A Hands on with SharePoint

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SharePoint has been over the years growing in popularity for connecting Microsoft Visual Studio applications to people and process. It is a collaboration software for enterprises, as dubbed by Microsoft. It is used by developers, IT professionals and end users for efficient sharing of website content developed without training and in minimum timeframe. Fortune 500 companies have often used fast and friendly technologies like SharePoint with Visual Studio to develop and collaborate in social networks for employees. Hence it remains chiefly a corporate venture.

How to build Visual Web Parts for SharePoint 2007

 

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise – ‘Create Site’ screen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

This article covers a basic tutorial on how to build Visual Web Parts for SharePoint 2007 as shown in the link https://vimeo.com/11285888 .

The main steps to follow are :

1. First create a sample empty website with Visual Studio 2008 and check that the browser and web server are working correctly displaying it. The web server is IIS Server. Any browser should be compatible.

2. Create a new project. Select WSPBuilder as the project. If you have installed SharePoint, the WSPBuilder option will come under Workflow projects under Visual C # or Visual Basic Language projects group. Change the name of the new project to something you want.

3. You get the project solutions explorer to list project files. Select the project name and right click to add new item. You can add windows forms, web forms, reporting, data and code object items. But in the WSPBuilder Items, there are many features like Web Part Feature, Sequential Workflow feature and State Machine feature alongwith event handler and other item templates. Select the Web Part Feature and Add.

4. In the feature settings, set the scope of the Web Part to site, since we would be adding the web part to the site. Also you may need to rename the feature and add description.

5. Now you get the feature folder having the manifest XML file of feature and elements. Also you get the CodeBehind file where you can add and manipulate data to be bound and displayed into the site.

6. Add GUIDType in the csproj Project File. The details are given in next section. This is to certify all .NET Web Forms to go with older VS 2008, so that after registering the new assembly with GUIDType in Project File, you can add VS 2010 Web User Control Items from Add Item templates.

7. Now Design a View Page with Data Controls.

8. Add/Edit Event Handlers of Controls.

9. Add your custom code to event handler. For example databind the datasources of data objects.

10. Now clear and recode the WebParts CodeBehind file. It has sample code as inherited from Microsoft Sharepoint Library. On the same namespace, inherit the WebPart Item class from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebPart .

11. Now you need to load the WebPart Control file WebPartUserControl.ascx . For which you just need to specify the relative path of your control file among the control templates inside your project.

12. Build the project so that Assembly dll is created.

13. Now you must add an assembly reference to the project dll file inside the User Control ASP code. For that use Reflection.exe drag drop the assembly created for your project. It will reflect the four part assembly reference which you copy paste in the ASP code of Visual Web Part User Control .ascx file.

14. Now build and deploy. Refresh your site and the Sharepoint Site has this new user control added for activation.

15. Activate the Web Part and use your site with new control behaviour.

Add and Register Assembly for SharePoint to VS 2008

http://www.elumenotion.com/Blog/lists/posts/post.aspx?ID=91

A Visual Studio project template defines the base configuration of a new project. If you’ve ever used VS, you have used a project template. When I am starting from scratch, I usually use the C# Class Library project template because it makes the fewest assumptions about what I am doing and therefore imposes the fewest restrictions. One problem with this approach is that the Class Library template lacks the item templates for ASP.NET. Among these are the templates for Web Forms and User Controls. I like the productivity tools provided by these item templates, especially the visual designers. Fortunately, it is easy to add the Web Form and User Control item templates to a Class Library!

In Solution Explorer, right-click the project node and choose Unload Project to expose the project file for editing and then edit the file.

The file opens in the editor. Insert the {349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc} element beneath element and save the file.

Right-click the project in Solution Explorer and select Reload Project. Now when you add a new item to the project you have the option to include any of the standard ASP.NET Web items.

I use the WSPBuilder tool to create web solution packages that I can install and deploy on SharePoint farms. WSPBuilder is simple to use, but it requires that the project files are in folders within the project that match the deployment target’s structure (the 12 hive). The next step is to create the folders shown below.

When you run WSPBuilder it creates a solution manifest based on the files that are actually in the project. So, if I don’t include any files in a particular folder, the presence of the folder in the solution won’t affect the package. So, I usually just start out with the set of folders I am most likely to use ahead of time.

Most projects require a few feature receivers or other code that has to deploy to the Global Assembly Cache. This requires that the assembly has a strong name, which in turn requires a strong-name key. The next step is to configure code signing. You can read more about that process here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms247123.aspx.

WSPBuilder will also specify in the solution manifest that the assembly should deploy to the GAC if it finds it in a GAC folder beneath the project root. To enable this create the folder in the project and set the output path. To learn how to do this, see:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kb4wyys2.aspx. At this point, the project structure looks like the following:

Finally, before I can write any code, I need to add references to the SharePoint and various System.Web assemblies.

That’s a lot of work to go through every time I want to create a new solution. In a team environment over the course of a year you could waste days doing this by hand. Worse, different members of the team might do things differently resulting in confusion for all. If you save the result as a project template you can avoid ever having to do these steps again. You can also share the template with your teammates. To export the project as a template, select File|Export Template and complete the wizard. The result is a ZIP file. If you give it to a teammate and they put it into their Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates folder, they will have it as an option when they create a new project.

You can download the result here: http://www.elumenotion.com/Downloads/WSPTemplate.zip

Author: Doug Ware

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