Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Due to popular demand I’ve created another sample of how you can make use of the jQuery Javascript library in your SharePoint sites. This example uses SharePoint’s Lists.asmx web service to retrieve all the list items of a specific list. In my previous posts I showed how you could use jQuery in SharePoint Site Pages (regular .aspx pages uploaded to a Document Library), so let’s do something different now; let’s use jQuery in a plain Content Editor Web Part.

In my previous post I showed how to make a call to SharePoint’s Lists.asmx web service with the jQuery library to retrieve information about the Lists and Document Libraries that are available on a specific SharePoint Site. In the comments of that post, one of the readers asked if it would be possible to create a new item in a List using the same technique. Of course this is possible, you just need to make use of the UpdateListItems web method (yeah, the name of that method is not very intuitive). Here is a quick example!

If you read this blog you probably know that besides the web user interface, SharePoint also exposes some interfaces which you can use from code: the SharePoint object model and the SharePoint web services. The object model of SharePoint can only be used by code/applications that are running on a SharePoint server in your Server Farm, so you can’t use the object model on client machines. The SharePoint web services can be used of course across a network boundary, that’s what they are built for! In this post I’m going to show you how you can access the out-of-the-box SharePoint web services by making use of the jQuery Javascript library. First let’s see what you can do with this technique: download this zip file that contains an ASPX page (a basic Site Page without any code behind), and the jQuery Javascript library (in case you don’t have it already). Upload the two individual files (not the zip file) in the root of a Document Library in any of your SharePoint sites. You can do this by making use of the web user interface; you don’t have to touch anything on the server itself. When done, just click on the link of the uploaded ASPX and you’ll see following page:

My last post about splitting the Top Navigation Bar of a WSS site in two with the help of jQuery, triggered a little discussion (in a good way) in the comments. As a result Christophe from the Path to SharePoint blog wrote some Javascript to accomplish the same thing, without using jQuery at all. Now Christophe started the "Jan Tielens Challenge" on his blog: "I have already talked about Jan in a previous post. End users who visit his blog can certainly feel like a kid in front of a bakery display: so many goodies that are out of reach!
So here is my proposal: if you find on Jan’s site a tool you’d like to have as an end user, send me the challenge! If a topic gets enough votes, I’ll work on a solution that can be implemented on the client side."

My pal Lieven and I are preparing some cool demos to show at the Belgian TechDays SharePoint Preconference next week. Our goal is to build up a nice story that shows the various ways how to use SharePoint 2007 in combination with .NET 3.5. For some those demos we're going to make use of one of today's hypes: Twitter! This evening I tried to query Twitter data using Linq and I discovered there are lots of samples available on the net; there's even a complete Linq to Twitter provider on CodePlex. Too bad the Linq to Twitter provider is focused on the tweets for a specific Twitter user and I wanted to make use of Twitter's Search API. It turned out to be very, very easy (thanks to Robert Horvick's code snippets). Just dump the code at the bottom of this post in your .NET 3.5 project, and you can query the Twitter Search API using 'sharepoint' as the query like this:

Next month, (10, 11 & 12 of March) the Belgian TechDays will be held in Antwerp. Together with my pal Lieven Iliano, I'll present the SharePoint Pre-conference day on March, 10th. So what is this SharePoint Pre-conference all about? Well were going to talk about .NET 3.5 in SharePoint 2007, think WCF, Silverlight, Linq and WF applied in SharePoint 2007 sites. I'm very excited and I'm sure Lieven and I will be able to entertain you 5 (five!) sessions in a row. For the full agenda, check the TechDays site and I hope to see you there!

[Via Paul Andrew] Now here is a must have tool for every SharePoint developer that wants to make sure that his code isn’t causing any nasty memory leaks due to forgotten Dispose calls (typically on the SPSite and SPWeb instances)! The SPDisposeCheck utility can actually review a compiled assembly and tell you if there are any forgotten Dispose calls, so you can even check third party assemblies. But remember, it’s a tool: nothing beats a full code review, but it certainly speeds up the process.