Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Today I got an interesting question in the U2U Sharepoint 2007 DevCamp in Copenhagen which I couldn't answer straight away (this happens more than I'd like it to happen). After some searching and with the help of one of the attendees we finally managed to answer the question!

Getting external data into an InfoPath form is extremely easy and creating rich electronic forms is easy as well, so lots of power users and developers are using InfoPath to capture structured data. Publishing those forms is also very easy: in the InfoPath client, just click the Publish menu item and go through the wizard. Et voila, the form is ready to be filled out in a SharePoint document library by the end users. The fun starts when those power users or developers are not allowed to deploy directly to the production SharePoint servers: probably the locations of the external data is different on your development/test server than on the production machine (especially if you automatically submit data). In InfoPath 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) this can be solved by using Universal Data Connection (UDC) files. The InfoPath knows where to find the UDC file (relatively to the location of the form) and the UDC file tells InfoPath where to data is located. So the location of the data is not stored anymore in InfoPath, but it's stored in the UDC file. The result: you can change the location without having to change the InfoPath form.

[Via Renaud Comte, aka CAML Boy] I haven't tried this tool myself but it looks like a potential must-have-tool for every SharePoint developer's/administrator's toolbox: SharePoint Inspector [download here].

Once in a while I get the remark that there are no document-level templates available in Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 SE (VSTO 2005 SE). Typically people that used to work with Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 are worried since they can't find their beloved templates for creating Word documents, Word templates and so on in Visual Studio. Actually the download page for VSTO 2005 SE gives the answer/solution:

Brice Dunwoodie has written a nice article on CMS Wire about the latest release of the SmartPart (aka the Return of the SmartPart).

[Via ZDNet Belgium] Novell is going to include Microsoft's Office Open XML Format in OpenOffice! Read the full press release in Novell's Press Room.

Finally the latest version of the SmartPart is here: the Return of the SmartPart, also know as SmartPart v3, also know as SmartPart for SharePoint 2007. For those of you who are new to the SmartPart: the SmartPart is an open source web part that can host any ASP.NET Web User Control. What is the advantage of creating web parts by making use of the SmartPart? Well if you are familiar with the "traditional" web part development technique you probably know that you have to write lots of code, there is no designer support in Visual Studio. The SmartPart allows you to create a Web User Control (ASCX) in Visual Studio by making use of the designer, and deploy it to a SharePoint site. This release of the SmartPart is targetted for SharePoint 2007, both Windows SharePoint Services v3 (WSSv3) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Since the initial release almost 40.000 SharePoint developers have downloaded the SmartPart, get your copy today (for free of course) from the GotDotNet Workspace (in the releases section)! For those of you who have attended my session about web part development on TechEd: Developers in Barcelona, this is the version that I showed over there.

To deploy the Return of the SmartPart to your SharePoint 2007 environment, you have two possibilities: