Introduction As a consultant for Microsoft Global Delivery, I recently worked with a Customer who asked for continued use of the Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (known as the Fab 40 templates) in their Office 365, SharePoint Online Dedicated environment. But we were in a dilemma, because some templates were not working with the SharePoint 2010 release. With the help of .Net Reflector, I have found a resolution to this dilemma. Background Basically, there are some issues with a few of the .wsp files after upgrade. In particular, after upgrading, some customers are unable to create new sites based on the following templates: Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management, Call Center, Help Desk, IT Team Workspace, Knowledge Base, and Physical Asset Tracking and Management. There are freely downloadable templates which can work in SharePoint 2010, but not with sites that have been upgraded from SharePoint 2007. After the fixed FAB 40 templates are installed...

In this post, you learn how to hide the ribbon in SharePoint 2010 by using JavaScript. About the Ribbon in SharePoint 2010 The SharePoint 2010 ribbon provides a similar user experience as the Microsoft Office client products. The ribbon is a toolbar which appears on top of the page to provide the most commonly used tools, controls, and commands. The ribbon hierarchy is organized as follows (see Figure 1 and Figure 2): Contextual Tag Group - A contextual tab enables you to provide a set of user interface (UI) controls within a certain context. For example, when you select a table in a document, a set of tabs is displayed to work with the table. When the table is deselected, the contextual tabs are hidden. Contextual tabs with a similar context are organized in a contextual tab group so you can have more than one tab in a group. Tabs – Tabs are used to organize groups of related controls. For example, an Insert tab displays controls that enable you to insert various objects into a document...

In the Part I of this series, we were pleased to announce the SharePoint List Designer as one of the new features introduced in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Using the List Designer, you can quickly and visually build a SharePoint list within Visual Studio without having to create a list first in SharePoint Designer and then import it into Visual Studio.

To familiarize you with the List Designer, in Part I of this series, we provided a link to a MSDN Help topic that walks you through the process of creating a list and a content type by using the List Designer. If you’ve used the List Designer, you might want more details about its functionality. This blog post provides more information about it.  

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Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for items in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Refer here for more information on the managed metadata in SharePoint 2010. A column is a location in a list in which to store information about a SharePoint Server 2010 item. When you define a column, you provide a name for the column, specify the column's type, and provide additional information that depends on the column type. SharePoint Server 2010 introduces a new column type named managed metadata . When you create a managed metadata column, you specify the term set from which the column's values must come. When you want users to provide information for list items (including documents), and the valid values for the information are contained in a term set, use a managed metadata column. Create a new content type or modify an existing content type, and then add the managed metadata column to the content type. This post...

Problem Statement Many SharePoint projects and solutions need client-side JavaScript for performing activities, from displaying an alert statement to performing data validation activities. The advantage of doing many of these activities in the client is to improve the user experience and reduce the need to reload the page. However, one issue we face is how to localize text. This post addresses ways to do this. Solution The following approaches described here can be used in traditional ASP.NET (and by inference SharePoint because SharePoint is an ASP.NET application) to perform localization of client-side scripts: File Based Localization and Assembly based Localization Adding Localized Resources to a JavaScript File However, because this post is referring to SharePoint 2010, you can leverage a feature that is already available in SharePoint to localize the client-side content. There are two potential scenarios: one where you have JavaScript inline as part of the Application (.aspx) page...

Part 1 of this series on SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta summarized all of the new features. This article focuses more on the features that support building remote SharePoint Online solutions and provides an overview of the new tool enhancements in this area. As you may already know, Office 365 provides secure, global access to email and calendars, Office Web Apps, web conferencing, and file sharing. SharePoint Online , a component of Office 365, lets you create remote SharePoint sites to share your documents and information, making it easier to work together with colleagues and customers. Visual Studio 11 Beta provides improved support for creating SharePoint applications that leverage SharePoint Online, which is a remote, sandboxed environment. For security purposes, SharePoint solutions that run on SharePoint Online must be sandboxed solutions. Here is a list of new and improved features designed to make your SharePoint Online development experience better: · Publish...

In the previous post in this series, we showed how to deploy WSPs as part of an automated build process. This knowledge is useful for supporting deployment testing, but most people agree that the real point of Continuous Integration is to support automated testing. Automated testing can take the following forms: Unit tests Integration tests (usually defined as unit tests that call into the core product/platform – SharePoint in this case) User Interface (UI) tests When executed as part of an automated build, such tests are often referred to as Build Verification Tests . In most scenarios, using a combination of automated test types yields the most benefit. It’s also worth remembering that a test strategy which relies exclusively on automated tests of any description is unlikely to be fool proof – manual testing still has a crucial part to play. The skill of an experienced tester is often hugely valuable in uncovering issues before users do. The idea of...

The figure below is a syntax diagram detailing how to construct URIs for the Excel Services REST API. For more information on using the Excel Service REST interface, take a look at the SharePoint 2010 SDK topics located here . And developer Shahar Prish details even more tips and tricks on working with the service on his blog . To explore those posts, start here .

Visual Studio 11 Beta introduces a new set of features and enhances existing features in the SharePoint Developer Tools for SharePoint 2010, helping you increase your SharePoint development productivity. You may have tried some of these new features in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview release. To make sure you get the most benefits from the update, we, the SharePoint Developer Tools team, plan to post a series of articles in the following weeks to show you all the exciting new tooling features. Below is a list of the planned topics, but please let us know if there is any other particular topic you are interested in knowing about: 1. What’s New in SharePoint Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11 Beta (this article) 2. Better support for O365 development 3. Tips and tricks in List Designer 4. ALM in Visual Studio 11 SharePoint Developer Tools As the first post of this series, we’ll briefly go through all of the key features delivered in the Beta release: · SharePoint List Designer for...

The Microsoft Office Developer Center has created 101 code samples for SharePoint 2010. These samples cover a wide range of useful tasks from working with lists and document libraries, to using BCS. The C# samples, in most cases, have a companion VB.NET project. There are also samples written in JavaScript. The list of samples were compiled from suggestions submitted by the SharePoint community via this blog. Be sure to check them out. We are sure that you will find something to use in your own solutions. You can get the descriptions of each sample and a link to each individual sample at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/site/search?f%5B0%5D.Type=Topic&f%5B0%5D.Value=Sharepoint%202010%20101%20code%20samples&f%5B0%5D.Text=Sharepoint%202010%20101%20code%20samples The sample pack can be downloaded at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SharePoint-2010-101-Code-da251182 Enjoy!

Summary: See how to retrieve the site collection URL at run time when using a timer job for deployment. In real word scenarios, a common requirement while using timer jobs is to deploy the job in such a way that it runs on only one machine in the farm and retrieves the site collection URL at run time. In this type of situation, it is not recommended that you use a hardcoded URL to compare to the requested site collection URL in the content database or that you use an index to get the URL. To deploy the same solution on different production servers, you would need to modify the deployment code for each individual server which is tedious at best and prone to errors. There are various ways to pass the URL, or any other values, to a timer job. For example, you can use configuration files, external files, property bags such as owstimer.exe.config , XML files, or the property bag for a SharePoint 2010 object. A property bag is simply a container for a series of name/value pairs that correspond...

The figure below is a syntax diagram of the structure of SharePoint Foundation REST service URIs. You can read more about the SharePoint Foundation REST service here . Syntax diagrams are a useful way of illustrating linear data structures. Things like: REST URI composition API signatures JSON, OData, or other XML-based data notation You can find out more about syntax diagrams at this Wikipedia entry , see some examples using JSON here , and see some more examples in the OData specifications .

This post describes how to update ODC files programmatically by using either a SharePoint feature or a console application written in .Net code, or with a PowerShell script. The contents pertain to: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 – Excel Services Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Overview of Office Data Connection Files An Office Data Connection (ODC) file contains connection information about how to connect to a data source and retrieve data for use in various documents such as Microsoft Excel workbooks. Connection information can either be stored in the workbook or in a connection file, such as an (ODC) file (.odc) or a Universal Data Connection (UDC) file (.udcx). Typically, an ODC file is used while building Excel services reports that fetch data from a data source. As part of the implementation, this report can be deployed in multiple environments such as development, staging, test, and production. Each environment may have a different data source and hence...

Today’s diagram is probably best considered a work in progress. We created the following diagram as a prototype, to see if we could use large-scale static graphics as aids for developers to visualize the SharePoint object model hierarchy and the relationships between classes within it. As an experiment, we took the subset of classes available in sandbox solutions, and, starting from a handful of the most important classes, laid out the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace hierarchy. The results were mixed: we quickly realized that, as recursively nested as the SharePoint object model is, arbitrarily picking starting points (even important classes such as SPWeb and SPList) and presenting a single hierarchical view of the object model from there probably isn’t going to be that useful long-term for developers. Locating a specific class was difficult. Also, in order to conserve space, we omitted the names of the members used to access a class from another class; in doing so, we inadvertently stripped...

XML files are often used as input to search engines. The article Custom XML Item Processing describes one way of indexing XML content for FAST Search Server 2010. Another option is to create a custom XML indexing connector. This option: Selects and creates the mapping from the XML elements to crawled properties outside of document processing. This means you don’t have to enable optional document processing and configuration of the XML mapper. Supports the indexing of multiple XML formats with your search solution. Indexes XML files that contain multiple XML elements that should be indexed as separate items or documents. Note: This is unlike the method described in Custom XML Item Processing, in which each XML element must be stored in an XML file. Example of a custom XML indexing connector for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint The custom XML indexing connector example described in this article is an extension of the custom indexing connector example described in Code Sample: MyFileConnector...

Ribbon customizations, deployed as custom actions, in SharePoint 2010 can be categorized in two ways: filtered and unfiltered. A filtered custom action is one that uses the RegistrationId and RegistrationType attributes, for example to target a specific list. An unfiltered custom action is one that does not use these attributes. Ribbon custom actions are handled in different ways depending on the type. Both filtered and unfiltered custom actions are passed into the SPElementProvider internal class. SPElementProvider retrieves the Server ribbon XML from the custom action and sends it to the internal classes SPToolbar and SPUIProcessor depending on the type of custom action. A custom action has two pieces: A user interface piece (i.e., a button) A command handler that will interact and control the button on the page For filtered custom actions, the UI and handlers are generated in the following way: SPToolbar class takes the handler data, which is stored in <CommandUIHandlers> in the...

Excel Services is part of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Excel Services is built on ASP.NET and SharePoint Foundation technologies. Following are the core components in Excel Services: · Excel Web Access · Excel Web Services · User-defined functions (UDFs) · ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) · Representational State Transfer (REST) service · Excel Calculation Services The Excel Web Access, Excel Web Services, UDFs, ECMAScript, the REST service, and Excel Calculation Services components can be divided into two major groups: the components on a front-end server (also known as the "Web front end") and the component on a back-end application server. An important aspect of Excel Services is that solution developers can use its power programmatically from their applications. These applications can be line-of-business (LOB) products or custom enterprise solutions that an organization develops internally. Following are examples of these applications: · Multitiered applications, with...

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) enables users to read and write data from external systems—through Web services, databases, and Microsoft .NET Framework assemblies—from within Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 applications. Both SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications have product features that can use external data directly, both online and offline. Developers can gain access to a rich set of features and rapidly build solutions by using familiar tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. To understand the important concepts and architecture of Business Connectivity Services, see the following topics: · How is Business Connectivity Services Different From the Business Data Catalog? · Business Connectivity Services Benefits · Mechanics of Using Business Connectivity Services · Connectivity Using Business Connectivity Services · Business Data Connectivity (BDC) Service · Secure Store Service · Business Connectivity...

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is included in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and Microsoft Office 2010 applications. However, the feature set and the capabilities differ in each application. The diagram below shows the differences in the feature sets of Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Server 2010, and Office 2010. For more information about the Business Connectivity Services features in each application, see the following topics: · Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Foundation 2010 · Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Server 2010 · Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft Office 2010

As a SharePoint developer, you very likely already know about the Excel Services JavaScript API available to you in SharePoint 2010. You use this API to automate, customize, and interact with the Excel Web Access Web Part control on a page. By using the JavaScript object model, you can build mashups and other integrated solutions that interact with one or more Excel Web Access Web Part controls on a page. It also enables you to add more capabilities to your workbooks and to code around them. That’s cool enough in itself, but it gets better: If you’ve already developed solutions on SharePoint using the Excel Services JavaScript API and Excel Web Access Web Parts, now you can do nearly all of the same development tasks with Excel Web App on any web site using the same API! Just using the Excel Services JavaScript API that you already know how to use, a workbook stored on a public SkyDrive folder, and standard web technologies, you can create really powerful Excel Web App mashups on your web...

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) enables users to read and write data from external systems—through Web services, databases, and Microsoft .NET Framework assemblies—from within Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 applications. Both SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications have product features that can use external data directly, both online and offline. Developers can gain access to a rich set of features and rapidly build solutions by using familiar tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. This diagram shows the relationship between all of the components that make up BCS or that interact with the services BCS provides.

Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define and then use as attributes for items in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Managed terms can act as sources of data for columns in libraries or lists. To manage the taxonomy column by using the server object model, there are APIs available under the Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy namespace. However, handling managed metadata columns by using the client object model requires a different strategy. Managed Metadata Columns To work with managed metadata columns by using the SharePoint client object model, it helps to have an understanding of how managed metadata columns store values in lists. Consider the following details: Managed Metadata Columns are Derived from SPFieldLookup TaxonomyFieldValue has a WSS identifier that is the LookupId property of the term in the TaxonomyHiddenList list. The TaxonomyHiddenList list can be viewed by navigating to /Lists/TaxonomyHiddenList/AllItems.aspx . This list contains...

In this fifth article of our SharePoint Continuous Integration series, we will look at how to implement automated WSP deployment as part of a Team Foundation Server (TFS) build. We have dealt with most prerequisites in our earlier articles, but since we still have one outstanding prerequisite to cover, this article is split into two sections: Configuring PowerShell remoting Deploying WSPs as part of the build process Additionally, we are also introducing a SharePoint/TFS Continuous Integration Starter Pack – this is a Codeplex project which contains the TFS workflows and PowerShell deployment scripts referenced in this article. Configuring PowerShell Remoting Once you have automated the build of the assemblies and WSP packages using TFS Build, most likely you’ll want to deploy the WSPs to a SharePoint environment to test them. Unless SharePoint 2010 is installed on the TFS build server(s) (a configuration rarely recommended for several reasons, not least...

The request batching process helps to improve performance and reduce network traffic in two ways. First, fewer Web service calls occur between the client and the SharePoint server, which reduces the "chattiness" of the client-server interface. For example, you can perform two list queries in a single request. Second, as a set of operations occur on the server in a single request, the data being acted on doesn't need to be moved between the client and the server for the intermediate operations—only the list of operations and the final result set are passed between the client and the server. Request batching requires a different mindset when you create queries from client-side code. First, be aware that you do not have access to any results until you call ExecuteQueryAsync (or ExecuteQuery ) and receive the call back with the results. If you need to implement conditional logic in the client-side code that can't be expressed in the command list that you send to the server, you will...

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) for SharePoint 2010 builds on the technology of the Business Data Catalog first introduced in SharePoint 2007. It provides the ability to connect SharePoint to external data sources of all kinds, including but not limited to, other database systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, ERP systems. BCS provides a developer with a means of pre-defining all the information needed by an application to connect with and manipulate this external data through External Content Types (ECT). The most important aspect of ECTs is that once the developer creates it, the ECT will be available for use by SharePoint users to connect and use the external systems without knowing any code. The following diagram displays a high-level overview of how the components of BCS all work together. Business Connectivity Services provides mechanisms to enable experienced users, developers, and business unit IT professionals to do the following much more easily: Reveal...