SharePoint Apps: Alexander Malek's weblog

Download VSeWSS . Greetings from TechEd Barcelona! Today, we finally got to announce a project I've been working on for the last year: "Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0". Yup, the name's a mouthful :). Explaining it...

One of the cooler uses for Conditional Formatting is to to dynamically swap between a set of icons/images, e.g. imagine a scenario where you want a red, yellow or green light based on how a sales department is tracking to budget. Although it's possible...

There is so much stuff in SharePoint Designer 2007, it's hard to pick favorites, but if I had to choose the five things I'm most excited about... 1) Data View v2: In addition to update (form) support, we can also now create "aggregate" views across...

...From the Open Internet Lexicon: "A Transformation Language to convert XML/XSL documents into HTML suitable for a browser to display." Personally, I like to think of it as language that sucks data from an XML file into an HTML file :). Here's...

Beyond look and feel, there is lots of other formatting support in the Data View. One of the most important is that you can easily change the way the Data View interprets data for presentation, i.e. for fields such as dates, hyperlinks, rich text, numbers...

I’m excited to be going to TechEd this week. I'll be presenting two sessions on SharePoint Designer 2007. If you have any questions about building apps on SharePoint, definitely come by the session or the Office booths! See ya in Boston. Session ID: OFC210...

In my previous post , I talked about how Web Part Connections can be used to pass data between Web Parts. I showed building a simple master/detail scenario, where you have one view, showing all the records in a data source, filtering a second "single...

Now that beta2 of Office is out (grab it here for free!), I think it's a great time for me to switch over from talking about FrontPage 2003 to SharePoint Designer 2007 . In case you hadn't heard, a few months back we announced that Office 2007 would include...

One of the great new features part of SharePoint v2 is this thing called "Web Part Connections", which allows you to easily have Web Parts communicate with each other, thus adding a level of interactivity to your web applications. In a way, you can think...

Just about to take off for Seattle – finally catching up on a week’s worth of email backlog :). Overall, TechEd was a blast. It was great to be able to show off SharePoint Designer to so many people. Thanks to everyone who came by after the sessions or...

Now that I've introduced the Data View web part, I'd like to give you a quick demo of how easy it is to add one of these data-driven views to a web page... -> The main entry point for creating Data Views is the top-level menu called Data, which...

During my time here on FrontPage (coming on 3.5 years!), I've spent most of my waking hours on features that help users build dynamic web applications for SharePoint. Now, it wouldn't surprise me if many of you haven't even heard of SharePoint - it's...

Today was our annual company meeting and all in all I had a great time. That despite my natural inclination to be cynical about rah-rah sis boom bah :^>. It was cool to see the wave of products nearing completion - I definitely have techolust for xbox360...

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time in ‘code view’ getting your page to look just right. In FrontPage 2003 we added a whole bunch of neat features to help users be more productive when editing code. One of my favorites is the ‘Select tag’ feature...

Adding content through the SharePoint browser-UI is generally workable (especially if you use the super cool 'data sheet' view), but it lacks some of the richer formatting options that one finds in most modern browser-based content editors, such as the...

In my last post, I mentioned the neato ‘Datasheet’ view that comes with SharePoint. I'm sure this is old hat to many of you out there, but on the off chance you haven't played with it, the Datasheet is definitely worth checking out. In a nutshell, the...

As I mentioned previously, my main area of focus on FrontPage is features that help users build applications for SharePoint. The cornerstone of our app creation experience in FP 2003 is a little thing we call the ‘Data View’ web part. You can think of...

I'm very happy to say that formatting a Data View works exactly the way you'd expect/want - you simply select the field you want to format, use the HTML formatting toolbar and voila: 'it just works'. a quick example: let's say you wanted to highlight...

Let’s get this thing rolling. My name is Alex Malek; I’m a Program Manager on the FrontPage team. I already know what your first question is - no, FrontPage doesn’t mess up your code anymore ;>. But seriously, I hope to use this blog to talk about...

In my last post, I talked a little about XSLT - how it can be used to mix data from an XML file with HTML markup, thus producing a web page presentation for that data. This is fundamentally how the Data View Web Part works. When the Data View executes...

One of my long pet peeves about Outlook is that if you search for a user in the “Global Address List” that happens to be in your “Contacts” list, Outlook always returns the entry from the contacts list. This is a pain since sometimes there is information...

We built the Data View on XSLT for a couple of important reasons: 1) We wanted there to be a "real" programming language under the covers, so that our users would never be limited by what our UI allowed, i.e. even if FrontPage can't do something, you...

One of the things XSLT makes really easy is "conditional formatting", i.e. having parts of your view appear differently depending on some data condition. Quick example: let's say you have a view of a "Product Sales" list, and you want to show a flag...

In addition to being able to show and hide content using Condition Formatting, you can also use the feature to dynamically change the presentation of your view, based on data in the associated data source. Example: for the view of the "Product Sales...

Sometimes true Wysiwyg is not what you want in design view. For example, if you are using Conditional Formatting to optionally show content in your view, and your data is such that all records evaluate to false, you end up in a situation where you can...