Links (6/28/2009)

1. Creating Wireframes for Page Layouts
2. Getting all documents in document library inside all folders
3. SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 Ninja Debugging
4. SharePoint Tool Basket
5. SharePoint Check Calendar Availability Custom Column (Beta)
6. Case study: KPI roll-up in MOSS (Part II)
7. SharePoint: Redirecting to a page after adding a New item to a list
8. Implementing the AJAXControlToolkit AutoCompleteExtender inside SharePoint
9. Sahil Malik on Silverlight and SharePoint

Links (6/25/2009)

1. Using the Today token in a CAML query
2. Be selective about how you get items from an SPList
3. Using KeywordQuery to search in your SharePoint site
4. Use SharePoint and Silverlight to display a summary of SharePoint blog posts on any site page
5. How Page Parsing functionality in SharePoint (SPPageParseFilter) works with the constructor of a webpart
6. How to use SharePoint Rich-Text Editor in Webparts and Controls
7. Inconvenient PublishingScheduleControl
8. SharePoint Task Master: My Web Part Misses its Cache, and I Want to Help
9. TDD and SharePoint is it worth doing?
10. InfoPath: Reading Repeating Tables from SharePoint List
11. Create and Configure a Scope to Only Return Documents in a Search Result
12. Sample MOSS 2007 WCM site now available – Adventure Works Travel
13. Hotfix for SP2 issue that reverts SharePoint products to Trial Version has been released
14. Automatically add themes to the SPThemes.xml file
15. Create a Dashboard in WSS: High Priority Indicator
16. The Content Editor Web Part

Links (6/22/2009)

1. Performance of various methods to retrieve one list item
2. Extending SharePoint CoreResultsWebPart
3. My checklist for optimizing SharePoint sites
4. Silverlight instead of DataView Web-Parts? Sure, why not?
5. Use SharePoint and Silverlight to display a summary of SharePoint blog posts on any site page
6. A Simple, but Highly Effective Approach to Logging
7. Configuring Logging in a Console Application
8. Configuring Logging in ASP.NET Applications (and SharePoint)
9. Configuring Logging in SharePoint Application Pages
10. Customising the Content Query Web Part’s RSS feed
11. SharePoint 2007 – 12 Hive System-File Changes: One Feature to rule them all!
12. Uploading Files to SharePoint Server 2007 from ASP.NET Web Applications by Using the HTTP PUT Method (Visual How To)
13. SharePoint 2007 – How to enable left navigation, quick launch, for all web-part pages in a farm?
14. Securing SharePoint List/Document Library Views Seems (sort of) Possible with jQuery
15. Guest blog by NaT – SharePoint People Picker: Override Validation Logic
16. Should I Build my application in SharePoint vs. ASP.net
17. SharePoint JavaScript – Page Load Add function: _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames
18. Identity and Access Strategies for SharePoint (MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0) Products and Technologies
19. How to create list using custom list template using SharePoint object model
20. Cannot Store the WebPart Pages in the document libraries created from the custom document library definition in WSS 3.0. Now Bend It !!
21. STSADM (Part 2)
22. STSADM (Part 3)
23. Securing Application Pages in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
24. Small SPQuery tip (How to get rid of “Cannot complete this action” error)
25. Planning SharePoint Solution Packages (WSPs)
26. Modifying out-of-the-box SharePoint files
27. Using SPWebApplicationBuilder class for creating Web Application programmatically
28. SharePoint and TDD
29. Add Totals to the Dynamic Groups that Appear in your List Rollup Data View

Links (6/18/2009)

1. The ApplyApplicationContentToLocalServer Method and Why It Comes Up Short
2. We Drift Deeper Into the Sound … as the Flush Comes – BLOB Cache
3. Making Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Navigation Better
4. Hiding specific item from ECB menu
5. How to make “This Site” the default SharePoint search scope
6. SharePoint WCM: flushing publishing pages from the cache
7. SharePoint, Features and web.config modifications using SPWebConfigModification
8. Debugging SharePoint/ASP.NET code? Smart key-codes + disable timeout!
9. Quick and Easy: Use jQuery to Hide a Text Field on a SharePoint Form
10. How to show file/folder icons depending on the type in Content Query Webpart
11. Quick and Easy: Create Your Own jQuery Sandbox for SharePoint
12. How to modify a DateTime value of AfterProperties in ItemUpdating/ ItemAdding Events in SharePoint
13. Taming the Elusive “Calculated Column” – Referencing Multiple Lines of Text Column
14. Quick and Easy: A Better Way to Use jQuery to Hide a Text Field on a SharePoint Form
15. How to customize the table styles in content editor webpart
16. The maximum limit for the length of the QueryText property of FullTextSqlQuery is 4096 characters.
17. Retrieve SharePoint List Data with XLINQ using VS 2010 Beta 1
18. STSADM Evolution
19. SharePoint Data Zoom: Content Rotator Web Part
20. Useful SharePoint Links
21. Adding SharePoint Search plug-in for Firefox
22. PowerShell quickie: Extract the feature IDs used in large SharePoint projects
23. Looking through the source of SharePoint on SharePoint
24. Run a workflow as a specific user using code
25. Using the RadFileExplorer for ASP.NET AJAX in a MOSS web application
26. Extending your MOSS site with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0
27. STSADM (Part 1)

SharePoint Saturday Charlotte

I will be in Charlotte this weekend attending SharePoint Saturday Charlotte. My presentation will be:

Developing Custom Timer Jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are similar to Windows’ scheduled tasks. Timer jobs are used by SharePoint to automate tasks such as search indexing, sending notification alerts, emptying the recycle bin, and removing unused sites. Developers have the capability to create custom timer jobs and integrate them within SharePoint. Custom timer jobs can be used in your organization to support IT governance, satisfy legal and audit requirements, plus many more scenarios. Come to this session to learn how custom timer jobs are created and how to deploy them into your SharePoint environment.

Hope to see you there.

Links (6/15/2009)

SharePoint

1. SharePoint 2007 Development – Build Processes
2. Final Call: Excel and SharePoint – I didn’t know you could do that!
3. Quick and Easy: Use jQuery to Set A Text Field’s Value on a SharePoint Form
4. Cool SharePoint Photo Gallery With JQuery!
5. Updating Metadata on Files in SharePoint: Low Cost, High Reward
6. How To Trim SharePoint Blog Post
7. MOSS Navigation Deep Dive – Part 1
8. MOSS Navigation Deep Dive – Part 2
9. Live demo: SharePoint, XML files, and Flash charts
10. How to Check if SPGroup Exists
11. Working with SharePoint (C#)
12. SharePoint: Internal developer portal – first thoughts
13. SharePoint Designer 2007 Governance: Options for selective lockdown?
14. SharePoint Solution Deployment Strategies – Dare I say Best Practices?
15. SharePoint Filter web parts: using a context filter in a page layout
16. I got tired of attaching debugger to w3wp.exe. And you?
17. Do you want to add totals to your List Rollup data view? Follow these simple steps…
18. It’s Like Building WebParts, for Your Phone
19. Highlighting the current page (site) in a custom navigation
20. Charts with Power WebPart ( Management-Eye-Catchers )
21. Hey SharePoint Calendar, I want my space back!

Office

1. Removing Page and Section Breaks from a Word Document
2. InfoPath form and other xml Office documents do not open from Internet Explorer – Raw XML displays instead

SharePoint Saturday Chicago

I will be in Chicago this weekend attending SharePoint Saturday Chicago. My presentation will be:

Developing Custom Timer Jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are similar to Windows’ scheduled tasks. Timer jobs are used by SharePoint to automate tasks such as search indexing, sending notification alerts, emptying the recycle bin, and removing unused sites. Developers have the capability to create custom timer jobs and integrate them within SharePoint. Custom timer jobs can be used in your organization to support IT governance, satisfy legal and audit requirements, plus many more scenarios. Come to this session to learn how custom timer jobs are created and how to deploy them into your SharePoint environment.

Hope to see you there.

Links (6/10/2009)

SharePoint

1. A great web part for SharePoint End Users
2. SharePoint Photo Gallery using jQuery
3. Let’s discuss about some BDC Web parts!
4. Creating top-level (welcome page) redirects in SharePoint sites
5. Six ways to store settings in SharePoint
6. Updating Content Types Custom Edit, View Displayforms
7. Embedding css file in custom Webpart in SharePoint
8. 4 Minute Screencast: Create SharePoint “Sub-Calendars” using Content Types
9. The Content Query Web Part
10. Free Last Modified By/Date From SharePoint
11. Submitting an InfoPath form to SharePoint with a unique filename
12. SharePoint Search Design
13. Datasheet view with Lists and content types
14. Creating Content Types
15. Using SharePoint Controls with Power WebPart
16. Best Practices of SharePoint Farm configuring and deployment Part 2 – Installation & Configuration
17. Using the Reusable Content to style HTML Contents
18. Time Comparison in CAML Queries
19. Columns missing when using the Lists.GetListItems SharePoint webservice
20. SharePoint Filter web parts: using a context filter in a page layout

Office

1. How to access SharePoint calendars through Microsoft Outlook 2007
2. Generating Microsoft Word Documents
3. Ensuring Infopath forms to open in Forms Services
4. Google Wants to Replace Microsoft Exchange with an Outlook Plug-in

Links (6/7/2009)

1. Customising Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and Discussion Boards
2. SPLimitedWebPartManager.AddWebPart Mysteriously Increments zoneIndex
3. Case Study: Dynamic Charts in SharePoint, No Code Required!
4. Bigger SharePoint Templates
5. Developing Sequential Workflows for SharePoint Server 2007 Using Visual Studio 2008
6. jQuery for Everyone: “Read More…” On a Blog Site
7. SharePoint Branding Build Test Checklist
8. Debugging your code execution for anonymous users in SharePoint
9. TechNet Launches New Interactive Silverlight Application for STSADM Technical Reference
10. FeatureDeactivating does not remove the EventReceivers
11. Add Web Parts to DispForm, EditForm or NewForm.aspx
12. WCF and SharePoint: context != context
13. SharePoint Performance, Stress or Load Testing
14. #SharePoint Lists, event receivers and content types
15. Automatically add SharePoint subfolders when adding a new Folder Content Type
16. How to: Programmatically read the ChangeLog in PowerShell
17. Granularity of SharePoint Features and Solutions
18. How To Automatically Changing Permissions in a Doc Lib
19. Define custom new/edit/display forms for Content Types
20. Deploying the Browser enabled InfoPath Form template through feature
21. Using User control (Web service call ) in SharePoint Web part
22. Account Names, SharePoint Setups, Server 2008 and Cheese

Links (6/4/2009)

1. **** Tiny Calendar!
2. Image rotator: build your own!
3. SPExLib Release: These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things
4. How BIG is your SharePoint
5. NO CODE! Silverlight – SharePoint Integration
6. jQuery for Everyone: Collapse or Prepopulate Form Fields
7. Adventures with Silverlight 3.0 and SharePoint – Part 1
8. Get the number of current SharePoint connections
9. Using jQuery to fix the removal of the Title column of a list
10. Quick config for Silverlight in SharePoint 2007
11. jQuery for Everyone: Hourly Summary Web Part
12. How to get column names to wrap in #SharePoint new item forms (NewForm.aspx)
13. Goolge Wave vs. SharePoint
14. STSADM Technical Reference for SharePoint
15. Multiple Pie Charts in a WSS Dashboard
16. Writing a custom trace listener to log to the 12 hive log from the Enterprise Library logging block
17. Dirty secrets of Data View Web Part revealed
18. Smarter SharePoint Alerts – IM and Text
19. Taming the Elusive “Calculated Column” – Date and Time – Part 3
20. Taming the Elusive “Calculated Column” – Date and Time – Part 4
21. Retrieve pageurl in SPSiteDataQuery
22. Reusing a saved site template (stp) inside another Site Collection
23. KPIs – Who Am I and Where do I Come From? (Part 3 of 6)
24. Using same custom edit forms across different Lists in SharePoint
25. MOSS Web Services – Accessing SharePoint List data
26. SharePoint Designer Workflows – what user identity?

Learning jQuery 1.3 Review

I have been working with SharePoint for close to 3 years now. I am always looking for ways to improve what I can do with it. As a SharePoint developer, you need to understand that you do not live in Visual Studio 100% of the time. This is definitely disconcerting to developers who are making the transition to SharePoint. There are many reasons why you are not writing Visual Studio code 100% of the time.

1. The functionality you are looking to deploy is already available out-of-the-box. Yes, it may not meet 100% of the business requirements but it is close enough.
2. SharePoint Designer can be used to extend and add functionality.
3. Your SharePoint Governance plan may restrict what type of custom code can be deployed.
4. SharePoint Administrators limit what can be deployed.
5. Companies may not currently have in place a way to deploy custom code.

In my case I have run into all of these scenarios. The client I am working with exclusively for the past year does not have a custom code model in place; therefore, Visual Studio applications are out. So what is a developer to do? On most projects, business users want functionality which is not easily available out-of-the-box or through SPD. Can’t very well say, sorry it can’t be done. There are many ways to add custom solutions to SharePoint in a non custom code model.

1. SharePoint Designer
2. Silverlight. I have been working with Silverlight a bit the past few months and can definitely see the power. I will definitely be writing more blog posts on integrating Silverlight and SharePoint. You use web services to communicate with SharePoint.
3. Office Business Applications (OBAs). Instead of putting the custom logic in SharePoint, you put the logic in an Office tool. You use web services to communicate with SharePoint.
4. Use JavaScript to create script to do advanced functionality, either by integrating within a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) or linking in the .js file within your master page.

Although JavaScript is powerful and there are plenty of examples on how to do different things, the biggest obstacle you have is writing extra code to accommodate for different browsers. This is where jQuery comes in. jQuery is a JavaScript library which allows you to create web effects with little code.

From a SharePoint perspective, there are many examples out on the Web of very cool things people have done using jQuery. One notable example is Paul Grenier’s “jQuery for Everyone” series on EndUserSharePoint. Examples include Accordion Quick Launch, Calculated Columns, Resizing Web Parts, and Pre-Populating Form Fields. Jan Tielens has recently written many great posts on how to communicate back to SharePoint from jQuery code using web services. There are plenty of others who have done equally neat things.

So you have decided you want to learn jQuery. What resources are available? First off, there are many resources available on the Web. Open your browser and search for jQuery or SharePoint+jQuery and you will see plenty of links. Second, there are plenty of books. I love tech books – call it a disease – but there is nothing better than opening a box from Amazon and sitting down for a few hours to read. This gets me to the book “Learning jQuery 1.3” written by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg which I want to spend some time covering.

I bought the first edition of the book from Amazon. Packt Publishing was kind enough to send me a review copy of their latest book which covers the new 1.3 version. So what are my impressions of the book?

Chapters 2-5 are a good introduction on jQuery. These chapters include Selectors, Events, Effects, and DOM Manipulation. These are the basic building blocks on how to get started with jQuery. Chapter 6 covers AJAX and how you can retrieve data in a seamless fashion. Chapter 7 covers Table Manipulation, Chapter 8 covers Forms Function, and Chapter 9 covers Shufflers and Rotators. Chapters 7-9 do a great job of showing real-world examples which you can use in your applications. The rest of the book covers Plug-ins, or allowing your to extend jQuery. Extensions can be done by you or the community. There are many powerful examples of plug-ins. The most popular would be the jQuery UI. The jQuery UI plug-in includes widgets such as the accordion, date-picker, and progress bar; interactions such as drag-and-drop; and effects for animation. One of the next books on my read list is the companion book jQuery UI 1.6: The User Interface Library for jQuery.

My favorite chapter in the book was Chapter 5 which covers DOM Manipulation. Being able to add, delete, and change HTML elements is very powerful and something which you use often on a SharePoint project. One section in the chapter covers creating “pull quotes” which was very timely because they were needed on a project I was currently working on. Each chapter starts small, a snippet here, snippet there, but by the end of the chapter, you are creating full, real-world examples. The chapters are structured in a way that you can go back to a chapter whenever you need a refresher on a particular subject.

As far as 1.3 features, it covers most new features, but there are a features which came out in 1.3.2 which are not covered in the book.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book. I would recommend it for those who want to quickly get up to speed on the jQuery. At just under 400 pages, it can be quickly read within a few days. With that in mind, if you are looking for an all encompassing jQuery reference, you may need other resources to learn all the jQuery nuisances.

Packt Publishing

Amazon