Archives
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[OT] Happy Holidays!
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3D Silverlight Charts in SharePoint: SmartTools.Charts
Last week I was teaching the U2U Advanced SharePoint Development course in Brussels when one of my students showed me a web part he had created. The web part showed a cool 3D chart (rendered with Adobe Flex) based on some data coming from a SharePoint list. This idea inspired me to create an addition to the SmartTools project on CodePlex: the SmartTools.Charts component. The SmartTools.Charts component contains a web part that can show charts rendered by making use of a very cool open source Silverlight control created by Visifire (since I don't have any knowledge about Adobe Flex). The web part can be configured to read data from any list or document library of that site on which it's placed. At the end of this post you can see a screenshot of the web part in action. I've created a small video as well since the charts have some fancy animations when they're shown, so you need to see it in motion! A high resolution version of that video can be download from this page (bottom right). If you'd like to try the SmartTools.Charts component, you can download a first beta version from the CodePlex site (direct link to the releases). Since this is an early beta version, things can go wrong, and breaking changes in future releases can be expected; so basically use it at your own risk (source code is included). As usual, let me know if you have any comments, remarks or feature requests.
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SmartTools.DockNavigation: Cool SharePoint Navigation using jQuery
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Cool Navigation in SharePoint 2007 using jQuery – Teaser!
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Integrating SharePoint 2007 and jQuery [Part Two]
The first part of this article showed you how you can enable jQuery in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages, so in this article let's assume jQuery is up and running in your SharePoint environment. The second part of this article will show you a couple of things that you can accomplish by making use of jQuery in SharePoint 2007. It's not my goal to write about how jQuery is working, the syntax etc, for those things I kindly refer to the tutorials that are already available.
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Integrating SharePoint 2007 and jQuery [Part One]
In the first part of this article I'll talk about how you can enable the jQuery JavaScript library in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages. The second part of this article will focus on using jQuery in SharePoint 2007 sites and pages.
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Enabling .NET 3.5 in SharePoint 2007 Sites, the Lazy Way
You probably know that if you want to make use of the fancy new .NET stuff, like ASP.NET AJAX in SharePoint 2007 sites, you have to make a bunch of modifications in the web.config of that site. You can do that the manual way, for example Mike Ammerlaan has described how you can enable ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 in SharePoint sites already a long time ago. Recently .NET 3.5 (including a new version of ASP.NET AJAX) became available, including the steps that you needed to go through to be able to enable it in SharePoint sites. You can check out Tobias Zimmergren’s post for example to get an idea.
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Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to Application Pages in SharePoint Central Administration
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Meet Me in Los Angeles, PDC2008
According to the countdown timer at the PDC2008 site, the opening keynote is only 17 days away (at the time of writing). The previous PDC in 2005 was all about Office 2007 (including SharePoint) and Vista, but this time there didn't seem to be a lot of Office/SharePoint content scheduled. Not that this is a bad thing; after 3 years of SharePoint teaching, coding and evangelizing, getting to know new technologies can be great. :-) I'm really looking forward to learn more about Live, Live Mesh, Cloud Services etc. -
Patrick Tisseghem passed away
On Wednesday evening my dear friend, our colleague and my mentor Patrick Tisseghem passed away. Words fall short to describe what Patrick meant for me, both in my professional and personal life. He was that kind of guy you could rely on, no matter what happened, always friendly and always helpful.
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While I Was Sleeping: New SharePoint Tools by U2U
During my holidays my colleagues at U2U have released several pretty cool SharePoint tools/extensions. I’m just going to list them, if you want to learn more about them, check out Karine’s blog.
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Adding Copy and Paste to SharePoint with the SmartTools
I've just uploaded a new extensions to the SmartTools for SharePoint project on CodePlex. This extension adds Copy and Paste functionality to SharePoint Document Libraries. You can download the extension from the Releases section. For more info and screenshots see the CopyPaste Wiki page on CodePlex.
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Got Some Spare Time? Read Some SharePoint Blogs!
Weblogs are a great way to keep up with the latest SharePoint Buzz and I get quite a lot of questions from people who are just dipping their toes in the SharePoint pool for some good reading material. Well if you don't want to go after every interesting SharePoint blog individually or if you want to add blogs to your list that you didn't know yet, check out following links:
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New Version of the Caml Query Builder Tool
My colleague Karine has released a new version of her Caml Query Builder Tool! Version 3.1.0.0 has some great new features:
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DevDays NL Presentations and Demos Online
Pfew, the DevDays 2008 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands are over! I think both of my sessions (Getting your SharePoint Code Deployed & Advanced Web Part Development) went pretty well; no crashes or failing demos. Let's hope the audience thinks the same. :-) I already got quite some requests to get my presentations and demo code. So instead of sending a copy to everybody's email, I've uploaded them to my SkyDrive account.
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DevDays 2008 The Netherlands
For the third year in a row I'll be speaking at the Dutch Developer Days in Amsterdam. The event starts tomorrow and I've got two sessions on Friday (Getting your SharePoint Code Deployed and Advanced Web Part Development). Speaking in Amsterdam is always lots of fun, so I hope to meet you there!
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Photo World Record Attempt in Amsterdam
Micromiel is organizing a cool photo event in Amsterdam this weekend, I whish I could attend it!
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Creating Hierarchical Menus with a CustomAction in SharePoint
It’s a fairly known technique to make use of CustomActions to add elements to the out-of-the-box user interface of SharePoint: you can add menu items to the Site Actions menu, you can add links on the Site Settings page, etc. The following piece of XML is the manifest of a feature that will add a new menu item to the Site Actions menu:
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Creating Custom Application Pages that look like OOB Application Pages
Juist a quick post so I won't forget this link: http://graegert.com/?p=505
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New Release of the SmartTools for SharePoint
I just uploaded a new release of the SmartTools for SharePoint to the CodePlex site. Currently the SmartTools project has two components:
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Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to SharePoint Application Pages, the Easy Way
UPDATE: If you want to add breadcrumbs to pages provisioned in the SharePoint Central Administration site, read the follow post: http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2008/10/10/adding-breadcrumb-navigation-to-application-pages-in-sharepoint-central-administration.aspx
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[OT] My Girl, One Year
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Introducing the Autocomplete Text Field for SharePoint 2007
Yesterday I finally had some time to finish a project I've been working on for some time: the Autocomplete Text Field for SharePoint 2007. Click here for a small demo screencast on Soapbox, or download the high resolution video from the CodePlex site.
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The What's New Web Part for SharePoint 2007
A long, long time ago, back in the SharePoint 2003 days, I created some pretty popular web parts which filled in some gaps the out-of-the-box functionality left open. In SharePoint 2007 most of those web parts are obsolete; for example the Breadcrumbs web part is not necessary anymore since SharePoint 2007 has breadcrumbs by default. But a lot of people contacted me to ask for a SharePoint 2007 version of the What's New web part. This web part displayed a list of new and changed items on site. It's arguable that this functionality is not needed anymore because in SharePoint 2007 we have RSS feeds, the Content Query Web Part (MOSS only) etc. But apparently some people like the simplicity of the original What's New web part so much ... and just for those people I've create a new SharePoint 2007 What's New web part! :-)
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Photowalking in Gent, Belgium, Next Saturday
[Cross posted from my photo blog] My dear friend and esteemed colleague Kevin DeRudder is hosting a photowalk in his home town: Gent (Belgium), next Saturday (22th of March). And of course everyone is invited: geeks, non-geeks, hobbyists, amateurs, professionals ... Kevin has created a nice outline of the day that starts at 2pm, you can find more details in the Photowalk Belgium group on Flickr (discussion here). The agenda is still open so feel free to comment and contribute. When you want to join, just drop a line in the Flickr group discussion (or on this blog if you don’t have a Flickr account). If you miss the 2pm start time: I'll do my best to post some updates on our location on my twitter account. If you want to join but don't know any of us, we'll be the geeky looking group with a higher-than-average-number-of-camera's-per-person. I'll bet Kevin will be wearing his famous "I'm blogging this" t-shirt:
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SPWebConfigModification Best Practices and Guidelines
The SPWebConfigModification class allows developers to write code that will make modifications to the web.config files of SharePoint sites. This is quite often necessary when you want to deply SharePoint customizations together with configuration settings. Using the SPWebModification class is not without any danger! :-) You can mess up your web.config files especially if you don't think about how you want to be able to undo your changes. Mark Wagner wrote an excellent article about the best practices related to the SPWebConfigModification class; required reading for every SharePoint developer. Mark explains some very important things you should know to get started:
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Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint
Did you ever want to integrated Silverlight with SharePoint? Check out the brand new Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint site: http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ !
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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:
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New SharePoint Developer Tool: STSDEV
Ted Pattison has created a new SharePoint tool called STSDEV. I haven't checked it out, but it sounds promising! If you want to hear Ted's sweet voice, check out the screencasts he has made to get you started.
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New SharePoint Tool: SharePoint Cross-site Configurator
Various settings and customizations (e.g. Master Pages, Content Types) can be pushed to an entire SharePoint Site Collection pretty easy. But crossing the Site Collection can't be accomplished without building your own solution (which typically involves writing code). The Microsoft guys and girls have released a tool that can help you with these scenarios: SharePoint Cross-site Configurator (http://www.codeplex.com/SPConfigurator)
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[OT] 5 * 3 * 2007
Yves has passed me this little stick...