Wictor Wilen

The CssRegistration class (in Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls namespace) is one of the most useful controls in SharePoint 2010. It existed in SharePoint 2007 but was fairly limited then. I thought I should guide you through why it is so useful in SharePoint 2010 and why and when you should use it. I briefly mentioned the CssRegistration control in my previous post on SharePoint 2010 themable CSS files. But first some background. Why the CssRegistration control? There are plenty of times when you need to add custom CSS definitions to your SharePoint projects, for instance in pages and Web Parts. There are several methods of adding CSSes to your projects. You could use inline CSS styles - which results in a lot of markup which may slow your page/site down. Another approach is creating a CSS file and include it in your master page - better but the CSS is always loaded.

SharePoint 2010 has a completely rebuilt theme engine. Instead of having to modify .inf files, create folders and copy and pasting CSS files and images in the SharePoint root we can now create a theme in PowerPoint and upload it to the server. The default SharePoint CSS files are tagged with comments that tells SharePoint to substitute colors and images with the values from the theme. When you switch theme SharePoint generates a new set of CSS files and images with the result of this substation.

I thought I should share my experience on working with SharePoint 2010 development on Windows 7. My previous posts on installing SharePoint 2007 on Vista and Windows 7 are posts that are quite popular. The downside with the “old” SharePoint version is that it was not officially supported to install it on a client machine, but SharePoint 2010 is supported for installation on Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1 for development purposes. There are many opinions on having SharePoint 2010 installed on your client OS. Some thinks it is despicable, but I think it is great and I’ve used local installations for years now. It’s perfect for rapid development, testing and demos. In seconds you can spin up a site and show some basic stuff for a client. Of course I use virtualization when testing my final bits etc.

While I was testing building some mashups using SharePoint 2010, Web Parts and SharePoint Designer I found an interesting bug. Initial problem Here’s what I did; I set up a Wiki Content Page (the new kind of Web Part Pages) in SharePoint 2010 that was supposed to be called with Query String parameter named ID which should be used by a Web Part. Another page contained items linking to this page using different integer values for the ID query string parameter like this:

The SharePoint 2010 Development Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is great and I really like the way that the project is built using the different artifacts. One thing really annoys me though and that is the way that the code is generated and named when you add items. For example if you create a project and then add a Web Part item to that project then Visual Studio will create a Web Part class with a namespace and class name like this:

SharePoint is an amazing product and there are some fantastic opportunities to make awesome applications. It also has a great API which has had improved further in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. But there are several features available in the platform/API that just isn’t available to all of us, unless we sit in Redmond and are building the actual product. There are so many classes or methods that are marked internal or sealed, that I really would like to use. I’m not going to nag about the search Web Parts this time, but instead focus on some classes that I really would like to be changed from internal to public.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the SharePoint 2010 Ignite training and after a great, but quite hard, interview and discussion I have been approved as a SharePoint 2010 Ignite Developer trainer. I really look forward getting out there and teaching developers about all the awesome features and improvements in SharePoint 2010. If you are interested in training don’t hesitate in contacting me. Together with AddSkills I have planned for a couple of SharePoint 2010 upgrade classes this spring.

It is 2010 now and SharePoint 2007 have been out forever, it feels like it anyways. The last two years has been about best practices in SharePoint both for developers and IT-pros and especially the Disposing of SharePoint objects has been discussed in absurdum. So I guess we should have to talk about it - but guess what - we certainly do! The reason I bring this up today is that I was about to join a new WFE to a farm and it failed once it started to provision the web applications. Using the logs I found the source of the failure, it was some kind of component that threw an unhandled exception when it was created. See logs below (I have cropped it a bit)

This is the second post in my mini series on how to extend the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon. First post can be found here. The goal with this excersice is to extend the Editing Tools Insert tab with a smaller Insert Web Part drop-down, so we don’t have to expand the whole Web Part Gallery to insert a Web Part. In the last post we created a Visual Studio 2010 solution and added the drop-down to the correct tab in the Ribbon using the CustomAction element and some new SharePoint 2010 XML syntax.