows developers to write code that will make modifications to the web.config files of SharePoint sites. This is quite often necessary when you want to deply SharePoint customizations together with configuration settings. Using the SPWebModification class is not without any danger! :-) You can mess up your web.config files especially if you don't think about how you want to be able to undo your changes. Mark Wagner wrote an excellent article about the best practices related to the SPWebConfigModification class; required reading for every SharePoint developer. Mark explains some very important things you should know to get started:
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Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint
Did you ever want to integrated Silverlight with SharePoint? Check out the brand new Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint site: http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ !
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Introducing the SharePoint SmartTemplates for Visual Studio
During the last year I've been developing custom solutions for SharePoint 2007 for various customers and I've been evangelizing my approach for writing code which is easy to deploy and maintainable on your servers. Of course I used the best practices for building SharePoint solutions: making customizations available with Features and packaging those customizations and components in Solutions (WSP's). Building SharePoint Features comes down to writing XML and the only tool Microsoft gave us developers was Notepad; of course I'm exaggerating a little bit: you can use Visual Studio as well, but still you have to write XML. Packaging SharePoint customizations into Solutions is even worse: a WSP file is actually a CAB file that you have to create by making use of the famous tool MakeCab. You need to feed the MakeCab tool a DDF file, which is a plain text file (not XML) describing the contents of the CAB. Besides the customizations themselves, you also need to have a Solution manifest, again a XML file, that tells SharePoint how everything should get deployed. Bottom line: for developer it's quite hard to implement these best practices.
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Enable Audience Targeting Programmatically
I've seen the question if it is possible to enable Audience Targetting on a SharePoint document library or list trough code, but I've never found an answer to it. But this weekend Ryan Ramcharan posted a solution in one of the SharePoint Forums posts. It looks like you can enable Audience Targeting programatically by adding the Target Audiences field as XML, here is a small code snippet:
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Return of SmartPart v1.3 for SharePoint 2007 Released!
Yesterday evening I've uploaded a new version of the SmartPart to the CodePlex site. For those of you who don't know the SmartPart: it's a generic web part wrapper for SharePoint 2007 which can host any ASP.NET Web User Controls. So basically you can build web parts by using the Visual Studio designers instead of having to write all the code by hand. The new version includes a setup wizard for easy installation, localization support for ASP.NET AJAX controls and some minor bug fixes. It's not a beta version anymore and there is a 64 bit version available as well. On top of that I've included a bunch of sample controls to get you started (both normal controls and ASP.NET AJAX controls). There is even a short (only 2 minutes) screencast that shows you how easy it is to install the Return of the SmartPart v1.3 by using the new wizard. Get the 1.3 release from here: http://www.codeplex.com/smartpart/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10697
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New SharePoint Developer Tool: STSDEV
Ted Pattison has created a new SharePoint tool called STSDEV. I haven't checked it out, but it sounds promising! If you want to hear Ted's sweet voice, check out the screencasts he has made to get you started.