Wictor Wilen

A few weeks back I wrote a post on how to mix Windows Azure and SharePoint Online called Custom code with SharePoint Online and Windows Azure. Since then both Windows Azure and SharePoint online have had some updates. First of all you no longer need to create the bindings in the code to make it fully trusted. Good to know but it does not affect the solution. A Bug in SharePoint Online Web Services More important is the fact that you cannot longer use the Visual Studio Add Service Reference function and add the services from your SharePoint Online site to your solution. You will end up with an error like this:

The SharePoint 12-hive contains by default a number of interesting files that every developer should be aware of. The more you know the better you understand the inside of SharePoint and it allows you to create more efficient and better solutions. Here are my top five favorite files: ctypeswss.xml (in TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ctypes) This is the feature elements file for all the default WSS Content Types. When creating new content types, most often I find it useful to derive them from existing content types. For example if I need to create a content type that derives from the standard content type Task, i can easily get the content type ID, which is used when creating new content type IDs, and what Site Columns that content type has.

SharePoint Designer is now a free tool and available for download. What does this mean really? Anybody can download it and customize their SharePoint installations which is good in some ways, but really bad in others. If the users are not aware of what they are doing they can cause severe damage to your SharePoint, but it can also make really nice enhancements to their installation. There are a lot of nice things you can do with SPD in your sites that you can’t do using the web interface. The web interface on the other side protects you pretty good from doing some mistakes that even the best can do once in a while, like dragging a file or folder to the wrong place. Of course all of this has been possible to do before with SPD, it’s not a new product, but suddenly you can expect a number of new and untrained end-users fire up the SharePoint Designer and customizing in ways you never prepared your installations for.

Today almost everyone have more than one computer; one at work, a few at home, a media center, a PC, a Mac etc, your family members, friends and colleagues have the same. One problem is that a lot of us need access to files on one machine when we are using one of the others. For example I want to access my images when I’m at work sometimes and I do not want to copy all of these images onto my work laptop, when I’m at home I want to have the same favorites and documents that I use at work and so on. Then I have another scenario, let’s say that I do not have any of my computers with me and I want to access one of my files, then I want to have some way to access the files using a standard browser - and why not have editing possibilities.

Have you ever wanted to get rid of the Welcome text before the user name in the SharePoint user menu? At least I have! If you are like me - here is a solution that you can use to customize the text of the Welcome Control (Welcome.ascx). The approach is pretty simple, and can be made in several ways, but I wanted a pretty clean solution that didn’t affect any other behavior of SharePoint and I wanted to write as little code as possible. Eventually I ended up with some more rows than expected, but this was due to the fact that I created this custom Welcome control configurable and deployable.

Microsoft has released a set of ten free Themes for SharePoint for use with the Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. These ten themes provides a far better experience than the out-of-the-box themes delivered with SharePoint (WSS and MOSS), of which some are really annoyingly ugly! But the new themes needs some tweaking before looking really good, there are several design flaws in some of them, like black text on dark-grey background…

I’m glad to announce that I finally got my stuff together and stitched together the last pieces of the beta of ChartPart for SharePoint 2.0. ChartPart for SharePoint is a SharePoint Web Part that allows you to draw charts from existing SharePoint lists. It’s available at CodePlex, at http://chartpart.codeplex.com/, and is free for use. ChartPart 1.0 have had over 4.000 downloads since it was released and is translated to six different languages. The first version was pretty limited in customization and you could only create some basic charts.

I have been answering questions on the SharePoint forums at MSDN Forums, and while some are really tricky and interesting, some are really basic beginner mistakes. A couple of questions lately have been about Web Part development and how to and where to create your controls. Most of these is easily solved if you understand how the Web Part event model works. First of all you need basic ASP.NET understanding and know how the Page and Control objects work together, how a postback works etc. But I have even seen somewhat experienced ASP.NET developers failing at this point, probably due to the fact that Visual Studio have a slick interface for editing user controls and ASP.NET pages. When it comes to SharePoint you have no visual aids and you are out on thin water, and this knowledge is crucial.

A Web Part, in SharePoint or not, has a Verb that allows the Web Part to be Closed. Closed means that the Web Part is just closed (not rendered) and not deleted, which is a separate Web Part Verb. Closing Web Parts can cause headache for your users and even a really bad performance. Note: To delete a Web Part you have to go in to Edit mode for the page. Close can be done directly from the Web Part menu.