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Introduction

The article gives an overview of the steps and code required to create, fill, and upload an InfoPath form using code.

CodeProject: Programmatically create a browser enabled InfoPath form. Free source code and programming help

Greetings fellow SharePoint Developers.  As a follow up to a post I made last year on Windows Server 2008 (http://www.synergyonline.com/blog/blog-moss/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=10), I figured I’d provide some guidance on the development environment I now use on Windows 7 (RC build 7100).  I also used this for some time on Windows 7 Beta 1 with great success.

First off, let me mention that I run the 64-bit version of most versions of software.  This doesn’t really change much, but I find that the performance is just a bit better on my 4GB Dell D830 laptop.

Here is a summary of the software I install on my host operating system:

• 64-bit Windows 7

• 64-bit SQL Server 2008 (I use the developer edition)

• 64-bit MOSS 2007 (patched to SP2 level)

• Office 2007 Enterprise

• SharePoint Designer 2007

• 64-bit Visual Studio 2008

• 64-bit Virtual PC 2007 SP1 (I still use a number of virtual machines)

• MOSS SDK (v1.5 from Apr 09 is the latest)

Building a SharePoint Development Environment on Windows 7 – MOSS Blog

Yep, had to figure this out since I’m still working with SharePoint stuff.  I couldn’t find any "HowTo’s," code samples, tricks, hints, or anything else really helpful on this.  Just a bunch of other folks attemptint to do the same thing.

This is one of those things where the answer looks simple and seems like it should have been apparent from the start.  Alas I couldn’t see it in the beginning either.

Here’s the magic code:

// get a reference to the folder (this assumes path points to a valid folder)

SPFolder folder = SharePointConfiguration.Site.GetFolder(path);

// get a reference to the Sharepoint group collection

SPGroupCollection spc = SharePointConfiguration.Site.SiteGroups;

// get a reference to the group who’s permissions you want to modify for the folder above

SPGroup group = spc[groupName];

// create a role assignment from the group reference

SPRoleAssignment roleAssignment = new SPRoleAssignment((SPPrincipal)group);

// break role inheritance for folders/files because they will be having permissions separate from their parent file/folder

folder.Item.BreakRoleInheritance(true);

// update the role assignments for the group by adding the permissionSet “TestPermissionLevel” which is a custom

// permissionset I created manually…you can easily use any of the built-in permission sets

roleAssignment.RoleDefinitionBindings.Add(SharePointConfiguration.Site.RoleDefinitions["Test Permission Level"]);

// apply the new roleassignment to the folder. You can do this at the listitem level if desired (i.e. this could be SPfile.Item…. instead of SPFolder.Item)

folder.Item.RoleAssignments.Add(roleAssignment);

robgruen’s WebLog : How to Programmatically Set Permissions on Files/Folders in a SharePoint Document Library

In this tutorial I’m going to explain how you can host a Silverlight 2 beta 2 application from within a SharePoint Web Part. The Web Part will pass the URL of the SharePoint site together with the name of the list for which the Silverlight application will show the data. The retrieval of the data will be done by the Silverlight application using the HttpWebRequest technique for calling the SharePoint web services. As the SharePoint web services return a chunk of XML the XML will be handled by using LINQ for XML. The data will be bound to the Silverlight controls.

Creating a SharePoint Web Part that hosts a data binding Silverlight application | SharePoint Magazine

The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is an absolutely killer for MOSS 2007 Publishing sites. It is one of the best performing rollup Web Parts available to developers and should always be considered before rolling your own solution. You can even do some really sick customization to the presentation of the results produced by the CQWP as shown in this post on the ECM team blog by George Parantatos, a PM on the product team:

» ECM Team Blog: Configuring & Customizing the CQWP

However there are two things I always hear about the CQWP in terms of wish list type stuff:

1. It doesn’t contain any built-in paging mechanism… yeah, I too wish for this.
2. It doesn’t support dynamic filtering. For instance, I have to manually specify the filtering values rather than have them be dynamically set.

Before you rush off and roll your own, stop, get a cup of coffee, and saddle up next to your laptop. With just a few lines of code you can utilize the provided CQWP but add your own customizations. Take the second pain point: no dynamic filtering. Let’s say you have a slew of content and you want to dynamically set the filtering values, say for example, using values on the query string.

Subclassing the Content Query Web Part: Adding Dynamic Filtering

What is VSeWSS?

VSeWSS is a plugin to Visual Studio that adds a set of functionality which may help you in your daily tasks as a SharePoint developer. The plugin comes with a basic set of templates, and a great set of functionality which I’ll try to outline here.

Alternatives to VSeWSS

Of course, I’ll have to mention some of the alternatives to using VSeWSS as well, as all tools doesn’t fit in every mans hand.

• WSP Builder
• SharePoint Installer
• SharePoint Manager
• STSDev
• Application Pool Manager

Tobias Zimmergren’s thoughts on development

There has been a lot of buzz around SharePoint support for ASP.NET AJAX the last couple
of days, resulting in some nice posts, even from the Microsoft guys. If you are new
to the topic; some required reading:

• Integrating
  ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint (by Mike Ammerlaan)
  Mike clearly described what you need to do to get the ASP.NET AJAX extensions working
  in a SharePoint site. First install the extensions (of course), then make some changes
  to the web.config of the SharePoint site.
• AjaxBasePart:
  Easy ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (by Eric
  Schoonover)
  Eric describes how you can make use of ASP.NET AJAX in a SharePoint web part, he posts
  code for his implementation of a base web part class that supports AJAX. The nice
  thing about this base web part class is that it dynamically adds the AJAX ScriptManager
  control to the class (required for the AJAX stuff).

Yesterday evening (very late ) I’ve created a version of the SmartPart that
makes use of the Eric’s technique, let me introduce you the SmartPart with
AJAX! So basically said: you can create a Web User Control (ASCX) with the
Visual Studio Designer, that uses the ASP.NET AJAX extensions and run that user control
as a SharePoint web part. At this point in time, it’s still a beta version, you can
get it from the GotDotNet workspace (releases
section). How do you get started? First of all you need to download and
install the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. Next you need to extend your SharePoint site
with these extensions, check Mike’s
post for detailed instructions. You only need to change the web.config,
you don’t need to add the ScriptManager to the master page! Now you can install
the SmartPart (check the Installation guide, or this screencast).

SmartPart
for SharePoint – ASP.NET AJAX Support – Jan Tielens’ Bloggings

Recently I had to connect to a SharePoint List to access some data.  While there
is a data extension
available from Enesys (including a free Community edition) to do this I though
I would first make an attempt using the out-of-the-box options.

The first step was getting connected to any of the list services.  I chose to
start with GetListCollection because it required no parameters (aka it was simple
to use).  Here is what I did to get connected:

Accessing
SharePoint List Items with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services – Colin Bowern – RockstarGuys.com