March 2008 Entries
Carpenters need good tools to build a house efficiently. The same is true for SharePoint. Without nice tools, SharePoint development can be frustrating and time consuming. I collected a list of tools which are useful for daily SharePoint tasks.
• Virtual Machine - The ideal development environment is a virtual machine, not a physical server or desktop. It's much easier and efficient to host a SharePoint server and all the following tools in a virtual machine. The most widely used virtual machine softwares for developers are VMWare Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. VMWare Workstation is not free,...
A DataView webpart is a nice component to display SharePoint data. It can connect to various data sources including SharePoint web services which are located under http://[server]/_vti_bin. Here I'd like to show how you can display sub sites on a DataView webpart using SharePoint webs.asmx web service. With this approach, you can easily expose sub sites without any coding...
Rather than hearing directly from Microsoft, I indirectly found this supportability through several SharePoint workflow project templates in Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2008 comes with several project templates for creating workflows, and these workflows are based on .Net 3.5.
There are many benefits of using .Net 3.5 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 (or SharePoint) esp. for WCF and workflow. WCF and workflow in .Net 3.5 come with many new features and they are tightly integrated with each other. For example, it's now possible to call WCF services inside a custom SharePoint workflow using ReceiveActivity and SendActivity as well...
Let's say that I have to develop a questionnaire form for a public-facing web site which is based on MOSS 2007. The customer has a license to use InfoPath Forms Services. Should I use InfoPath forms services to develop the new questionnaire? The answer is "It depends."
In most cases, I would want to use InfoPath forms at the beginning, but more than likely, as requirements for the questionnaire becomes complex, I will eventually drop the InfoPath approach and switch to a custom asp.net...