Steve Fox's OBA Ramblings : Office Development

get trained with Sharepoint 2010 and office 2010 videos

Steve Fox — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:01:11 GMT

One of the charters of my team is to make sure that we provide collateral for developers to get up and running with a program called Metro—an early adoption program for ISVs (to sign up for Metro or get more information, you can email metroreq@microsoft.com). Part of this program is creating things like training videos, Hands-on labs, and source-code; all for the developer to get up to speed quickly and efficiently with SharePoint and Office 2010. (We also cover CRM and UC.)

One of the first publicly-facing things we’ve done is to begin posting our PowerPoint decks and SharePoint and Office 2010 developer videos on Channel 9 in our new Learning Centers as a complement to other collateral that is out there today. There are some great videos here that you can watch for 10-15 minutes at a time. To get them, navigate to the top-level learning center on Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/ or go straight to the either of the learning centers:

SharePoint 2010: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/SharePoint2010Developer/

Office 2010:

http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Office2010/

There are some great videos here, and the guys (Donovan Follette and Paul Stubbs) have done a fantastic job rallying this content.

There’ll be more to come with full downloadable packages coming next week and hands-on labs and source code coming at the beginning of January.

Happy Coding!

Steve

Retrieve SharePoint List Data with XLINQ using VS 2010 Beta 1

Steve Fox — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:30:28 GMT

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 either WSS or MOSS—when I say SharePoint I include both of these SharePoint pieces). A recent post got me thinking about how to not only retrieve data from SharePoint, but then having the ability to take that data offline (e.g. save to a file) or to use it in-memory for other types of processing (e.g. filtering/management within a UI), so I put together a small application that does a couple of things:

1. Retrieves data from a SharePoint list using the Lists web service (a service native to SharePoint 2007);

2. Uses XML to add items to a custom object; and

3. Uses LINQ to query the object and filter/manage into a XAML UI.

All this using the latest Visual Studio 2010 Beta bits.

First, let’s take a quick look at the SharePoint list. It’s called “Products” and lives on my test SharePoint server (“http://stefoxdemo”). You can see a cropped screenshot of the list. It’s pretty simple and should be thought of as such because we really just want to show data coming from the list—not hoards of data.

If you’ve never created a list, you open SharePoint, navigate to your home page, click View All Site Content, click Create, and under Custom Lists click Custom List. Complete the Name and Description fields for your new list and click Create.

Now that you’ve created the list, open Visual Studio 2010 and click File, New Project. Select WPF Application and provide a name (e.g. MySharePointData) and location for your project and click OK—see the figure below.

We’re going to keep things simple here and add nine controls to the WPF UI:

Four labels
One listbox
Two textboxes
Two buttons

If you inspect the XAML code below, you’ll see that this is the resulting code that was generated from me dragging and dropping controls from the VS 2010 Toolbox onto the XAML designer. Check out the different properties of the controls.

The resulting UI from the above code looks like the following:

Once you’ve created your WPF UI, you now will want to add some code-behind to actually do something. The first thing you’ll want to do is to add the SharePoint Lists web service. This provides you with the ability to interact with lists and data in your lists. You can see from the figure below the subset of methods that are available to you. To add the web service to the VS 2010 project, right click References and select Service References. Click Advanced and then click Add Web Reference, and then discover the Lists web service by clicking Web Services on the Local Machine (or entering the service URL in the URL: field, e.g. “http://stefoxdemo/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx”). Provide a name for the service reference (e.g. SPListGetData) and click Add Reference. You now have a reference added to the Lists web service and can use it in code.

One thing I used in my solution was a custom object, which I used to store (in-memory) a list collection of the different elements in my list. This allowed me to use the collection of objects later and run a simple LINQ query against it. To add an object, right-click the project node and select Add, and then select Class.

The custom object comprises three strings (mapping to the three parts of my SharePoint list): 1) a title (or product name), 2) a product number, and 3) a sales figure. The code I have for my custom object is as follows—note that I’ve set the properties on my object to both read/write, but in this file all we’re really doing is reading.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace MySharePointData
{
   public class MySPData
    {
        public string clsTitle { get; set; }
        public string clsProductNum { get; set; }
        public string clsSales { get; set; }
    }
}

After you’ve added the class to the project, you can now add some of the heavier-weight code. This code is going to set some class-level variables, use the Lists web service to get the data in my list, iterate through the list and use XLINQ to create and populate the custom object, and then if the user changes the selection on the list the fields will be updated through a LINQ query.

Let’s start with the class-level variables. I’ve added a string to represent the selected item in the listbox, a list collection object (which will be in-memory collection object) called lstSPData, and the declaration of an XDocument (called myXMLDoc), which will be used as the document to which I’ll add the items from the SharePoint list.

…

string strSelectedItem = "";

List<MySPData> lstSPData = new List<MySPData>();

XDocument myXMLDoc = new XDocument();

…

Once you’ve added these three top-level items to the class, you’ll want to double-click on one of the buttons you added to the UI and then add some code for that. In my case, the name of the button was btnGetData and the subsequent event was called btnGetData_Click. The code below shows what I added into that method. There are a few things that are interesting in the code. For example, note that one of the first things we do is create a proxy for the web service, pass my default credentials to call the service (SharePoint must know who you are even at the service level), and then uses an XMLNode object to get all of the items from the Products list. You’ll then also see that I’ve began creating an XML object, but creating an XElement and then setting the declaration type of the XML Document I created earlier. Then to get the data out of the object, you iterate through the nodes and grab the inner text of the XML. In this case, you need to be sure you’re pulling from the SharePoint XML (this is the “ows_Title,” “ows_ProductNum,” and “ows_Sales”). From there on, two major things are happening. The first is that I’m reassigning the XML data from the object being passed back from the web service call with some XML that I’m more comfortable with (and a structure that I prefer to work with), and then I’m creating an instance of the custom object I created and then am populating the list collection for that custom object as I iterate through each of the XML nodes of the returned XML data. You’ll then see two lines of code lying outside of the foreach statement, and this is where I’m first adding the more comfortable version of the XML data to my originally-created XML document, and then I’m saving that XML document to a file share.

private void btnGetData_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{

    MySharePointData.SPListGetData.Lists proxy = new MySharePointData.SPListGetData.Lists();
    proxy.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
    proxy.Url = "http://stefoxdemo/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx";

XmlNode myLIstItems = proxy.GetListItems("Products", null, null, null, null, null, null);

XElement newRootElement = new XElement("NewData");

myXMLDoc.Declaration = new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "true");

foreach (XmlNode outerNode in myLIstItems.ChildNodes)
{

if (outerNode.NodeType.Equals(System.Xml.XmlNodeType.Element))
{

foreach (XmlNode node in outerNode.ChildNodes)
{

if (node.NodeType.Equals(System.Xml.XmlNodeType.Element))
{

                    XmlNode listFieldTitle = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem("ows_Title");
                    XmlNode listFieldProductNum = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem("ows_ProductNum");
                    XmlNode listFieldSales = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem("ows_Sales");

                    string strListFieldTitle = listFieldTitle.InnerText;
                    string strListFieldProductNum = listFieldProductNum.InnerText;
                    string strListFieldSales = listFieldSales.InnerText;

                    XElement xmlData = new XElement("MyData",
                            new XElement("Title", strListFieldTitle),
                            new XElement("ProductNum", strListFieldProductNum),
                            new XElement("Sales", strListFieldSales));

newRootElement.Add(xmlData);
lstBxProducts.Items.Add(strListFieldTitle);

MySPData clsSPDataInstance = new MySPData();

                    clsSPDataInstance.clsTitle = strListFieldTitle;
                    clsSPDataInstance.clsProductNum = strListFieldProductNum;
                    clsSPDataInstance.clsSales = strListFieldSales;
                    lstSPData.Add(clsSPDataInstance);

                }
            }
        }

}

myXMLDoc.Add(newRootElement);
myXMLDoc.Save("c:\\SPData\\MySharePointData.xml");
}

The key takeaway from this, though, is that there are now two data structures in this app: one that I’ve created as an XML file and saved to disk (or alternatively could be used to inject into another program, say a Word document through Open XML); and one that now represents a list collection of the custom object—this is my in-memory version of the data that I can use for querying.

The next bit of code we’ll look at handles the user interacting with the listbox; that is, when the user changes their selection this will invoke the lstBxProducts_SelectionChanged event, which triggers the following code. This code is fairly straight-forward. I’ve set three string variables as temporary variables, grabbed the currently selected item in the listbox (and am storing it in strSelectedItem) and then am using a LINQ query to get the other data in the record that maps to the product name selected in the listbox. Given the fact that this results in a list of one record, I’m then using the First method to grab the first (and only) element in that record and assigning the text property of the controls to those strings.

private void lstBxProducts_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
   {
       string strTempTitle = "";
       string strTempProductNum = "";
       string strTempSales = "";

strSelectedItem = lstBxProducts.SelectedItem.ToString();

       var lstXMLObject = from lstXML in lstSPData
                          where lstXML.clsTitle == strSelectedItem
                          select new
                          {
                              strTempTitle = lstXML.clsTitle,
                              strTempProductNum = lstXML.clsProductNum,
                              strTempSales = lstXML.clsSales

};

txtBxProductNum.Text = lstXMLObject.First().strTempProductNum;
txtBxSales.Text = lstXMLObject.First().strTempSales;

}

The finished product results in the following cool and slick (okay, not so much…but functional) WPF UI first getting SharePoint list data and then allowing you to query that data in the context of your whiz-bang UI. Note that it also saves the XML to your local file system. When you F5, you should see the following UI. Click the Get Data button, which triggers the service call. This will populate the Product Name listbox and subsequently allow you to click on an item in the listbox and filter on that item.

If you browse to the location where you saved your XML file (in my case this was c:\SPData), you will find an XML file that hopefully resembles the data you have in your list.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<NewData>
<MyData>
    <Title>ALK-Bike Crank</Title>
    <ProductNum>0398021</ProductNum>
    <Sales>$209,002.98</Sales>
</MyData>
<MyData>
    <Title>OUU-Bicycle Riding Helmet</Title>
    <ProductNum>38271920</ProductNum>
    <Sales>$901,199.23</Sales>
</MyData>
<MyData>
    <Title>YTT-Road Bicycle Wheel</Title>
    <ProductNum>03929901</ProductNum>
    <Sales>$890,872.12</Sales>
</MyData>
<MyData>
    <Title>HGT-Off-Road Bike Gear Pack</Title>
    <ProductNum>3746281</ProductNum>
    <Sales>$459,922.10</Sales>
</MyData>
<MyData>
    <Title>BKP-Bianchi Racing Bike</Title>
    <ProductNum>3902443</ProductNum>
    <Sales>$2,019,100.29</Sales>
</MyData>
</NewData>

Lastly, the Exit button you see on my UI also calls a method; basically a simple method to exit the application. The code for this is as follows:

private void btnExit_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
Application.Current.Shutdown();
}

And that’s it! Wasn’t that fun? I thought so. For your reference, the entire code sample from the core Windows.xaml.cs file is pasted below.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Data;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;
using System.Windows.Navigation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Linq;

namespace MySharePointData
{
    public partial class Window1 : Window
    {
        public Window1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }
        string strSelectedItem = "";

List<MySPData> lstSPData = new List<MySPData>();

XDocument myXMLDoc = new XDocument();

        private void btnGetData_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {

            MySharePointData.SPListGetData.Lists proxy = new MySharePointData.SPListGetData.Lists();
            proxy.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
            proxy.Url = "http://stefoxdemo/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx";

            XmlNode myLIstItems = proxy.GetListItems("TR8", null, null, null, null, null, null);
            //Creation
            XElement newRootElement = new XElement("NewData");
            myXMLDoc.Declaration = new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "true");

foreach (XmlNode outerNode in myLIstItems.ChildNodes)
{

if (outerNode.NodeType.Equals(System.Xml.XmlNodeType.Element))
{

foreach (XmlNode node in outerNode.ChildNodes)
{

if (node.NodeType.Equals(System.Xml.XmlNodeType.Element))
{

                            XmlNode listFieldTitle = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem("ows_Title");
                            XmlNode listFieldProductNum = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem("ows_ProductNum");
                            XmlNode listFieldSales = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem("ows_Sales");

                            string strListFieldTitle = listFieldTitle.InnerText;
                            string strListFieldProductNum = listFieldProductNum.InnerText;
                            string strListFieldSales = listFieldSales.InnerText;

                            XElement xmlData = new XElement("MyData",
                                    new XElement("Title", strListFieldTitle),
                                    new XElement("ProductNum", strListFieldProductNum),
                                    new XElement("Sales", strListFieldSales));

                            newRootElement.Add(xmlData);
                            //tempAll = strListFieldTitle + " " + strListFieldProductNum + " " + strListFieldSales;
                            lstBxProducts.Items.Add(strListFieldTitle);

MySPData clsSPDataInstance = new MySPData();

                            clsSPDataInstance.clsTitle = strListFieldTitle;
                            clsSPDataInstance.clsProductNum = strListFieldProductNum;
                            clsSPDataInstance.clsSales = strListFieldSales;
                            lstSPData.Add(clsSPDataInstance);

                        }
                    }
                }

}

myXMLDoc.Add(newRootElement);
myXMLDoc.Save("c:\\SPData\\MySharePointData.xml");

MessageBox.Show("XML Data Saved to File!");
}

        private void btnExit_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            Application.Current.Shutdown();
        }

        private void lstBxProducts_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
        {
            string strTempTitle = "";
            string strTempProductNum = "";
            string strTempSales = "";

strSelectedItem = lstBxProducts.SelectedItem.ToString();

            var lstXMLObject = from lstXML in lstSPData
                               where lstXML.clsTitle == strSelectedItem
                               select new
                               {
                                   strTempTitle = lstXML.clsTitle,
                                   strTempProductNum = lstXML.clsProductNum,
                                   strTempSales = lstXML.clsSales

};

txtBxProductNum.Text = lstXMLObject.First().strTempProductNum;
txtBxSales.Text = lstXMLObject.First().strTempSales;

}
}
}

Happy coding!

OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP & Siebel Released to Web

Steve Fox — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:57:09 GMT

Over the past few months, we’ve received some very positive feedback on the OBA Sample Application Kits that we’ve released. Well, today we release to web the latest in the family of kits, the OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP & Siebel. Included in this kit are:

Overview whitepaper
Source code
Installation guide
Developer guide

As per the diagram below, this latest OBA kit provides guidance on how developers can integrate Outlook and MOSS 2007 with Siebel and SAP. It integrates a variety of key MS technologies (e.g. BizTalk LOB adapters, WCF, VSTO, and so on) to help you understand how you can integrate LOB systems such as Siebel and SAP into your Office and SharePoint solutions.

The actual developer kit can be found here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sapsiebel. And for more information on other OBA developer kits, you can go here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx.

Enjoy!

Steve

Quick Announcement: ODC is being Wrapped into SPC

Steve Fox — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:15:00 GMT

Hey gang,

Just a quick announcement, if you attended the Office Developer Conference (ODC) last year you may be wondering what happened to it this year? Well, it's going to be subsumed within the SharePoint Conference (SPC), which is happening October 19th-22nd. This is actually going to be great because that means you'll be able to get all of the latest SharePoint and Office development sessions in one conference--what we call the Twofer deal! More info can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/06/01/office-developer-conference-moving-to-sharepoint-conference-2009.aspx.

Cheers,

Steve

SharePoint Connections Deck

Steve Fox — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:39:00 GMT

I'm just wrapping up my week here in Las Vegas for SharePoint Connections, and one of the requests I had was to post my decks for those who attended my sessions. I've posted my decks to a public skydrive folder here:

http://cid-40a717fc7fcd7e40.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePointConnections/Final%7C_Presentations.zip

If you have any issues connecting and retrieving the decks, let me know.

I'll also upload the code samples and some videos that go along with these, but wanted to get these uploaded first. As for the questions we discussed in the sessions, I'll be posting answers to those as well.

Thanks to all of you who attended the sessions and made SharePoint Connections another successful event.

Steve

End-to-End Sales Forecast OBA Released To Web!

Steve Fox — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:28:00 GMT

It's been a while, but I wanted to let all you OBA developers out there know of something cool that we recently released, which is the End-to-End (E2E) Sales Forecast OBA. As you know from reading this blog, you know that OBA is an Office Business Application and involves mutltiple technologies within the Office platform. The E2E Sales Forecast OBA is a solution that walks you through a scenario where a salesperson creates and submits a quarterly sales forecast. Using a customized Excel template (built using VS 2008/VSTO), our salesperson has the ability to navigate to the team Sales Forecast portal (SharePoint portal), invoke a custom Excel sales forecast template from the New button (content type mapping to a custom template), load line-of-business sales data into the document (via WPF custom actions pane), generate executive reports for the forecast (via Open XML), and submit the document for approval (through SharePoint workflow). It essentially uses all of the concepts and technologies that I've discussed thus far in this blog--plus a few that I haven't.

In the demo solution (which is available on CodePlex--see link below), the approving manager can interact directly with SharePoint or choose to approve the workflow via a custom Outlook Form Region (built using VS 2008/VSTO). Messaging of the workflow is marshaled by SharePoint, and Open XML enables the solution to parse out the necessary data and attach to workflow and to the custom Outlook from region. This is a great starter solution if you're looking to get your hands on some code, and includes the technologies below:

- SharePoint

- Office Client Ribbon and Action Pane Customizations (VS 2008/VSTO)

- Outlook Custom Form Regions

- Open XML

- Unified Communications (UC)

- SharePoint Workflow

- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

- ++

For the community source-code download and accompanying book, you can check out the following resources:

Sales Forecast Codeplex Source Code Site

http://www.codeplex.com/obasales

Sales Forecast Wrox Book Accompaniment

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470377313.html

The goal of the book is to walk you through all of the code and you would set up and deploy the sales forecast OBA.

Enjoy!!

Steve

Use Silverlight to Enhance your SharePoint-Based OBAs with the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint

Steve Fox — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint Released to CodePlex!

Today we released the source code for the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint—based on the Silverlight Beta 2 release. The Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint provide a way for developers to better understand how to integrate Silverlight applications with SharePoint. Silverlight is an incredibly popular technology and with the increase in SharePoint adoption we’re finding an increased call for integrating technologies like Silverlight with SharePoint.

In this release, you’ll find five blueprint samples:

1. Hello World

2. Media Player

3. Slider Control

4. Custom Navigation

5. Colleague Viewer

Included in the release are documentation for each of the samples and the source code (go to the Releases tab of the CodePlex site). Also posted to the site is an FAQ document. In the coming days and week, we’ll publish additional screen-casts and any other supporting documentation we create or that is provided to us through the developer community.

The links to get to the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint are:

1. http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ --or direct at the CodePlex site

2. http://www.codeplex.com/SL4SP

Enjoy!

Steve

Create Your First OBA: Part 4

Steve Fox — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:17:00 GMT

Wow, it's been a while since I blogged on this...time flies. If you've been following along with my previous posts, you'll have seen some of the other Create Your First OBA posts. Here they are if you haven’t seen them:

1.       Creating the VSTO document-level solution (i.e. the custom document);
2.       Deploying the VSTO document-level solution;
3.       Integrating the VSTO with SharePoint content type;
4.       Associating SharePoint workflow with VSTO document-level solution;
5.       Customizing SharePoint (BDC);
6.       Customizing SharePoint (Excel Services).

This post describes how you can add workflow to your OBA.

First, let me say that I can’t believe the amount of people who are asking me about this. I’ve presented at a number of conferences over the last few months and I’ve been getting more questions around this particular subject. That said, a specific walkthrough on exactly how to do this is quite long so I’ll walk through at a high level what you need to do, and then I’ve added a few references for you and also attached a hands-on lab that you can use as well to walk through—complete with code samples.

You’ll also note that the code samples cover other areas of OBA development—mainly covering client-side development using VS 2008 (specifically VSTO 3.0). Some great code samples and walkthroughs, so enjoy.

Okay, back to workflow. To create a SharePoint (SP) workflow you first need to make sure you have an ‘object’ within SP against which you’ll build the workflow. A Word document might be an example or an InfoPath can be another example. You then need to figure out what type of workflow you’re going to build and what the workflow will do. The SP workflow derives from the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) workflow types in the .NET Framework 3.0, so the two main types are Sequential and State Machine. Sequential being as it sounds: a workflow that follows a particular sequence. And State Machine being a workflow that moves along to the next ‘activity’ depending on the state of the workflow. An activity are the individual actions that make up a workflow. If you’d like more details on SP WF, you can check out these links here:

1. Book excerpt from Programming Office Business Applications: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc534997.aspx.

2. You can also find some articles here in the VSTO 3.0 documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386211.aspx.

So, once you’ve figured out what your workflow will do (and let’s assume for simplicity sake that you’re going to build a Sequential workflow), you then open Visual Studio 2008, click File, New, Project, select the Office node under the language node of your choice (i.e. either VB or C#) and then select SharePoint 2007 Sequential Workflow, give it a name and click OK. This will invoke a wizard that will enable you to give the workflow a name and map the workflow template (each workflow is built and deployed as a template) to your specific SP site. Once this is done, click Next and then you can select the library or list you want to associate your SP workflow with, the History list and then the Tasks. In mine, I had a document library for the custom Word document I built earlier in the blog series (called Annual Reviews) so I built a small approval workflow (that updated a status note that corresponds to that particular document library. At this point, VS creates a project shell with a number of items in it. You can drag and drop activities onto the designer, add code behind for the activities and then map the properties of the workflow to the activities to make sure everything works. You can then press F5 to test out your workflow and it will invoke SP and run your workflow.

Now, keep in mind I just encapsulated in one paragraph what will take you an hour to walk through in the attached hands-on lab—which is why I chose the really condensed version—and even longer when you’re planning out your own SP workflow. I did this to not only save some time in writing the blog, but also because the resources I’ll provide below will help you just as much if not better.

So, here’s what I would recommend as next steps for you to get really get stuck into learning SP workflow:

1. Take a look at the attached hands-on lab and walk through lab #4. It’s an awesome and simple example of how to quickly create a simple workflow. (The lab uses VS 2008 (VSTO 3.0), and you'll need to have Office 2007 installed and a MOSS 2007 server available to build your workflow against.)

2. Take a look at the following web cast. It’s a great intro to SP workflow and provides you with some deeper-level information: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032378840&CountryCode=US.

3. Take a look at following new site for SP developers; it’s got some awesome content: http://mssharepointdeveloper.com.

Okay, hopefully that will get you started.

Steve

Interesting OBA Blog on DITA...

Steve Fox — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:14:00 GMT

A colleague sent this to me today...thought it was interesting, so I thought I'd pass along to you all.

http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmullinax/archive/2008/06/17/democratizing-dita-dita-exchange-and-danish-beer-20-questions-with-steffen-frederiksen-of-content-technologies.aspx

Steve

Create Your First OBA: Part 3

Steve Fox — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:14:00 GMT

Hey gang,

If you've been following along with the Create Your First OBA series, I've published the first two of the six parts - see below.

I was actually hedging on posting for the third item because I wrote an article for MSDN Magazine that covers it. So, I'll provide you with a link to the article which lives here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507632.aspx.

I'm on the road again at Sapphire for the next few days, so if you're in Orlando at the conference look me up...I'll be dutifully hanging out at our booth. When I get back, I'll post on SharePoint workflow. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there's been a lot of requests for this so hang tight and I'll get to it soon.

Have a great weekend!

Steve

The OBA Sample Application Kits

Steve Fox — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:07:00 GMT

Just a quick post to check out the OBA Sample Application for Kits MSDN page. The kits provide comprehensive guidance on how to integrate Office with SAP and PeopleSoft (and we'll have others in the future). The kits include whitepaper, install guide, technical walkthrough doc, and source code. We announced the latest of the kits (the OBA Sample Application Kit for PeopleSoft) last week at Kurt DelBene's keynote at Collaborate 08.

You can get to the page here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx

From this page, you can get to the individual kits.

Check it out! This is awesome stuff, and it is a rarity to find kits that provide guidance against these two very popular LOB Systems (that is PeopleSoft and SAP).

Cheers,

Steve

Conference Follow-Up Post

Steve Fox — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:41:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks, I've attended and presented at a number of conferences (specifically VSLive, MS CSAF, Collaborate, and DevConnections) and had some great conversations with attendees who were seeking more information or had questions in the sessions on additional OBA resources. During some of these conversations, I promised to follow up in my blog on some specific issues/questions. In this blog post, I've added some additional information on:

Deployment
SharePoint Workflow
Outlook add-in development

I'll also be following up on this post in the future with additional information, so I encourage you to check back or RSS the blog (as I'm not exactly to a schedule when posting).

Deployment

In a couple of my sessions, we had some detailed conversations around deployment. Here is a question that I was going to check on. I've also added some additional information that you can check out.

1. Can you point to the root folder assembly and have it point to the latest version of the bits? (This was in relation to mapping a content type from SharePoint and then invoking the assembly from the doc library.) The answer to the question, as I suspected, was yes--and that the deployment manifest should point you to the right location. However, the thing I forgot to mention was that you have to make sure that in your deployment properties you have "Check every time the customization runs." Also, this is not the default setting; the default setting is "Check Every 7 Days." So, once you publish a solution with that configuration, each time the custom document is opened you will get the latest version of the assembly associated with that document.

Misha Schneerson, one of the devs on VSTO, has a great multi-part post on Deployment. While we've made it easier in VS 2008 (by virtue of ClickOnce), there are still some things to keep in mind. You can check out his blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mshneer/archive/2008/04/24/deploying-your-vsto-add-in-to-all-users-part-iii.aspx.

SharePoint Workflow

Many of you asked me about some additional workflow guidance. I've pinged a couple of different people, and we're going to put together a blog-post with some additional information. I've also requested some web-casts to address some of the basics. I'll post pointers as these become available. Until then, here are a few things to get you started:

1. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=358685

2. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA101005911033.aspx

3. http://blogs.msdn.com/nikhil/archive/2007/09/11/vsto-and-sharepoint-workflow.aspx

4. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386168.aspx

I'm also working on a couple of other things (whitepaper and webcast) that I'll try and get out to you soon.

Outlook Add-in Development

I'm noticing more and more developers extending Outlook. In one of my sessions, we talked a little about deployment across 2003 and 2007 instances of Outlook and we also discussed migration of OFS form regions to managed code OFRs. Here is some additional information for you guys on this:

Outlook 2007 should host an Outlook 2003 add-in. Mary Lee recently wrote a blog post about developing and testing an Outlook 2003 add-in on a computer running Outlook 2007. You can read more at this post - http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/archive/2008/03/20/developing-an-add-in-for-multiple-versions-of-office.aspx.

Note that the deployment method isn't Office version specific; it's VSTO runtime specific. A VSTO solution that works for both O11 and O12 must be designed with the VSTO 2.0 runtime and .NET FX 2.0, so the same setup project with CASPOL deployment would apply.

There is also an interesting topic named "Creating Solutions for Multiple Versions of Office" at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772080.aspx.

We do have topics that discuss how to import an OFS into an Outlook 2007 project. We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of importing a form region vs. creating one fresh by using our designer. I will admit that the discussion of using an OFS file is not overly extensive. However, I don't think we missed any discussion critical to who are considering the idea of moving their OFS files to VSTO. Here are the topics that discuss using an OFS file:

· Creating Outlook Form Regions - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386301.aspx.

· Walkthrough: Importing a Form Region that was Designed in Outlook - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608611.aspx.

· Accessing a Form Region at Run Time - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772084.aspx.

Note: Thanks to the VSTO dev team and UE team for providing responses to my field notes and queries.

To those of you who attended my sessions and had questions, I hope the above at least gets you started. If not, I'll be sure to post more in the coming days and weeks.

Steve

Create Your First OBA: Part 1

Steve Fox — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:07:00 GMT

Last week I attended VSLive and promised to post some of the sample code (I emphasize demo code J) I discussed at the conference. Specifically, in the couple of sessions that I did I discussed SharePoint integration with Word (showing a lightweight OBA) and the creation of Outlook add-ins using Visual Studio 2008 (VSTO 3.0). In an earlier post, I showed you how to create an Outlook add-in and integrate with external data using a custom task pane. I also showed you how to create an Outlook Form Region. I also published an article on this in the most recent MSDN magazine http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164242.aspx.

So, I’m going to focus on the OBA side of things through six posts, which I’ll break out as follows:

The Lightweight OBA scenario is essentially an annual review process that uses a custom task pane to load employee data and then map it to a set of Word content controls in the document. The data comes from a SQL server and can be updated from the custom task pane as well. Further, the document is tied to a SharePoint content type and has some workflow associated with it. (I currently have some oob workflow associated with it, but I’ll create some custom workflow in the next couple of weeks and associate that with the document-level solution). To make things a little easier to get started, I’ve posted my VSLive deck to this post so you can walk through the deck…I’ve included screenshots with the deck so you can get a sense for what my demo looked like. Note that it is a work in progress!

So, since this is the first of these five posts I’ll cover the creation of the VSTO document-level customization. Alright, here goes:

The first thing you’ll want to do is to make sure you have an employee database (keep it simple with a table) with some records in it. In my solution, I have a few records each with an employee name, ID, title, and review scores for three years. I’ve also got some fields for the comments and ratings that you’ll use when uploading the comments. Take a look at the screenshots in the attached deck to get a sense for what fields I’ve created in the SQL Server table.

After you’ve got your table created, you’ll want to now go ahead and create your VSTO project. Note that when creating a document-level solution you can either create a document and then use that as the document in your development project or you can create and edit a blank document in the VS IDE. Depending on how complex you want your template to be, you can do either…but if you’re looking to build a complex template/document, I’d consider building it first and then using it in the project. Okay, open Visual Studio 2008, click File, New, Project, and then select either Visual C# or Visual Basic, Office, and Word 2007 Document. When prompted, select whether you want to use an existing document (if you created one here’s where you would browse to it) or not (in which case you would create/edit the document in VS).

With your VSTO document-level solution created, you’ll want first add the data source (the employee table you created) to your project. To do this, click Data, Add New Data Source, select your SQL server instance, and the database within which the employee table resides.

After you’ve got your data added, you’ll now want to add a user control that will host a data view. Right click your project, click Add, User Control, and give it a name. The designer view will open by default, and you can drag over the fields that you want to load from the SQL server table (mine was called employee) onto the designer, which will automatically create a data view for you. In my custom task pane, I also created a bottom part to the custom task pane (see slide 13 for the entire custom task pane) which I mapped to the data that the manager would enter in as rating data for the annual review process. For each of the custom task pane sections I had a button which had a load event (took the currently selected data and added it to the document) and a Sync button (which mapped the completed fields in the document to the fields in the custom task pane). You could then subsequently save the data using the data view back into SQL server.

Okay, you should now have the data source added to your project and the user control created. The next thing you’ll want to do is customize the Word document. In my document, I opened the Word document in the designer view and then dragged a few content controls from the Word Controls part of the Toolbox and create a document that could then house some external data (see slide 21).

After you’ve done all of this, we now need to do a couple of things to finish Part One: 1) add some code to load an instance of the user control into a custom task pane when the assembly is loaded by the host application and 2) add some mapping code between the data from the custom task pane to and from the document.

1) The code for adding the user control to the custom task pane will be added to the core ThisDocument.cs file:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Data;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using System.Xml.Linq;

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime;

using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;

using Word = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;

namespace _2008AnnualReview

{

public partial class ThisDocument

{

private AnnualReviewTaskPane ctrl = new AnnualReviewTaskPane();

private void ThisDocument_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

this.ActionsPane.Controls.Add(ctrl);

}

private void ThisDocument_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

}

…

}

2) Mapping code between custom task pane and Word document.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.ComponentModel;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Data;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace _2008AnnualReview

{

public partial class AnnualReviewTaskPane : UserControl

{

string empName;

string empNumber;

string empTitle;

string empReviewScore06;

string empReviewScore07;

string strWorkEthic;

string strLeadership;

string strProdKnowledge;

string strSkillsDev;

string strPromotion;

string str2008ReviewScore;

string strAdditionalComments;

string strDate;

string strSignature;

public AnnualReviewTaskPane()

{

InitializeComponent();

}

private void employeeReviewBindingNavigatorSaveItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

this.Validate();

this.employeeReviewBindingSource.EndEdit();

//You’ll want to add some more sophisticated error-handling code here.

try

{

this.tableAdapterManager.UpdateAll(this.annualReviewDataSet);

MessageBox.Show("Records Updated.");

}

catch (Exception exceptError)

{

MessageBox.Show(exceptError.ToString());

}

private void AnnualReviewTaskPane_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

employeeReviewTableAdapter.Fill(this.annualReviewDataSet.EmployeeReview);

}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

mapTextboxData();

mapContentControls();

}

private void mapTextboxData()

{

empName = employee_NameTextBox.Text;

empNumber = employee_NumTextBox.Text;

empTitle = employee_TitleTextBox.Text;

empReviewScore06 = review_Score_06TextBox.Text;

empReviewScore07 = review_Score_07TextBox.Text;

}

private void mapContentControls()

{

Globals.ThisDocument.wccName.Text = empName;

Globals.ThisDocument.wccEmpNumber.Text = empNumber;

Globals.ThisDocument.wccTitle.Text = empTitle;

Globals.ThisDocument.wcc2006ReviewScore.Text = empReviewScore06;

Globals.ThisDocument.wcc2007ReviewScore.Text = empReviewScore07;

}

private void button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

//You can definitely optimize this for one string mapping as opposed to a //two step process.

strWorkEthic = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistWorkEthic.Text;

strLeadership = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistLeadership.Text;

strProdKnowledge = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistProdknowledge.Text;

strSkillsDev = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistSkillsDev.Text;

strPromotion = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlistPromotion.Text;

str2008ReviewScore = Globals.ThisDocument.ddlist2008ReviewScore.Text;

strAdditionalComments = Globals.ThisDocument.wccAdditionalComments.Text;

strDate = Globals.ThisDocument.wccSignatureDate.Text;

strSignature = Globals.ThisDocument.wccManagerSignature.Text;

work_EthicTextBox.Text = strWorkEthic;

leadershipTextBox.Text = strLeadership;

prod_KnowledgeTextBox.Text = strProdKnowledge;

tech_SkillsTextBox.Text = strSkillsDev;

promotionTextBox.Text = strPromotion;

review_CommentsTextBox.Text = strAdditionalComments;

review_Score_08TextBox.Text = str2008ReviewScore;

}

…

}

Note: Where you see “…” I’ve not included this as this is auto-generated code.

So, at this point you should have a VSTO document-level solution that does the following:

1.       Loads data into a custom task pane.
2.       Enables the user to browse the data.
3.       Load the employee data into the Word document.
4.       The Word document enables you to add ratings.
5.      Sync the ratings with the custom task pane.
6.       Save the employee’s annual review data to the SQL server.

In the next post, I’ll discuss deployment.

Have fun coding!

Steve

Your Second Outlook Add-in

Steve Fox — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:52:00 GMT

In my previous post, I showed you how to create a custom task pane that hosted a user control data bound to an external data source. The control enabled you to browse data and then create a sales contact with the currently selected record. Vaguely interesting, yes, but more to the point we successfully extended Outlook and then manipulated and changed an Outlook item based on external data that we were browsing. In this post, I've added a small snippet to get you started on creating an Outlook form region (OFR).

OFRs are great; they allow you to extend your Outlook experience with customized forms that integrated into the various inspectors or forms within Outlook. For example, I could create a custom OFR for a mail message that is dynamically bound to my email properties or I could create a custom OFR for my sales contacts that looks up their address and maps their address for us on the OFR. In this blog post, I'll walk you through a simple OFR and then point you to some additional information that may be helpful for your more extensive OFR development.

OFRs are an artefact of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) 3.0, which is a component technology within Visual Studio 3.0 that enables you to create Office solutions. To create an OFR, open Visual Studio 2008 and click File, New, Project, and then select the Office node under either Visual C# or Visual Basic. Once you've got your project set up, right-click the Project and click Add New. In the Add New dialog, select Office and then select Outlook Form Region. Provide your OFR with a name and click Add. This kicks off a wizard that walks through the OFR creation process. You can either create a new OFR or import an existing one. Note that you have a number of choices here: i) Adjoining, ii) Separate, iii) Replacement, or iv) Replace All (see the article below for more information on these). Select Separate and click Next.Give your OFR a name and leave the two check-boxes checked.Click Next and then select Mail Message and then click Finish. This will set up and add your OFR to your project.

The OFR will have a couple of critical methods you'll want to pay attention to (double-click the OFR designer to see these methods):

[C#]

private void Demo_FormRegionShowing(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

}

private void Demo_FormRegionClosed(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

}

[VB]

Private Sub FormRegion1_FormRegionShowing(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.FormRegionShowing

End Sub

Private Sub FormRegion1_FormRegionClosed(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.FormRegionClosed

End Sub

These methods are, similar to other VSTO project shell methods, methods that allow you write constructor and clean-up code for your OFR when it shows and when it is closed. If you go back to the designer view, you can add controls to your OFR. Go ahead and add a combo-box, a label, a button and a web-browser control. In my project, I added "Stocks:" as the label text, added the text "Go" to the button, set the Name property of the button to Go, set the combo-box Name property to cmboStock, and then added five items to the combo-box collection: i) V, ii) MSFT, iii) GOOG, iv) GE, and v) CSCO. You'll want to size the web browser as 1000 x 900. I also changed the Name property of the web-browser control to stockBrowser.

The heavy-lifting, or not so heavy-lifting, is done by our button. You will want to add an event off of the button and then load the page in the web browser based on the user's selection. This is the code that you'll hang off of the button:

[C#]

private void Go_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

string strMsnURL = "http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol=";

string strStock = cmboStock.SelectedItem.ToString();

string fullStockURL;

fullStockURL = strMsnURL + strStock;

stockBrowser.Navigate(fullStockURL);

}

[VB]

Private Sub Go_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Go.Click

Dim strMsnURL As String

Dim strStock As String

Dim fullStockURL As String

strMsnURL = "http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol="

strStock = cmboStock.SelectedItem.ToString

fullStockURL = strMsnURL + strStock

stockBrowser.Navigate(fullStockURL)

End Sub

Once you've done this, you're done with the coding part of the sample. You can hit F5 and build your project.

I like the Separate OFR because it creates a button that enables you to toggle back and forth across default and custom inspector views. And for the above sample, if you create a new mail message you should see a button on your ribbon (name of your OFR), which you can click to view the OFR (see the attached image).

In general, OFRs are pretty exciting because you can host Windows Forms or WPF user controls and of course OFRs (and more widely VSTO) supports LINQ, WF, WCF, etc. This was a simple one to get you started, but you can check out the VSTO Developer Center for more information. Also, I recently published an article with MSDN magazine that provides a more in-depth walkthrough of a custom OFR (this one walks through a Replacement OFR). You can find these links as follows:

1. VSTO Developer Center: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905533.aspx.

2. MSDN Magazine Article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164242.aspx.

Also, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry the MSPress book Programming Applications for Office Outlook 2007 is a good book for learning about all things Outlook.

Have a great day!

Steve

Integrate Office with SAP...

Steve Fox — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:17:00 GMT

You may have heard of Duet, an out of the box OBA that supports a number of different scenarios for the enterprise (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/duet/FX101686211033.aspx?ofcresset=1). Duet is a great solution and covers a wide variety of scenarios. If you're looking to hook the Office system into SAP programmatically on a smaller scale, though, what do you do? You have a couple of options depending on what you're trying to integrate with. Assuming you've got your Web services created, you can either hook into the Office client using Visual Studio and you can integrate with MOSS using either the iView Web part, the Business Data Catalog (BDC), or through PerformancePoint Server. If you're looking to integrate with the client or through the BDC, I've posted some guidance that may be able to help you. I developed this in partnership with Softagon, an IT firm based out of San Francisco, and have delivered this guidance in the form of a 'kit' -- more precisely an OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP (v. 2.0). The kit includes a whitepaper, install guide, technical overview, and some source code to get you started. The only bummer is that you'll need to recreate the SAP environment. But once you do that, you can recreate the solution around which the kit was built (a specialty travel package application).

You can find the kit here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/obasapsak. The kit shows you how to integrate SAP Web services with Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 and MOSS 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 (specifically Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0).

If you're looking for guidance for earlier versions of Visual Studio, I've also released the OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP, v. 1.0. You can find that here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb498189.aspx. This shows you how to integrate SAP Web services with Excel and PowerPoint 2007 using VSTO 2005 SE.

More kits will come in the future, so check back for more information or go to the OBA Developer Portal: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905528.aspx.

Steve