TechNet Evenings: SharePoint Customization & Development
Yesterday I presented a TechNet Evening Session together with Patrick Tisseghem and Yves Kerwyn about SharePoint Customization & Development. Yves told the public that he fell in love with FrontPage 2003, and I must admit that after seeing his demo's I am at least “very attracted” too this product too! (Note to my wife: FrontPage is a Microsoft product, not a girl's name! ;-). It's amazing how easy it is to customize SharePoint with FrontPage: very cool stuff! Patrick showed the InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio.NET, finally it's possible to write managed code for InfoPath forms! But that's not the only new thing; the InfoPath integration with SharePoint is improved. There are quite a lot of new features, for example you can populate a combobox in InfoPath with the contents of a SharePoint list.
My presentation/demo was about creating webparts, first the basic stuff and then some advanced things. During my presentation I mentioned some good resources, here are the links:
- My presentation (warning: very little content)
- MSDN Belux
- Web Part Templates for Visual Studio .NET
- Reflector tool
- Patrick's weblog
If you're intrested in seeing some code I showed in my demos, you can take a look at following web parts:
After my talk Patrick told me that it's not really necessary to give your assemblies a strong name (as I mentioned), but you can set the trust level in the web.config to WSS_Medium. Another nice tip if you're doing a SharePoint presentation and you don't have a netwerk connection: remove the OnlineLibrary tag from the web.config, this will prevent that SharePoint will try to access this library (so causing a delay because it's not there when your disconnected). If you have any questions, remarks, ... please contact me!