Implementing SharePoint Solutions

Create List item in Folders using Client Object Model

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:36:00 +0000

There are scenarios where you would like to add list item to a folder/sub folder in a custom SharePoint list and many of you would like to achieve this using ECMA script/ JavaScript Client Object Model. Before we start with the code, i am assuming that you have enables Folder Content Types in a custom list and have also created a Folder in a list before the below snippet is executed.

function CreateListItemInFolder()
{

// Create client context
var myContext = new SP.ClientContext.get_current();
// Get current web (comparable to SPWeb)
var myWeb = myContext.get_web();
// Get list by title (comparable to SPList)
var myList = myWeb.get_lists().getByTitle('Docs');
// Create new object for list item creation

//Create List Item Infor and set the Folder Path for the item to be created.
var myListItemCreationInfo = new SP.ListItemCreationInformation();
myListItemCreationInfo.set_folderUrl("http://servername/sites/PP/Blog/Lists/Docs/Folder1");
var newLinkItem= myList.addItem(myListItemCreationInfo);

// Set properties for new list item
newLinkItem.set_item('Title', "Title");
// Update the new item
newLinkItem.update();

myContext.executeQueryAsync(Function.createDelegate(this, onSuccessAddQL),Function.createDelegate(this, onFailureAddQL));

}
function onSuccessAddQL(sender, args)
{
alert("Item Added Successfully In the Folder");
SP.UI.ModalDialog.commonModalDialogClose(SP.UI.DialogResult.cancel,'Closing Quick Links Dialog');
}
function onFailureAddQL(sender, args)
{
alert("Item Adding Failed to the Folder");
}

happy coding..

Creating Root Site Collection Using Custom Blog Site Template in Office 365

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:16:00 +0000

There are scenarios were you would like to use Blog Template (any default site ) or custom site template as the default site template for the Root Site Collection instead of the regular Team Site In Office 365. By default when you subscribe a new Office 365 Subscription you will have team site as default root site collection.

The steps below will guide you to create the root site collection with a custom blog site template. I have created a site using Blog template and created custom list in the site. After you have the necessity structure for the Blog site in place, save the Site as Site Template and download the Blog Template from the Solution gallery to your local PC.

1. Delete the default root site collection of your subscription, by navigating to the admin portal of Office 365. Your Admin portal looks like the screenshot given below.

2. Now click on the new tab and select New-> Private Site Collection, You will get a new New Site Collection PopUp Screen, specify the title of the site, In the Template Selection, click on the Custom tab and select “Select Template Later”, specify the administrator account and Click OK. The screen should look like below

3. Wait for the site to be created, Once the site is created, Navigate to the site, you will see a Template Selection page were you can select the default template as blog for your root site

4. To use custom blog site template, Click on the Solution Gallery, it will take you to the Solution Gallery, upload the custom Blog Site template WSP and activate. After activating the WSP navigate back to the Template Selection Page and you will be able to see a Custom Tab as shown below, select the BlogSite Template and click Ok

5. Once the site is created it will navigate you the Set Up Groups for the site Page as shown below and click Ok.

In this way you can use any custom site template or change the default site template for your Office 365 SharePoint Online.

Collapsible Quicklaunch Menu for SharePoint2010 Using Jquery

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 07:34:00 +0000

Recently I have been getting comments on my post Collapsible QuickLaunch SharePoint Menu For MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0 Using Jquery saying this is not working on SharePoint 2010 or is there any solution to get it working in SharePoint 2010. So here is the post that would describe how to achieve this in SharePoint 2010.

The way quick launch is rendered in SharePoint 2010 is different from MOSS 2007/WSS. SharePoint 2010 uses DIV/UL/LI for rendering menu tags compared to TR/TD in the previous versions. The image below shows how the menu is typically rendered in SharePoint 2010.

After doing some research I came to an approach of using Jquery to achieve this. Here is the article which is the base of this approach, so that you can use it to customize further if required. After implementing this how the collapsible quick launch looked.

But there was an issue with post back operation on click of each item on the navigation menu which resulted in losing the menu click item as expanded. To fix this issue I used cookies to maintain the expanded state of a menu item after post back which was posted as comment by Krillehbg on my previous post. The below snapshot show how it looks when you click Lists menu item.

Currently I will be posting the script which you can place it in master page later at some point of time I will make this as feature or someone could work on this to make it as feature.

Open the site in SharePoint Designer in which you want to make the QuickLaunch Collapsible.
Open the Master Page which resides in the catalog folder.
Copy and paste the given snippet above the end of head tag in the master page

        <script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function () {


    $("body").addClass("enhanced");
    $(".root li:first").addClass("selected");
    $(".root li").not(":first").find("ul").hide();


    $(".root li.static").click(function () {        
        var menuClicked = createCookie("Menu_Clicked", $('a > span > span ', this).html(), 1);
        if ($(this).parent().find("ul").is(":hidden")) {
            $(".root ul:visible").slideUp("fast");
            $(".root li").removeClass("selected");
            $(this).parent().addClass("selected");
            $(this).find("ul").slideDown("fast");


        }
    });


    var menuClickedOld = readCookie("Menu_Clicked");
        $(".root li.static").each(function () {
        if ($('a > span > span ', this).html() == menuClickedOld) {
            if ($(this).parent().find("ul").is(":hidden")) {
                $(".root ul:visible").slideUp("fast");
                $(".root li").removeClass("selected");
                $(this).parent().addClass("selected");
                $(this).find("ul").slideDown("fast");


            }
            return;
        }
    });
});


function createCookie(name, value, days) { if (days) { var date = new Date(); date.setTime(date.getTime() + (days * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000)); var expires = "; expires=" + date.toGMTString(); } else var expires = ""; document.cookie = name + "=" + value + expires + "; path=/"; } function readCookie(name) { var nameEQ = name + "="; var ca = document.cookie.split(';'); for (var i = 0; i < ca.length; i++) { var c = ca[i]; while (c.charAt(0) == ' ') c = c.substring(1, c.length); if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length, c.length); } return null; } function eraseCookie(name) { createCookie(name, "", -1); } function createCookie(name, value, days) {
    if (days) {
        var date = new Date();
        date.setTime(date.getTime() + (days * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000));
        var expires = "; expires=" + date.toGMTString();
    }
    else var expires = "";
    document.cookie = name + "=" + value + expires + "; path=/";
}




function readCookie(name) {
    var nameEQ = name + "=";
    var ca = document.cookie.split(';');
    for (var i = 0; i < ca.length; i++) {
        var c = ca[i];
        while (c.charAt(0) == ' ') c = c.substring(1, c.length);
        if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length, c.length);
    }
    return null;
}


function eraseCookie(name) {
    createCookie(name, "", -1);
}
        </script>

Happy Reading :). Please feel free to leave comments

JQUERY RSSReader WebPart for Office365

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:20:00 +0000

It’s been long time I have posted any technical posts. This post would describe an alternate for RSS Reader Web part in Office 365. Last week I started to work on one of our client’s requirement to show RSS feed in Office 365. For surprise I came across few posts which indicated RSS Viewer Web Part is not supported.

To start my research first I tried with RSS Reader Web part present in CodePlex written by phil wicklund. If you try to deploy this solution on cloud it would through error because of few limitations that I had posted here in my previous post.

So I started to Google to check how to display RSS feeds in ASP.net which doesn’t use any web part concept. I ended up with This post. With the help of the above two posts I started creating JQUERY RSS Reader web part for office 365.

After completing the development of the base web part, I thought it would be great if can render the rss feeds as ticker instead of static. So I ended up in creating the following display mode 1. Basic and 2.Ticker which can be configured to render feeds accordingly. Here are some snapshots of the configuration and how the web part looks.

Please find below the source code and the WSP for this web part now. Please feel free to modify this webpart according to your needs and let me know if you have any better solution.

Summary of OFFICE 365 Limitations and Workarounds

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 07:44:00 +0000

This blog post will brief you about that various limitations I faced during Office 365 Sandbox development. Sandbox limitations differ when it comes to cloud deployment compared to on premise deployment.You will find various blogs with Sandbox Limitations.

This post would help you understand these limitations in a quick way, so that you can plan before you start your deployment. If you are a SharePoint Expert this blog would not help you much, but there are lots of Office 365 BeginnersJ.

1. The WSP package cannot deploy files to hive .i.e. file system. The possible option to uses document library to deploy your files

2. We can use Sandboxed Visual WebParts with some limitations while you are developing for Office 365. You need to install the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools and use Visual WebPart (Sandboxed) Item Template.

4. You cannot use Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly on cloud but this will work when you are developing sandbox for on premise application.

5. You cannot use Page.RegisterClient script for registering JavaScript on the page; you can use html render tag to insert script tag in the page. This holds good for adding css. Few say to use embedded resources but not sure if it’s really going to work out on cloud.

I have developed an alternate solution to achieve this. Will be posting a post on my blog soon.

7. You cannot use Run with Elevated privileges in sand box solution.

8. Using resources in sandbox solution is Tricky, which is not feasible while developing solutions for OFFICE 365 or cloud.

Will be updating this blog as and when I find more limitations. Please feel free to comment on the above points or if you have a better workarounds.

Note: Post Updated On August 8 2011

QueryString Value using JavaScript in SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:47:00 +0000

This post talks about how to use JavaScript to retrieve query string value from the URL and display it in an asp.net web control in an OOB SharePoint page. This might be a very common scenario in an ASP.Net environment, but when it comes to SharePoint the implementation is different and it may also take couple of hours to achieve this if you don’t have a complete idea about how SharePoint page works.

There are some limitations or rather you can say security related to SharePoint pages when it comes to JavaScript which access server side control. You cannot write directly access server side controls using JavaScript you need to make certain tweaks for this to work.

1.Make web.config changes so that you can access controls using JavaScript without getting “Page Parser Error message code blocks are not allowed”.

If you have scenario where you want to allow JavaScript in a particular page then you have to make the below entries in your pages

For ASPx Pages

<PageParserPaths> 

  <PageParserPath VirtualPath="/pages/[file name].aspx" CompilationMode="Always" AllowServerSideScript="true" /> 

</PageParserPaths>

For master page, this will enable inline code blocks for all master pages:

<PageParserPaths> 

  <PageParserPath VirtualPath="/_catalogs/masterpage/*" CompilationMode="Always" AllowServerSideScript="true" /> 

</PageParserPaths>

Making these changes will allow users who have access to Content DB to embed JavaScript in your site using SharePoint Designer.

2.The other option is to user HTML controls in your page. But even in this scenario SharePoint will adds an Auto Generated ID suffix and the control id changes like the one give below.

label id="lblName{generate-id}

So you may have to remove the auto generated suffix and keep only the label id.
So here goes the JavaScript which you can embed in a SharePoint page at the bottom and set the value of the control based on the query string

<script type="text/javascript">

var query = location.search.substring(1); 

if(query!=null)

{

 var query = location.search.substring(1).split('&');

 if(query .length>0)

 {

      var keys = query[0];

      var key = keys.split('=');

      var control=  document.getElementById('lblName');

      if(control!=null && key.length>0)

      {

        Control.innerText = key[1] ;

      }

 }

}

</script>

Twitter Widget IE8 Compatibility Issue

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:28:00 +0000

In this post I am going to talk about issue which i came across while integrating Twitter Widget in SharePoint 2010. This is most common requirement of integrating a twitter or any other widget into your SharePoint or any other community site.

There are many posts which will guide you on integrating Twitter widget into SharePoint site you can find some of them below given below

1.    http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/01/26/add-twitter-to-your-sharepoint-site/

2.    http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1202

Recently when I was integrating twitter widget with SharePoint 2010, I came across a issue where the tweets won’t scroll or you will see no tweets coming up in the widget section after integration. Initially I thought this might be a SharePoint 2010 issue  but later found out that all the tweets where coming up perfectly fine in other browser like Chrome and FireFox.

I noticed that there was a JavaScript error popping up at IE8 status bar. It was showing “Object doesn’t support this property or method” for the widget.js file. 

So this is an IE8 twitter widget compatibility issue.  Finally to conclude on this I also verified this with IE8 on of my colleagues machine for surprise the tweets where coming perfectly fine. So the problem was with IE8 version that was installed on the SharePoint Box. Please find the IE8 version details below.

Given below is the below are the steps which I took to fix this issue.

Step 1: Download the Widget.js file, this file is required for fetching the tweets

Step 2: Find Array.forEach in widget.js file and replace it withArray.prototype.forEach. You will find only one instance of this occurring

Step 3: Upload the Widget.js file to a document library and refer this link into the twitter widget javascript.

This will make your twitter widget work perfectly. If anyone has found any alternate solution please feel free to leave a comment..

Installing SharePoint2010 on Windows VISTA

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:06:00 +0000

Finally I started my first installation on sharepoint2010 on Windows Vista Home Premium. It had been long time I had download SharePoint 2010 and wanted to install it desperately. I couldn’t install it on my machine since its 32 bit, and affording a new machine at this point is like a big hole in my pocket. Though I have got one instance of SharePoint 2010 at my company, but I didn’t really enjoy exploring it since it’s damn slow because of Hardware resources allocated to it.

The craze of installing SP2010 made me burrow my friend’s laptop which has a decent configuration where I can start my installation. Given below is the Laptop Configuration Details.

tHP HDX18t Premium Series Notebook PC

• Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack2 (64-bit)
• Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo Processor P8700 (2.53 GHz, 3 MB L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• 4GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm) - For 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M
• 500GB 7200RPM SATA Dual Hard Drive (250GB x 2) with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection

It always better to read some article to start SharePoint 2010 installation, so I went through this link to start my installation. So in the first step it was specified that I can “install SharePoint 2010 on Install SharePoint on Windows 7 x64, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 x64, or Windows Vista Service Pack 2 x64.”

I started to install all the prerequisites specified, had faced little bit of problem in Uninstalling Power Shell and the hot fix. Also performed a windows updates, once the updated was done I restarted my machine and ran the setup file. Was really happy to see the installation Screen of SP2010 but this didn’t long since I saw another popup which said “Setup is not able to proceed due to following errors: This product requires Windows Vista (x64) SP1 or above Business, Enterprise or Ultimate or Windows 7(x64) Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate. Correct the issue listed above and re-run the setup”.

It was a disaster when I saw this error. It would have been good if the Microsoft article had mentioned clearly that SharePoint 2010 cannot be installed on Windows Vista and Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. It would have definitely saved my time. I am not sure if there are any workaround for this , if any please feel free to leave a comment on the post.

SharePoint WebPart Socket Exception

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:35:00 +0000

Recently when I was working on a web part which hosts a user control was throwing socket exception. I got stuck with this exception for almost 6hrs and finally figured out the main cause for this exception. It was a simple user control which was making a web request to a website and returning some data. The user control worked perfectly fine when I deploy it in an ASP.Net Application, but when I hosted this user control in SharePoint it started throwing Socket Exception “System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”.

Initially I thought this may be due to Firewall and have to open up port for that web application but the windows firewall was completely turned off (Not a good way of doing that, you should always open port instead of turning off the firewall). So the next thing I did is tried to access the web request URL from my browser for my surprise the URL worked perfectly fine and returned XML data.

For one instance I was thinking this might be something related to web.config settings for sharepoint web application. So went through various settings of web.Config file. Made the proxy settings entry in the System.Net Section of the web.config file and it worked like charm. Given below are the entires that i made in web.config file.

<system.net>
     <defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true">
      <proxy usesystemdefault="False" proxyaddress="ServerName:portNo" bypassonlocal="False" />
    </defaultProxy>
  </system.net>

I was little bit confused at that instance because I had also specified proxy server settings in IE it didn’t work. Will look out for the correct reason why sharepoint was throwing this exception even after the proxy settings had been made in the browser and will update the post accordingly as of now it solved my issue and thought of posting it here.

Download SharePoint 2010 Beta Version

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:19:00 +0000

Hi Friends

The much awaited SharePoint 2010 beta version is now available for download publicly. You can download the beta version from the below link here. You need to sign in to download.

SharePoint Designer 2010 and Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta are also available for download.

http://technet.microsoft.com/hi-in/evalcenter/ee388573.aspx

Have updated the Sharepoint 2010 download link recently.

SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure Access Denied

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:02:00 +0000

Recently we had a new server setup for SharePoint with Windows server 2008. I needed a publishing site for my new application, so I went to the Site Settings -> Site Collection Feature -> and clicked on activate Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure Feature. For a surprise I got an Access Denied Exception for the first time (Completely Shocked Since I never faced this before). I was curious to find out what were the exception details in the event viewer. The Event viewer showed the following exception details “Failed to provision the scheduling job definitions. Page scheduling will not succeed.”

The fix for this exception is to change the Application Pool Temporarily. Open IIS, Navigate to your website. Click on Advance Settings, by default the application pool will be your website app pool, change it to Central Admin from the drop down list shown below and click Ok. Go to your Site Features and activate the Office SharePoint Server Publishing feature. Once the feature is activated reset the Application Pool of the website to its original state and perform an IISRESET.

I don’t know if there is any alternate approach for the same. If any please leave a comment.

Download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 BETA

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:34:00 +0000

Hi friends,

To download beta version of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is over. Microsoft has made the beta version available for download. You can download it from HERE

If you want to download different versions/editions of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. Check out this link

Happy Download

Collapsible QuickLaunch SharePoint Menu Using Jquery

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:36:00 +0000

Updated: August 10 2011: SharePoint 2010 Collapsible Quick Launch

I am sure most of SharePoint Developers have started to use Jquery in SharePoint. In this post I am going to talk about how we can use JQUERY to make a collapsible QUICKLAUNCH MENU. Many organizations may have come across this scenario where you have a very long list of links on the QuickLaunch Menu and would love to have collapsible Headers for QuickLaunch. Hope this post will be a stop for your search.

1. Open the site in SharePoint Designer in which you want to make the QuickLaunch Collapsible.
2. Open the Master Page which resides in the catalog folder.
3. Copy and paste the given snippet above the end of head tag in the master page

 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Load jQuery
google.load("jquery", "1.2.6");
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
//initialize menus
var menuRows = $("[id$='QuickLaunchMenu'] > tbody > tr");
var menuHd = menuRows.filter("[id!='']:has(+tr[id=''])");
//set img path for when submenu is hidden
var closedImg = "/_layouts/images/Menu1.gif";
//set img path for when submenu is visible
var openedImg = "/_layouts/images/ptclose.gif";
var cssInit = {
"background-image": "url('"+closedImg+"')",
"background-repeat": "no-repeat",
"background-position": "100% 50%"
}
var cssClosed = {"background-image": "url('"+closedImg+"')"}
var cssOpen = {"background-image": "url('"+openedImg+"')"}
//hide submenus
menuRows.filter("[id='']").hide();
//apply initial inline style to menu headers
menuHd.find("td:last").css(cssInit);
menuHd.click(function () {
var styleElm = $(this).find("td:last")
var nextTR = $(this).next("tr[id='']");
if (nextTR.is(':visible')) {
nextTR.hide();
styleElm.css(cssClosed);
} else {
nextTR.show();
styleElm.css(cssOpen);
}
});
});
</script>

4. Save and close master page changes
5. The QuickLaunch should look like this given below
Note: Hope you have internet connection for your development machine or else you may have needed to download the JQUERY scripts locally and add the references accordingly.

SharePoint 2010 Virtual Conference & Expo

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:24:00 +0000

Hi Friends,

Those who are really interested in knowing more about SharePoint 2010 should not miss a chance of registering yourself to SharePoint 2010 Virtual Conference & Expo .

This conference will have the following topics addressed.

The SharePoint 2010 Roadmap
Your first look at the new SharePoint tools
Integrating Silverlight with SharePoint 2010

To know more and to register visit here.

Productivity Hub

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:22:00 +0000

Microsoft has developed the Productivity Hub to help support your ongoing end user training efforts.

The Hub is a SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central place for your training efforts, and includes training content from Microsoft’s core products. Microsoft also provides ongoing and updated content packs.

The Hub uses SharePoint Server’s social networking capabilities, such as blogs and discussion groups. In addition, it offers the Coach program, a change management feature to help you train end users to self-help, reducing the burden on your training and IT staff. The Coach program impacts productivity in a collaborative and positive way.

What the Productivity Hub is:
1. Format: Pre-loaded SharePoint site collection optimized for Web 2.0 functionality and easily deployed within SharePoint Server 2007 environment.
2. Content: Convenient end user productivity training in a variety of formats (documents, videos, podcasts, etc.). Receive free quarterly updates of content that you will learn about through the Productivity blog.
3. Blog: The Productivity blog offers tips and tricks for end user productivity. Use it as is, or your training staff can use the posts as their own to help them get started in running an internal blog.
4. Train the trainer: Includes IT/Manager section to aid with deployment of the site collection, and guidance to develop the Coach program.
5. Products: Office 2007 System applications including SharePoint Server 2007. Windows 7 and others will be added in the future.

You can download it from HERE

SharePoint Guidance for Developing SharePoint Application

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:01:00 +0000

Last month the updated version of SharePoint Guidance for Developing SharePoint Application has been released. I didn’t get much time to explore this but thought of blogging it, may be in near future I will explore and blog few things about it. Here’s the brief description about the goals behind this release.

You can download the latest version here

This goal of patterns & practices Developing SharePoint Applications guidance is to help customers understand how to develop large scale, content-driven SharePoint applications that extend the value of existing line of business systems. We achieve this goal through the Partner Portal reference implementation and general guidance. We had three primary objectives to meet this goal:

Large Scale – Show customers how to build a large scale SharePoint application. This includes guidance on building in the manageability, configurability, and performance expected from large scale applications.

Content Driven – More advanced SharePoint applications often include many sites and combine custom coded logic with created content. We demonstrate areas like custom navigation and publishing, composing Web parts with published information, and managing a consistent user experience.

Extend LOB Systems – SharePoint can aggregate and extend information from Line of Business systems to end users, enhancing structured business processes with informal processes through collaboration. We show how to integrate security considerations into business services, and demonstrate how to create collaborative sites that help manage business events like incident escalations and order exceptions.

The following topics may help in understanding the guidance and how it applies to your scenarios:
When to Use This Guidance
Intended Audience
Evaluating the SharePoint Guidance
Developing SharePoint Applications

Videos
Channel 9 videos
Setting up the Contoso RI
Walkthrough of the Contoso Reference Implementation
How to use the configuration component?
How to use the logging components?
How to use the SharePoint Service Locator?

Linked Sources in SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:02:00 +0000

Here in this post I will be talking on Linked Sources in SharePoint. To begin with I will give a brief introduction on different data source library.

In SharePoint there is a repository for all the data sources known as Data Source Library. It’s a location where we can manage and access different data sources. All the data sources present here can be accessed using SharePoint Designer.

Given below are the lists of data sources available.
1. SharePoint Lists: All the lists in a SharePoint site reside here.
2. SharePoint Libraries: Consist of libraries across the SharePoint Site.
3. Database Connections: database for all the SharePoint Site.
4. XML Files: Files used across SharePoint.
5. Server Side Scripts: like RSS
6. XML Web services.
7. BDC: Business Data Catalog, we can store different view.
8. Linked Sources: linked sources across SharePoint site

Linked sources are used when you want to aggregated data from different list i.e. joining or merging data from different list. You can achieve the following 2 things using linked sources.

1. Merge: in this you merge data from different list into a single data source.
2. Join: in this you perform a join between two lists which as a common filed between them.

Sahil Malik as written a very good article here which describes how to perform joins between lists.

UnKnown Error Page in SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:20:00 +0000

I am sure most of the SharePoint developers would have come across the most common error page i.e. UnKnown Error Page while developing some custom web parts in SharePoint. In this post I am going to talk about 2 different ways to display exception details on the UnKnown Error Page.
Method 1: Turning the mode On/Off/RemoteOnly mode for the CustomErrors attribute in the web.config file. This is the most common way of displaying the exception details on the UnKnown error page.
Method 2: The other approach to catch this exception detail is by using this wonderful tool named Rapid-tools. There are 4 components in this tool which increase a developer’s productivity.
1. SPDeploy is a client side component that extends MSBuild to include targets that allow you to create a SharePoint solution file (.wsp) from a standard C# class library project inside Visual Studio. In addition, SPDeploy allows you to deploy your compiled wsp file to a remote SharePoint server. This allows you to develop locally and deploy to SharePoint remotely.
2. Provisioning Framework is set of APIs that allow you provision SharePoint assets including Site Collections, Sites, Pages and Files.
3. Exception Display is a component allows you to control the SharePoint's unhandled exception behavior.
4. Data Cache allows you to cache data inside the SharePoint content database. This provides high performance data caching in web applications and also non-web applications, including SPtimer Jobs, stsadm command, WinForms applications and console applications.
The tool which I am going to use for displaying exception detail is Exception Display. You can download this tool from here. The installation is pretty simple just run the RapidTools-Server-Install.bat file in the server folder.
Enabling Exception Display
1. Exception display with minimal detail:
stsadm -o rapidtools-EnableExceptionDisplay -url siteurlhere

2. Exception display with the stack trace included:
stsadm -o rapidtools-EnableExceptionDisplay -url siteurlhere -printstack

3. Exception display with stack trace and http response terminated. In this case no UI is rendered, only the formatted exception is print to the http stream and the response is ended:
stsadm -o rapidtools-EnableExceptionDisplay -url siteurlhere -endresponse

Disabling Exception Display
stsadm -o rapidtools-DisableExceptionDisplay -url siteurlhere

Get DLL From GAC Or Assembly

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:27:00 +0000

I am sure most of the people will be knowing but this is for few crazy people like me who are always behind learning new things. Recently i ran into a scenario where i need to build a sharepoint project on a local machine (one which has windows XP and no SharePoint Server installed). Obviously the build will fail coz of missing reference's for Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. Since my sharepoint development server was down for some time i had to get the dll from my colleague.

Given below are the steps to take a backup of a dll from the GAC or Assembly

1. To get dll from assembly, open run window and type “cmd” to open command window.
2. Navigate it to c:\windows\assembly in the command prompt
3. Type “cd GAC_MSIL”
4. Then type cd dllname; [Eg: In my case since dll name is Policies, it will be “cd Policies”]
5. Then type “cd “ and then space and press tab so that it will automatically populate the directories(Version) associated with that dll . Usually it will be only one. In the below picture you can see that it starts with “1.0.0.0_…..”

6. For copying that dll to c:\ , type “copy dllname.dll c:\destfoldername
7. Important: Type “del dllname.dll” in the command prompt as the last step. If you did not delete the dll from this folder, you cannot install the dll with same name of another version. You might get the error “Cannot create/shadow copy ‘File Name’ when that file already exists”.

SharePoint2010 Sneak Peak

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:23:00 +0000

Hi Guys,

Its been a long time i have not posted any articles since i was busy with personal work, anyway let me start the first post of July with Share point 2010, yes its Share point 2010 Sneak Peak, recently Microsoft has released few videos and a brand new site on Silver Light few days back. You can have a first look at SharePoint 2010 from the below URLS,

1. Sharepoint 2010 OverView: The page basically describes a new Sharepoint 2010 architecture. It would be great to have a look at the video directly here

2. Developers Sneak Peak: This page basically describes how a sharpoint developer can increase productivity and performance of sharepoint site. The video in this page shows sharepoint development using Visual Studio 2010 and Sharepoint 2010. Following are the things covered in the video from developers perspective.

1. Siverlight Applications in Sharepoint
2. New Templates in Visual Studio 2010 for Sharepoint Development
3. Sharepoint WebPart Development.

you can view the video and have a look at new Sharepoint 2010 here

3. IT Professionals Sneak Peak: This page basically describes the enhancements made in sharepoint 2010 from administration point of view. The video in this page shows how administrator can easily manage the following things in sharepoint

1. Restore And Back Up
2. Usage And Error Logging Reports
3. New Look For Central Administration

you can view the video and have a look at new Sharepoint 2010 Central Administration here

Difference Between SiteTemplate and SiteDefinition

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:50:00 +0000

Site Templates : Are snapshots of sites at a point in time. When a user customizes a site from the UI or SPD, the custom template consists of the difference between the original state of the site (determined by its definition) and the state of the site or list when the custom template is generated.

Custom templates remain tied to a particular site definition (for example, the site definition for SharePoint Web sites or Meeting Workspace Web sites), so that if the site definition is not present or is changed, the custom template cannot work.

Site Definitions : As the name implies, A Site definition is "core definition of a site" . Each site definition emerges through a combination of files that are placed in the 12 hive of WFE during installation of SharePoint. Site definition files include .xml, .aspx, .ascx, and .master page files, as well as document template files (.dot, .htm, and so on), and content files (.gif, .doc, and so on).

Difference between them are as follows

Site Definitions

Files are on disk, better performance.
Highly customizable and extensible (XML and .NET code is much more flexible than UI)
Can provision multiple webs This could be achieved using Provisioning handler ( For more info, refer to the Publishing Site Definition in the 12 hive )
Complex to create
Requires admin access to server for deploying.
Modifying the site definition after provisioning at least one site from it is not supported and might break existing sites.

Site Templates

Files are in database, less efficient.
Not easily extensible (You are limited by what UI offers)
Can only provision one web
Easier to create
Installable from a Web UI by site owners.
Custom templates can be modified without affecting existing sites that have been created from the templates(**).

** Please note that If the site definition on which the custom template is based does not exist on the WFE, the custom template does not work.

On the surface, it appears that a site template has numerous advantages; it is certainly easier to create and deploy, and you can change it without breaking sites that use earlier versions of the template because it is not centralized in the 12 hive.

However, the fact that a site template contains everything about a site in a single file makes granular modifications of individual elements very difficult. For many projects, that is a good enough reason to suffer the additional complexity of site definitions.

However, site definitions present a different challenge. If you change an existing site definition in the 12 hive, you run the risk of breaking any sites that were created previously and use the existing definition. ( Besides, this is not supported by Microsoft ) , The key is to adopt the same strategy as for the core WSS site definitions:

Keep the definition as simple as possible and use feature stapling for everything else. Feature stapling allows you to add a feature to an already existing site definition. You may think this would be a complete waste of time, because you can simply add the feature into the site definition using far less code than having a feature staple, but when I tell you that

Microsoft does not support modifying a site definition in any way after a single site has been provisioned from that site template, you may reconsider.

Features are not an alternative to site definitions. Features are a complement to site definitions. If you keep the site definition as simple as possible and use features for the majority of a site elements, you gain the benefits of granular control in the development environment while reducing the risks involved in making changes to production systems over the life of the sites.

Assembly Version Number Details

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:46:00 +0000

Before i start describing about the version number in assembly, lets understand why we need them. Much before Microsoft released .Net Framework, thats in the era of Visual Basic, Most of the developers had problem in maintaining different version of DLL once deployed in GAC(Global Assembly Cache) and this problem was called has DLL HELL PROBLEM . In order to come up with this issues microsoft introduced versioning of assembly.

Versioning on assembly can be done only if they have strong name. In order to place assembly in GAC it must have a strong name. An assembly can have version information in 2 ways

1. The assembly's version number, which, together with the assembly name and culture information, is part of the assembly's identity. This number is used by the runtime to enforce version policy and plays a key part in the type resolution process at run time.

2. An informational version, which is a string that represents additional version information included for informational purposes only.

Assembly Version Number

Each assembly has a version number though which it can be identified. As such, two assemblies that differ by version number are considered by the runtime to be completely different assemblies. This version number is physically represented as a four-part string with the following format:

For example, version 1.5.1254.0 indicates as follows
1 as the major version, 5 as the minor version, 1254 as the build number, and 0 as the revision number.

The version number is stored in the assembly manifest along with other identity information, including the assembly name and public key, as well as information on relationships and identities of other assemblies connected with the application.

Microsoft Bing Features Rock

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:07:00 +0000

Finally the new search engine rather i can say it has a updated version of Windows live is called as BING... BINGO you got what you where looking for!!!.
Its into beta release, in the next 12 month Microsoft his going to update the Bing with new features. All the features of Bing currently are not available across the world.so if you want to have look at the full version of Bing, go to this page and set English - US as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere.

There is a lot of improvement in the Search engine compared to live but not definitely a Google Killer. So for few days i will be using Bing lets see weather i will stick to it or move back to Google.

1. The first thing that i noticed is the left result tab i.e All Results Menu, its like summary of all the results easiest way to directly access the concern topic you are looking for.

on the right side of the search result you will find the summary of the site and page details

2. The second i was fascinated with the image search check out the All Results Tab, it has categorized images into size, layout, color, style and people. If you hover on any of the images you will see the images pops u.. cool na apart from this on right side corner of the search result you will the types of layout simply awesome

3.In video Search you can view videos according to the following categorization, length, screen size, resolution and the most importantly search.

I started loving Bing by the time i finished writing this post.. Hope i will stick to it..

New Version Of AjaxControlToolKit

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Wed, 27 May 2009 05:47:00 +0000

Recently they have announced the newer version of Ajax Control Tool Kit. The new version of Ajax control toolkit can be used only on .net framework 3.5 and visual studio 2008. If you want to use visual studio 2005 then you need to user the previous version of Ajax Control Tool Kit

They have added three new Controls to the tool kit

1. HTMLEditor:This is a rich text editor, so people using third party tools can now use this control, i dont think spell check is integrated in this editor. You can see the live demo here

2. Combo Box: This a is a great control, was waiting for this control from long time, its a text box and a combo box control, where in you can type in the comobox..cool isnt it. you can see the live demo here

3. Color Picker: A new color picker control, fed up of using java script for color picker or any third party tool, you can try ajax control tool kit color picker, You can see the live demo here

Make sure that you are using Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 to use the newer version of Ajax Control Tool Kit. You can download the tool kit from below

Download New Ajax Control Tool Kit

Sharepoint 2007 Limitations

noreply@blogger.com (Raghavendra Shanbhag) — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:23:00 +0000

Site object Guidelines for acceptable performance performance degrades if the below specified limitations exceed.

1. Site collection: 50,000 per Web application Total farm throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases.

2. Web site: 250,000 per site collection You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100 sites, each with 1000 subsites, is 100,000 Web sites. The maximum recommended number of sites and subsites is 125 sites with 2,000 subsites each, for a total of 250,000 sites.

3. Subsite: 2,000 per Web site The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well as the number of subsites surpasses 2,000.

4. Document: 5 million per library You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders, using standard views and site hierarchy. This value may vary depending on how documents and folders are organized, and by the type and size of documents stored.

5. Item: 2,000 per view Testing indicates a reduction in performance beyond two thousand items. Using indexing on a flat folder view can improve performance.

6. Document file size 50MB (2GB max*): File save performance is proportional to the size of the file. The default maximum is 50 MB. This maximum is enforced by the system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 GB.

7. List: 2,000 per Web site Testing indicates a reduction in list view performance beyond two thousand entries.

8. Field type: 256 per list This is not a hard limit, but you might experience list view performance degradation as the number of field types in a list increases.

9. Column: 2,000 per document library 4,096 per list This is not a hard limit, but you might experience library and list view performance degradation as the number of columns in a document library or list increases.

10. Web Part: 50 per page This figure is an estimate based on simple Web Parts. The complexity of the Web Parts dictates how many Web Parts can be used on a page before performance is affected.