Steve Fox's OBA Ramblings

The last blog post I wrote was on interacting with SharePoint using services. One of the things that I’ve been quite involved in over the past year or so has been Silverlight and SharePoint integration. You will definitely see more of this type of development...

When building an OBA, you’re often going to want to either integrate with the native Web services for SharePoint (when I say SharePoint, in this instance I’m referring to both the WSS and the MOSS services) or you’ll want to create your own custom services...

One of the big features for SharePoint 2010 (and for building OBAs) is the Business Connectivity Services (BCS). I’ve written a few posts on this, but wanted to follow up on these early posts with some additional detail on how to create a solution leveraging...

In a recent virtual conference, I was asked about whether you can still ghost/unghost site pages when editing files in SharePoint Designer 2010. The short answer is yes you can, but the longer answer is as a site administrator you can actually manage...

I was recently asked what are the best ways to prepare for the 70-573 SharePoint Developer exam. I pinged a couple of folks who had gone through the process, and below are the responses I received from them. From Kirk: “I used the MeasureUp practice tests...

SharePoint 2010 is great for BI; you have a ton more options. One of these options is the native Chart Web part, which allows you to create and map data from a number of different sources. For example, if you navigate to your SharePoint site, click Site...

If you’re trying to install VSeWSS 1.3, the latest version of the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services, you may find that you need to tweak a couple of things post-install to make sure the VSeWSS 1.3 web service is configured correctly...

I was asked a couple of times recently about WCF and SharePoint—i.e. how do you integrate a WCF service with SharePoint that is hosted in IIS? Well, I did a little digging around over the past few weeks to see what was out there and besides finding Sahil...

One of the key things you’ll likely want to do with SharePoint is interact a lot with lists. In earlier posts on this blog, I’ve discussed adding data to a SharePoint list using both custom and native SharePoint services (i.e. services that ship with...

I’ve had this question a few times, so I thought I’d post a super-quick blog entry on it. The question is: how do I get images into SharePoint and then leverage them in my Visual Web Part that I’m building in VS 2010? The answer is twofold: 1. Put them...

What’s New at SPC 2011 I’ve been hanging out here at the SharePoint Conference (SPC) 2011 in Anaheim, CA this week, and it’s been a blast. Earlier in the week, Jeff Teper announced a key innovation for the cloud: support for Business Connectivity Services...

SharePoint and Azure: How They Play Together? Today, I presented a session on Azure and SharePoint—specifically addressing how to integrate the two technologies. SharePoint is not built on Azure, so this session was about how can you take an...

Introduction You might have read an earlier post of mine where I discussed the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) functionality in SharePoint Online (SP-O) and walked through how you can leverage jQuery and JavaScript to interact with an external...

Windows Azure & SharePoint 2010 Azure is Microsoft’s platform in the cloud that provides you with an endpoint for your custom services and data storage. It also provides you with a great development environment to build and deploy solutions into the...

  SharePoint Online and Windows Azure: Developing Secure BCS Connections in the Cloud Introduction Over the Christmas vacation, a few of us got together and started down the path of how to not only secure external data connections to SharePoint Online...

One of the cool new kids on the block for Windows Azure is Media Services . Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS) is currently in Beta, and as I dig in more I personally feel there’s a ton of potential here—especially when it comes to SharePoint. For those...

Last Friday, we presented an Academy Live (AL) session that discussed, at the introductory level, how SharePoint and Windows Azure Platform come together. On the call were myself ( Steve Fox ), Mike Fitzmaurice (VP, Technology at Nintex) and Donovan Follette...

Many developers are looking at enhancing SharePoint by integrating Silverlight into their SharePoint servers. One of the key blockers, though, is getting your server set up so you can actually build and more importantly deploy Silverlight applications...

One of the demos I showed this week was the integration of the new SharePoint 2010 client object model (SP COM) and an external list. The SP COM is a way to work with lists where you create and execute batch commands against your SharePoint 2010 server...

While the summer here in Seattle has been short, we managed to ship an updated version of the SharePoint and Windows Azure Developer Training Kit for all of you wanting to explore how these two technologies come together. Below, you can find the updated...

At TechEd this week, there was a lot of activity around the new Windows Azure Spring Preview. As a part of this release was the announcement of the new Virtual Machine. This is an important advancement for Microsoft and Windows Azure because it brings...

One of the cool things about the Media Streaming Services is that you can circumvent some of the server set-up for SharePoint and still integrate a Silverlight (SL) app into your SharePoint (SP) site. By using the Media Streaming Services, which are free...

Office Business Application (OBA) development is growing in importance thus continues to be an integral part of the Office platform developer story. To that end, we recently completed a new resource that could be used for OBA training specific to PeopleSoft...

Last week, the Visual Studio (VS) 2010 Beta 1 was released to the public. I’m personally very excited about the VS 2010 release because of the additional support for Office and SharePoint development. While you won’t see the SharePoint 2010 project templates...

Book Supplements I’ve been wanting of time to add some how-to supplements to my Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development book. For those of you starting out, you may have questions about the ‘how’ and sometimes there are errata, bugs or updates from the...