Monday, April 18, 2005 10:20 PM
Jan Tielens
Interesting project: SharePoint Explorer in VS.NET
Some time ago Patrick, Karine and
myself were brainstorming on what cool tools we could create for SharePoint. One
of the things was to create a VS.NET extension like the Server Explorer, or the
BizTalk Explorer. We never started developing it, but luckily Ciaran had the
same idea and did started a similar project on GotDotNet:
SharePoint Explorer. I haven’t got the time to check it out, but it sounds
promising: (extract from an email he sent me) “The developer will be able to
browse the whole portal through a tree structure, similar to windows explorer,
and view web-parts, properties, etc. on each site along the way, and then at any
point the developer could right click on a site or web part and be able to view
it in the VStudio browser or IE. There would also be a limited amount of
administrative tasks the developer could perform, tasks like creating/deleting
sites, security, and others that can be decided as the project is planned.
I have already created a basic sample of this and I have uploaded the source
into the source control of the workspace, you can also see some screen shots
that I have made available from a link in the top news item on the front page.”
That are already some nice features, here’s another one: generate code based
on the item selected in the explorer. For example right clicking on a specific
List or Document Library, would generate some code that would give you an
instance of that List or Document Library. You can even stretch that idea and
think about integrating our U2U
CAML Query Builder Tool. Anyone else has some feature requests, and/or some
free time to contribute to the project?
Filed under: SharePoint