Archives
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CopyUtil.aspx: a little SharePoint Gem
Did you ever had the need to navigate to a SharePoint list item or document, when you only got the ID's of the item, the item's container (list or document library) and the item's web? I sure did! For example when you query SharePoint data by making use of the SPSiteDataQuery class; the resulting data table includes all those ID's (and additional properties if you want), but it doesn't include a link back to the item. You could make use of the Object Model to build the link in code, but that is both resource intensive and pretty complex. In that case you have to check out the CopyUtil.aspx page, which is also used by the Content Query Web Part by the way. The CopyUtil.aspx page is an application page to which you can provide a bunch of ID's, as a result the page will redirect you to the corresponding item or document.
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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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VSeWSS 1.1 ready for download!
[Via the SharePoint Team Blog] The long awaited version 1.1 of the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services has RTM-ed, you can download it here. There is still no support for Visual Studio 2008 (but it will come in June 2008), but there are some interesting new things: