February, 2011

MSDN has published a long technical article of mine on SharePoint Architecture.  I should actually say “architecture s ” because, as I point out in the article, SharePoint has a lot more than one architecture.  I cannot claim that it will tell you everything that you need to know about SharePoint’s plumbing, but it will tell you a lot . It has 15,000 words and 11 diagrams on the following subjects: What Is SharePoint? SharePoint Development Platform Stack SharePoint as an ASP.NET-IIS Application SharePoint Configuration Stack SharePoint Deployment Models Process and Execution Trust Model Pages, Parsing, and Safe Mode Data Model, Data Management, and Query System Services and the Service Application Framework Site Definitions and Web Templates SharePoint Security Server Object Model in SharePoint Client Object Models in SharePoint Workflows in SharePoint Here’s the link: SharePoint 2010 Architectures Overview

This blog post explains how a WCF service can be called using jQuery in a SharePoint application. I won’t cover all of the implementation details. This post will highlight the relevant parts of configuring a WCF service to be accessible using jQuery in SharePoint. [Update – 2/23/2011 – The original post contained some poor deployment practices and erroneous code. We apologize for the errors and want to give a big thank you to Wictor Wilen for pointing them out. The best practices for deployment and development using Visual Studio 2010 are available on his blog post . We are working to create a technical article that will show the best practices and Visual Studio 2010 tools.] Creating a WCF Service Let us start with the creation of Data Access Layer. This consists of the ProductsManager class and the associated methods. Create a class library with the name DatabaseManager . Add a class called ProductsManager . Add function to ProductsManager called GetProducts . This will get the list of...

Wictor Wilen , one of our MVPs, asked for some illumination around the RefreshCommandUI function in SharePoint 2010. I've been working with that particular function lately, so I have a pretty simple (but useful) example for all of you Server ribbon users out there. I also want to give a shout out to Fred Mameri, a dev on SharePoint here at Microsoft. He was absolutely critical in helping me create this post. Thank you for the inspiration and the code contribution! In this example, I'll show you how to enable a button based on the file type selected in a list. This can be used to give your users contextual button availability if a certain file type is in a list. This is using purely using the EcmaScript-based object model and declarative customization of the Server ribbon. You can surely find a way to do this on the server-side, but I like the client-side. :) For this post, I'm going to skip over creating the Server ribbon customization. If you need documentation on that, it is well covered...

The Visual Studio BizApps team has joined forces with the awesome developer evangelists in the West region to bring you some expert SharePoint 2010 training in March that you can’t miss. Come learn how to effectively use Visual Studio 2010 to develop and manage solutions for SharePoint 2010 directly from the team that builds the SharePoint tools for Visual Studio! You’ll get an overview of all the tools in Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint development as well tips & tricks on how to use them to their full potential. You’ll also see how to use Team System to manage the application lifecycle of SharePoint projects as well as some new features we’ve added in Visual Studio 2010 SP1. We’ve also got additional SharePoint experts in each location to deliver real-world SharePoint developer training. Weather you’re a seasoned SharePoint veteran or totally new to SharePoint development, this event is for you. Check out the cities where we’ll be on tour : Tempe, AZ - 03/15/2011 REGISTER >>...

Hi again, this is Anweshi Deverasetty with a new blog post. You might have read my recent blog post Working with SharePoint 2010 Themes . Next, I am going to talk to you about how we can embed and link client side scripts for Web parts in SharePoint 2010. About creating client-side scripts for Web Parts Scripts are blocks of code that are inserted into a Web page and are interpreted at run time. Just like a browser interprets HTML on a Web page to determine what to display, a browser also interprets scripts to determine what actions to take when an event occurs (for example, what happens when a user clicks a button on a Web page). Client-side scripts run on the client as opposed to the server. After a Web page is downloaded to the client computer, if the browser has enabled scripts to run, all the client-side scripts will run in the browser. Although script languages are simpler than programming languages, scripts can add sophisticated logic to Web pages and increase interactivity. You...

In this article, we will see how to design a SharePoint BCS entity from a SQL stored procedure that takes some inputs and returns a list of records. The scope of the article is to show the use of OOB features provided by SharePoint Server and SharePoint designer to achieve this. We will also see how to use the OOB Business Data List web part to display the output of the stored procedure. Contents Overview.. 1 Verify Web Application settings. 2 Configure Business Data Connectivity service. 3 Create Stored Procedure. 4 Create the External Content Type. 5 Verify the ECT in the Central Admin. 11 Use Business Data List web part to show the external data. 14 Connecting Business Data List web part with other web parts. 16 Additional Resources. 19 Overview Business Connectivity Services are a set of services and features that provide a way to connect SharePoint solutions to sources of external data and to define external content types that are based on that external data. This article contains...

Some developers are getting this error whenever they try to use a sandboxed solution, or sometimes when they add a sandboxed Web Part to a page, even in circumstances in which the service could not be busy.  There seem to be multiple things that can cause this. The following are some solutions that have worked for others.  If you find a different solution, please report it as a comment to this post. Be sure to double-verify it: undo your solution and verify that the problem comes back, then redo it and verify that the problem goes away. I. Be sure the sandboxed host service is running on the appropriate servers. The service is called Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service in Central Admnistration. It is called SharePoint 2010 User Code Host in Windows Services. It can be started in either place.  If you have configured the sandbox to run in local mode, then the service must be running on every front-end web server. If you have configured it to run in remote...

Hi Everyone, I am Anweshi Deverasetty. I have been working as an Associate Consultant in Microsoft Services Global Delivery from past 4 ½ years. I have around 9 years of experience in Software Industry and have been extensively working on SharePoint. Currently, I am working on a project which involved migration of application from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, implementation of Pivot Viewer, BCS, FAST Search etc. This blog is an outcome of the effort that I put in to develop and deploy Themes. Happy Reading!! :) Introduction Our application involved migration of site collections on a Web application from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 environment. As we wanted to perform Visual Upgrade on site collections on an as-needed basis at the user's request, we performed migration using PreserveOldUserExperience in stsadm. This will do the data migration but preserve the SharePoint 2007 look and feel. Later, Visual Upgrade can be used to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 look and feel. You can find more about PreserveOldUserExperience...

Have you ever seen that Far Side comic where there’s a guy yelling for help, and he’s yelling “F1! F1! F1!” instead of “Help! Help! Help!”? Well, the Help for SharePoint end users isn’t F1, but actually F2. You can set the HelpUrl property and the HelpMode property to display Help documentation for a web part, a Ribbon button, or feature. Alternatively, you can configure the Help at the site collection and farm-wide levels through the SPSiteExtension.ActivateHelpCollection and SPSiteExtension.DeactivateHelpCollection methods. If you have other tips and tricks to share about getting Help to end users, feel free to leave a comment. Mary Lee, Programming Writer.