Track: SharePoint for Developers - Part 1

In this first part of the two part series, Steven covers the differences between Site and Application pages in SharePoint 2007, why each may be used in various circumstances, and prepares for the construction of a menu located application page. After a brief introduction he examines the concept of Site Pages and Application Pages separately in detail with supported screenshots.

As the second article in a two part series, Steven examines the attributes and details of a SharePoint 2007 application page, including the construction and feature deployment of the same page based project. Since this is a WSS level objective, as opposed to MOSS, you will not need MOSS to work with the code included in this project. Windows Server 2003, WSS, and Visual Studio 2005 are all that is needed, with no additional add-ons. He provides a detailed analysis of each step involved in the creation and deployment of the project.

SharePoint will only display Web Parts on a page. However, there are publicly available shims that allow you to write user controls and have them be displayed as a Web Part. From SharePoint's point of view, the shim is a Web Part. From the point of view of the user control, the shim is simply a control in .NET that is including the user control

Office 2003 is being released this month, and a cast of supporting applications is already available. One of these is Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, the free team add-on for Windows Server 2003. If you're not familiar with SharePoint Services basics, take a look at What Developers Need to Know About Windows SharePoint Services. In this article, I'm going to drill into one key place where SharePoint and Office 2003 overlap: document workspaces

We might have seen colleague tracker web part which keep tracks the changes made in our contacts/colleagues details like profile/lists/sites. The same tracking mechanism can be implemented by using MOSS API in any custom web part/ web control/ feature/web service...

UserProfile.GetColleagueChanges is the method which returns all changes happened with the contacts, this method also accepts a Query (UserProfileChangeQuery) where we can specify different parameters to filter the changes

The following helper class demonstrates a few techniques that allow documents to be uploaded to a SharePoint document library programmatically without using the API or a custom web service. You don't need to specify a document library name, and it will create any folders specified in the URL as required. File meta data will be updated if any properties are passed.

If you don't see content query web part listed in the web parts list, this is because you have not enabled "Search Server Web Parts" feature in site collection features. Enable this feature and content query web part will show in the list of web parts.

Visual Studio 2010 integrates with SharePoint much more closely than in previous versions. Visual Studio 2010 includes SharePoint-specific project types and project item types, and includes powerful packaging, deployment, and debugging features that help increase your efficiency as a SharePoint 2010 developer.

This programming task includes the steps for creating a basic custom Windows SharePoint Services Web Part. It is a simple Web Part that allows you to change the Web Part's Title property, which is a Windows SharePoint Services WebPart base class property that sets the text in the title bar of the Web Part.

MVVM is to have an instance of a particular Model (say currentPerson) inside my ViewModel (say PeopleViewModel) which is exposed to the View (say PeopleView). The View binds and edits the Model directly.

This definitely flies in the face of what most people consider to be the holy grail of MVVM pattern, but it's a fairly new pattern, so people are still finding their way with it every day, and this works for me very well. The reason I do what I do, is for the following reasons:

1.I have always had the luxury of being able to write my own UI specific Model classes. I would even do this if I was using some other Model classes first, such as LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entity Framework. As these classes don't have everything a proper WPF Model class needs in my humble opinion. Though, they are pretty good, as they are Partial classes and use INotifyPropertyChanged/DataContract etc etc
2.I am a pragmatist and I do not like writing code for the sake of writing code. I have seen some MVVM apps where the author has had a Model with 50 properties on it, that are simply repeated in the ViewModel abstraction, where the ViewModel added nothing. On that day I decided I would never do that unless I have to.
3.I honestly see no harm in writing directly to the Model from the View, JUST SO LONG AS if the Model is InValid its data NEVER makes its way to the database. I honestly see no pro