Having some fun with Sharepoint!

I've been exploring for some time now Windows Sharepoint Services and I'm really getting excited about it! After seeing some demos and presentations about this product I gave it a try. Actually it's quite impressive what you get out-of-the-box. In my opinion one of the great things is that once a user has it's own workspace or team site, he/she can control what will be on his/her site. Not only which Webparts are on the site, but even he/she can create subsites beneath his/her workspace, for example for meetings, documents, ... And this is possible without any intervention of an IT-guy. Life will be great! :-)

Although there are a bunch of Webparts you get out-of-the-box, it's always nice to be able to add some yourself, especially if they are free. Here are some links to directories of (mostly) free Webparts:

But after playing with WSS, you'll probably get bored and (as a developer) want to do some real work: building your own webparts. First you need to get the Web Part Templates for Visual Studio .NET and install them so you have a new project type in Visual Studio.NET. From then on, it's pretty straight forward. The only tricky part is deploying your Webparts so you can test them (if someone has a better solution, please tell me!).

  1. Give the assembly containing the Webpart a strong name (SN tool).
  2. Put it in the GAC of the server.
  3. Alter the web.config file on the server (add it to the SafeControls node).
  4. Put the dwp file in the wpcatalog directory (under your Sharepoint site directory).
  5. Add the Webpart to a workspace.

Once you've given the assembly a strong name, make sure to alter the dwp file to, so the Assembly node contains the full name (including the key, version, ...) of your assembly (tip: use Reflector for .NET to get the complete name of an assembly). If you don't do that, it won't work I've found out the hard way... This, and a lot more information can be found in the articles of Patrick: Building Web Parts for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies and part two. Finally one last tip (which I also discovered the hard way), if you replace an assembly in the GAC while testing a Webpart, without changing the version number, you need to restart IIS (e.g. use the IISRESET utility) or clear the assembly cache. Otherwise you'll be using the old version of the Webpart. Have fun!

5 Comments

  • Jan,



    Did you try modifying stuff that comes out-of-the-box? When I played around with it, I had several things I didn't like:

    - I couldn't just modify the look of any page I wanted

    - I often found it hard to find out where I should look for certain things

    - Once I found out how to create a page with a certain template, I saw it indeed did use the template, but it still contained certain things like the stuff at the top and left.

    - The template of that page I added couldn't be changed anymore with the webinterface once it was added.



    Perhaps I tried to use it for the wrong thing: instead of using it as some 'document sharing tool', I wanted to see if I could use it as a base for building webapplications. From my experiences, I came to the conclusion that I shouldn't want to do such a thing.



    That's why I started with our own tool, which comes has the cool things in SharePoint, but not with the limitations I experienced.

  • Also Just some FYI, you might not want to put your assembly into the GAC since it would give it FullAccess rights. To have a bit more security you can just install it into the bin directory where sharepoint is installed (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\bin).



    Jeff

  • No offense, but first life will be great because you can do a lot, out of the box. Then you start that life will be even more great when you... and then A LOT of things come up you only can do with access to the server.



    I think that still kinda sucks! :)

  • The new MS FrontPage 2003 provides some features that complements well with SharePoint sites - data views, mods, etc.

  • I need your help i developed a portal on the development server now i want to migarte on the production server can some body tell me how can i transfer site from development server to production server

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