Creating an Application Design

Transcription

1 Creating an Application Design Evaluating application data access and storage on SharePoint 2010 Lists and Document Libraries Sites may be the primary building blocks within SharePoint, but there s no doubt that the workhorses are lists. Document Libraries and Lists contains the large amount of structured or non structured data, and their templates determine the shape and the functionalities that access it s content. Document Libraries works as special Lists, you can imagine them as special List Items with Attachments. You can think about Items being rows in a SharePoint Content Database, and each piece of information in that item (structured data) is stored in a column in that database. When talking about Pages, the term Web Content Management (WCM) comes into play. SharePoint provides basically 3 types of Pages: Content Page, Publishing Page and Web Part Page. If you ever heard about the MS s product Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS), you ll remember that it s goal was to provide functionalities close to SharePoint s WCM. Microsoft having heard that feedbacks that both products could become one, decided to merge them at 2007 with MOSS. About the list relationships, there are two options that provide an added measure of data integrity: one prevents referenced data from being removed from another list without the references being removed first (Restrict Delete), and the other option provides you with the ability to cascade the removal (Cascade Delete). SharePoint 2010 also has the new feature of checking in/out multiple files at the same time. SQL Database The databases that are installed with SharePoint Server 2010 (SPS) depend on the features that are activated in the farm. Some databases come with the SharePoint Foundation 2010 (SPF) meanwhile another comes with SPS Standard and Enterprise editions. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Power Pivot for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) can generate more and more databases. It s important to say that Project Server 2010 and FAST Search Server can also add more databases, so you got the 10+ databases picture that a simple SharePoint farm can reach to the sky.

2 Now it s time to relax and sit about the IOPS question. More and faster disks provide sufficient I/O operations per second (IOPS) by maintaining low latency and queuing on all disks. One can think that slow responses from the I/O subsystem can be compensated by adding other types of resources such as CPU or memory; however, it can influence and cause issues throughout the farm. BCS Business Catalog Services (BCS) formerly named Business Data Catalog (BDC) came in the SPF 2010 services package adding some new features, including the ability to read/write content from external systems, such as Web Services, Databases and.net Framework assemblies. BCS is available on SPF 2010, SPS 2010 and Office 2010, all of them differs from the features present, of course SPS 2010 inherits from SPF Next, an overview from the BCS services, illustrating that it is possible to connect to some kind of external resources in order to build in Web 2.0 on SharePoint presentation layer some rich elements that would lower costs to consumers and so on. Web Service Web Services on SharePoint 2010 still exist but I must add a note; Whenever possible, it is recommended that you use the new client side object model to work remotely with SharePoint data; said that, SharePoint Web Services connection is built on Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer namespace, including methods that access content on a web site, working with both list and sites information, as well as methods for customizing meetings, imaging, document workspaces or search.

3 The SOAP/SharePoint interfaces used are defined on the server-side model by the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly. Most Web services provide their functionality through the /_vti_bin virtual directory, which maps to %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\isapi physical directory in the file system. It s possible to accomplish operations such as adding users to a group, returning lists and list items, updating list items, customizing sites and even creating custom ASP.NET Web Services that operate within the context of SP File System Each Web Front End Server (WFE) that constitutes a SharePoint Farm must have installed on it s Hard Disk NTFS formatted some binaries. The File System is accessed regularly to feed the server with administrative pages, css styles, resource files, assemblies from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and so on. It s important to add a note that on Network Load Balance (NLB) SharePoint Farms, every WFE s File System must have the same files, cause you never know which WFE will response to the user s query. Remote BLOB Storage Typically on enterprise-scale deployment of SharePoint, 80% of data is represented by filebased streams that are stored as binary large objects (BLOBs). The BLOB persists on SQL Server database by default, but it s completely reasonable that a SharePoint Farm can make use of an external data store with equal benefit at lower cost than using SQL Server to contain BLOB data. Remember that SQL Server has it s use when talking about structure forms of data (our metadata). External BLOB storage (EBS) runs parallel to the site s SQL Server content database, which stores the site s structured data. To coordinate the two data stores, it s required to implement a COM interface, which uses simple semantics to recognize file Save and Open commands and invokes redirection calls to the BLOB store when it recognizes BLOB data streams. Identify artifacts from application requirements Web Parts Web Parts are server-side controls that run inside SharePoint s context. It s use goes from editing the user interface (UI) of a page to implement custom features with business value. SPF 2010 and SPS 2010 includes in it s features package some Web Parts that has the ability to generate custom Web Parts on it s own.

4 SharePoint Web Parts can inherit from both System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.Web Part and Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart base class; even though these types are supported, the ASP.NET Web Part (System.Web ) is recommended for all new projects, being excluded some special cases that using the ASP.NET Web Part base class is impossible due it s limitation to implement some SharePoint specific features. With Web Parts, you can create custom properties, improve performance and scalability, implement proprietary code without disclosing the source code, secure and control access to content, make your Web Part connectable, interact with object models, control the web part cache, benefit from a rich development environment, create a base class for other Web Parts to extend and control the Web Part implementation. Event Receivers SPF 2010 gives the control of the Before and After events on common SharePoint objects to the programmer through implementation of the Event Model. Event Receivers are managed components that get called when events are triggered; they can be created inheriting from one of the SharePoint event receiver base classes. After the event receiver is created, event handlers are implemented by overriding methods on the event receiver class. Triggering actions include activities such as adding, moving, checking in/out, deleting and so forth. Event hosts are the objects that expect to receive events, they are site collections, sites, lists, workflows or features. After events also have the ability to get processed on not only synchronous mode but asynchronous mode as well. List Definitions Visual Studio 2010 (VS 2010) now includes some SharePoint Project Items (SPIs), one is the List Definition SPI. A list definition defines the schema of a list along with other things that define a list, such as views and forms that used by the list. It s important to say that usually List Instances go with List Definitions in projects, because at the same type that you can t think of a custom list definition without views, forms and content types associated to it, you would also create a list instance programmatically just so your user would be able to activate a feature and have the final product delivered. Workflows Workflows are used in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 to automate business logic and processes by using the underlying Windows Workflow Foundation engine. When a workflow is

5 started, it has rules to guide it that are provided by it s designer. It can also perform some activities when specific conditions are satisfied. This allows a business to fully describe and programmatically represent their business processes without the need to manually intercept and follow up, and here is when people start to gain time on their work. While a workflow is running, it is often necessary to gather information from a user. To capture this interaction, a workflow designer can use either InfoPath forms or ASP.NET forms. These forms are connected to the workflow through a special kind of property that the workflow runtime engine can use to continue processing. Workflows on SharePoint 2010 version (v4) can be designed on SharePoint Designer 2010 (SPD 2010), VS 2010 and on Microsoft Visio 2010 (MS Visio 2010). Each of these tools have their own bottom and ups, but you can face VS 2010 as the most complete tool nowadays to get a Workflow done. Site Definitions Site definitions are used to define and deploy a site into a site collection. Your site than can also contain elements such as lists or Web Parts. The reason to create a site definition relies on the project s need to get versioned code files instead of SharePoint site templates. Custom Actions A custom action represents a Server ribbon, menu, or link customization that a user can see. Custom actions can be bound to list type, content type, file type, or programmatic identifier (ProgID). When talking about the Server ribbon customizations, only controls such as text boxes and dropdowns are supported, but user controls and Web Parts are not. Now, when your goal is to put the custom action on other menus, you must first know it s location attribute. For example, the Site Settings location attribute would be Microsoft.SharePoint.SiteSettings. It s possible to bind custom actions to list views, new/edit/display forms of a list, to the Application Created page, to the Application Security section on Central Administration Application Management page, and on more 30 places at least The idea when implementing a custom action is to develop an Empty SharePoint Project which will receive a Empty Element SPI. When this kind of SPI is created, it generates a elements.xml file, then you just have to enter code that is relevant to your goal targeted to it s location. For example, when we re talking about inserting an item to the Site Actions menu, we would have something like:

6 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 2: <Elements xmlns=" 3: <CustomAction Id="SiteActionsToolbar" GroupId="SiteActions" Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu" Sequence="1000" Title="Custom Site Settings"> 4: <UrlAction Url="/_layouts/Settings.aspx"/> 5: </CustomAction> 6: </Elements> Content Types Content types provide a means to manage the metadata and behavior of list items, making it possible to store different types of content within the same library or list. A content type helps you to encapsulate data requirements, allowing you to define: The metadata or properties you want to assign to that type. This kind of information is represented by site columns added to a list or library when you add a content type. Custom new/edit/display forms and other custom solutions to the content type. This kind of information is represented in the content type s.xml file. Workflows available only for the content type s items. This means you can code yourself workflows on both SPD 2010 and VS 2010 tools targeting them to a specific content type. On the document s content type case, you can define a document template that would be the base for this type. With content types standardization (available with SP 2010), it s completely recommended that when creating content types that plan to use across multiple site collections, you may centrally store that content type on a site collection that will be defined as the content type hub for your application. Some people think that content types are associated with file extensions, and when uploading a.doc file to a document library, SharePoint will automatically decide which content type that file will be targeted. Actually, content types are independent of file formats. That means that when you define for example a Business Plan content type, it could be applied to any format, such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Windows Media files or simple list items. You can create content types in three different ways: Using the user interface, using the object model or through a feature s deployment and activation. Site Columns

7 A site column is a reusable column definition, or template, that you can assign to multiple lists across multiple SharePoint sites. Site columns decrease the amount of rework needed and also helps ensure consistency of metadata across sites and lists. You can add columns to sites and lists, and reference them in content types. A column represents an attribute, or piece of metadata, that the user wants to manage for the items in the list or content type to which they added the column. When you add a site column to a list, SharePoint Foundation copies the site column locally onto the list as a list column. You can then make changes to the list column; these changes apply only to the column as it behaves on that list. Site columns also behave like site content types in terms of scope. When you create a site column on a site, that site column also becomes available to any child sites, and thereby, the lists on those sites. Site columns can be created by same ways content types. Deleting site columns can be tricky, because you might have some inherence on list columns that are being used, so forth you can t delete the site column until you delete those list columns. Mapping artifacts to application requirements With VS 2010, it s possible when developing a SharePoint feature to target application requirements such as images of other kind of resources to SharePoint s WFE folders, as the IMAGES, LAYOUTS or RESOURCES mapped folders. VS 2010 included kindly more than 20 Mapped Folders, which is really a bless when talking of a feature development speed. Select a deployment model Sandbox and Farm implementation It s a blame when SharePoint developers just disfavor their responsibility of a SharePoint application s quality and just delivers pure trash to the client. When SharePoint applications go into trouble, IT people is activated and they would never know what was going on, of course, they didn t develop the features YOU supposed to deliver with good quality. They might make changes such as altering some farm values and would dig their hole to hell. Clients would then start questioning about the availability of SharePoint applications. Not good huh? Sandboxed solutions represent a new way of planning, building and analyzing SharePoint deployed features. Basically what sandboxed solutions does is retaining the feature to a

8 partially trusted environment through code access security (CAS) policies and to certain portions of the object model (OM). Back to the v3 ages when there was no Sandboxed Solutions to count with, developers would basically deploy everything to the GAC and few ones would deploy to the BIN but then would change settings on the web.config file to set full trust in the SharePoint server, so farm administrators would find themselves in pure pain when hardware was saturated all of a sudden and they couldn t track down what was going on. That s why Microsoft recommends for a best practice approach to do everything that is possible with SharePoint features in sandbox solutions and let farm solutions only for situations where you would possibly need to read from directories, databases, web services and so on. Sometimes, even when you don t need to access external resources but SharePoint only, you can potentially cause the farm to go down if you code things like looping to every list on the entire farm instead of coding with specialist methods such as Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSiteDataQuery. You would never know your feature would collapse the entire farm when testing your feature on a minimal site collection on your development environment with only a few lists. With Sandboxed solutions, one might develop everything but: Visual Web Parts Application Pages Custom action group HideCustomAction element Content type binding Web application-scoped features Farm-scoped features Workflows with code What s left? Let s see: List definitions List instances Site definitions Content types/fields Module/files Feature callouts Web Parts Support for all Web Parts that derive from ASP.NET Web Part type SPItemEventReceiver SPListEventReceiver

9 SPWebEventReceiver Custom actions Declarative workflows You can do even more if you know how to use full-trust proxies, that adds a layer allowing some OM before restricted to be accessed by Sandboxed solutions. You ll encounter yourself programming a lot more client-side code than before when developing Sandboxed solutions, which is not bad, just adds some steps to the learning curve of your team. Single server vs. multi-server environments To scale out from a single Web server that already hosts Web applications, you would need to install SPS 2010 on another server in the same Active Directory (AD) domain. You would basically need install SharePoint binaries and then run SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard that would guide you through the process of provisioning additional servers to the farm. If you install additional resources such as Web parts, it is necessary that you install them on all your WFEs. Forgetting to install some kind of items on all servers ends up showing inconsistence to the user experience because NLB would redirect you to a server that has that resource and a time later would redirect you to a server that hasn t for example. Here s a short list of items that are often forgotten when adding servers to a server farm: Custom features and solutions Custom Web parts Web.config modifications Language packs SharePoint-aware antivirus programs SSL certificates Select the appropriate execution method In-page First of all, it s important to distinguish between the two different types of SharePoint pages, one being the Application Page and another as the Site Page. Application Pages can inherit from both LayoutsPageBase and UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase. The main difference between those is the authorization to execute them that an anonymous user has. Application Pages are stored in the file system of the WFEs. Application Pages can contain inline code and they do not run in safe mode. That s probably because they can only be deployed by site administrators as Farm solutions.

10 Now, for Site Pages, MS designed them to be content-oriented. However, that desire never stopped those pages to interact with SharePoint safe controls. Nevertheless, it s also important to remember that authenticated end-users can still manage and create those kinds of pages, so there are significant restrictions on the code ran by them. Again, there are two kinds of Site Pages, which are Standard pages and Web Parts pages. So always remember that: 1. Inline code in Site Definition based ASPX pages: Inline code is not recommended within a site definition due to the issues involved with the code no longer rendering as soon as the page is customized. 2. Inline code in _layouts-based ASPX pages: Inline code is supportable if included on a page in the _layouts directory. 3. Inline code enabled through PageParserPath exclusion: Inline code should not be allowed though this technique except in extremely rare circumstances. Don t put yourself and your system on risk by marking the whole virtual path to contain inline code please. Enabling in-line code trough the PageParserPath exclusion: 1: <SharePoint> 2: <SafeMode MaxControls = "200" CallStack = "false" DirectFileDependencies ="10" TotalFileDependencies = "50" AllowPageLevelTrace = "false"> 3: <PageParserPaths> 4: <PageParserPath VirtualPath="/_mpg/*" CompilationMode="Always" 5: AllowServerSideScript="true" IncludeSubFolders="true"/> 6: </PageParserPaths> 7: </SafeMode> 8: </SharePoint> Workflow You can create workflows by using the Visual Studio 2010 Workflow Designer. Each workflow is compiled into its own DLL. In addition, your workflows can interact directly with the user through custom workflow forms. Workflow forms enable you to gather information from the user at each stage of the workflow. To install the workflow on a server farm, you need to create a workflow definition. A workflow template definition is an XML file that contains the information SharePoint Foundation requires to instantiate and run the workflow, such as: Name, GUID, and description of the workflow Location of any custom forms used in this workflow Correct class within the workflow assembly to call

11 Each server farm contains a workflow associations table. Each entry in this table contains association data for a workflow as it applies to a specific content type, list, or document library. This association data typically includes whether the workflow is started automatically or by users, and the task and history lists for the workflow. If a workflow has been added to multiple content types, lists, or document libraries, it will have one entry for each such association. Likewise, if you add multiple workflows to a specific content type, list, or document library, then the table contains one entry for each workflow added to the content type, list, or document library. This is a cool picture if you want to illustrate the whole process to your DEV team: After the process of creating the workflow solution is done, you can also programmatically associate the workflow to a content type, a list or a library using the SPWorkflowAssociation object. You can also make use of the SPWorkflowManager object to start, run, cancel, return all the workflows or perform other workflow administration operations on a previous determined item. Event receiver (asynchronous vs. synchronous) Microsoft SharePoint Foundation provides a robust events model to support the development of SharePoint solutions by providing a broad array of both before and after events on common SharePoint Foundation objects, such as sites, webs, lists or content types. When creating an Event receiver, you should add Event handlers to it, which means basically you re customizing determined events that get triggered by time. Each Event receiver you develop is then compiled into an assembly and placed in the GAC; then you bind it to a Event host. When you use asynchronous events, you can t ensure that the modifications you make along the firing process will be rendered to the user before those modifications get completed. That may enforce you to chose always synchronous events so you can be 100% sure about the user

12 experience. But remember some operations just take to long by it s nature, so using asynchronous events will be also good for those situations. Programmatically talking, you got to chose between the values of the Synchronization property on the SPEventReceiverDefintion object. Timer job Timer jobs come in hand when you have something to do periodically, and you won t accept any solutions that are not automated. SharePoint Timer is a service on the SharePoint Platform that enables you as a developer to code some custom Timer jobs. When developing Timer jobs, your type must inherit from the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPJobDefintion class. Then you got to implement 3 constructors on your type and override the Execute method, that will do what you got to do. When that type is ready, encapsulate it s functionality in a feature receiver, which can be created from inherence of the Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeatureReceiver class. Override some methods such as the FeactureActivated and the FeatureDeactivating to get things done. Service Application One of the well known benefits from Web services are their ability to get closer systems that before were heterogeneous to each other. On every case that a Web service is being used across the Internet or any other kind of network, you have the server and the client roles. In SharePoint, a WFE server will probably play the server role meanwhile a Web part or a Silverlight application will play the client role. As for the server role, you can go with the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) standards, or you can go with the RESTful Web services, well known to be lightweight services, they don t require the WSDL standards and do a better job, or you can go with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It s VERY important to remember about Azure, the newest cloud platform from MS, that can connect to a product called SharePoint Online, that due to it s capabilities to run Sandboxed solutions will require frequently use of the Service applications. Designing UX Determine presentation page type Web Part page

13 Web Part pages are used to manage Web Parts inside a rendering ASPX page. These Web Parts can be organized among Web Part zones, which allow you to move Web Parts across the page, using the zones. Web Part pages do not have the ability to manage text on itself as the Publishing pages. It s interesting that Web Part pages by default do not inherit the default layout of Publishing pages or Application Pages, especially when it comes to the left navigation bar. That s because Web Part pages override the content of the Left Navigation place holder that the.master file provides. In order to retain the master s layout behavior, the solution is as simple as removing the region codes in the mark-up page file that override the master s definitions. Application page Application pages are used to surface content and functionality to SharePoint users just as Site pages, but Application pages are accessible from everywhere in the farm, from the most different sites and site collections, differently from Site pages, that are local to where they were created. Another big different of Application pages is that they usually get executed and consequently rendered faster because they re stored into each WFE server file system, and Site pages are stored in the Content database, which will deliver the content with delay of course. Application pages also get their code-behind files compiled in DLLs, which makes then perform better than Site pages. Application pages in VSTS 2010 are available as SPIs, so all you got to do to create these beauties is to create a SharePoint project and add a new Application Page in it. Automatically, VSTS 2010 will create a LAYOUTS mapped folder if the project doesn t have one, add a new folder with the project s name and insert your brand new Application page inside of that folder. Application pages cannot be created inside a Sandboxed solution because they are meant to be available in any site of the farm, and Sandboxed solutions are activated on the Site Collection level. Note: Application pages do not have the design view mode that is available by default on ASP.NET pages. MS s reason for that is they didn t have enough time and resources to get a designer working for that. HAHAHA. Publishing page Publishing pages comes with the Publishing feature turned on either on the Web or Site Collection levels. When that feature is turned on, some document libraries are created and you can t delete them until you turn the Publishing feature off. Those libraries are the default hard-

14 coded repository for some functionality that the Publishing feature is based on, for example, creating Publishing pages. When you create a Publishing page, you are enforced to chose which content type and page layout you are going to use, even though that decision is made behind the scenes, so you can expect some more references in the.aspx file for those kind of pages. Since Page layouts and Content types can change in time, Publishing pages have the capability to change accordantly so there are no glitches for the user experience nor for the administrative users. Publishing pages also suffers from a healthy workflow that controls it s effective publishing to end users. They got to be approved before other users than the one making the changes can see them. That s completely reasonable on Internet facing sites that are updated frequently and I should say that this OOB feature should serve as clients getting delighted. Page Layout The Page layout concept can be sometimes confused with Master pages, but MS designed those 2 artifacts I can say to work together in order to get a nice control of the look, feel and content of each page. Every time you create a Publishing page, you can be sure that a Page layout will be behind the scenes manipulating the the Page fields and Field controls will be placed and if the layout should keep with the master page s or it should get improved by overriding some definitions, creating some CSS or including some other scripts/in-line code. Page layouts are stored in the Master page gallery together with Master pages and some CSS. It s important to say that in the same way you can have multiple Master pages on a same SharePoint site, you can have multiple Page layouts per content type, which enables you to deliver more user experience in different situations. Determine SharePoint visual components Web parts Developing Web parts is one of the most common tasks developers face on regular basis, and beside what rules the Web part should follow or what tasks it should perform, it s also a developer duty to build how the UI will be presented, specially on the Web part SPI, that by it s

15 nature will only provide as resources some configuration files and a code file of your preference, either.cs or.vb. On previous versions of SP 2010, developers would attach some controls such as.ascx files to the Web parts so they could split what is a Web developer job and what is a programmer job. Now there is the Visual Web part SPI for that. Something that got to stick to your head is the difference of those two powerful SPIs. Web part SPI can be held on a Sandboxed solution because it s completely reasonable a Web part being built only using a client-side programming to access information, or really just client-side with few server-side code. Now, with Visual Web parts, you don t have the option to include them on a Sandboxed solution, because by it s nature of creating an.ascx file and having it placed on the CONTROLTEMPLATES mapped folder, you can expect that this modification would be then stored on the File System of a WFE server, a thing that a common user shouldn t have access to. Silverlight Silverlight is a big topic, but there are some fundamentals to understand first: It s a relatively new technology from MS that enables you as a developer to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It s also Web-based, that means cross platform and cross-browser, so you can expect it to run on Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc. The basic application s artifacts are the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), which is pronounced zammel, and the code-behind being VB.NET or C#, but you can add to the mix some Javascript, Phython, Ruby or AJAX. You can count also with WCF or REST to communicate to the external world or to use LINQ when making queries. Silverlight applications vary from just simple input/edit forms to advanced Webcam or Streaming features. SharePoint and Silverlight are both success products from MS, Ballmer himself said it at the 2009 SharePoint Conference at Las Vegas, showing impressive numbers from the two products, and it s interesting to think that both of them also are Web-based technologies, both based on.net, both can be developed with MS tools as VS 2010, and you can expect a strong community to hold support on them. There are some peculiarities when developing with Silverlight, for example the routing event concept, which says that some events may impact inner controls of controls; you remember from Naming containers in ASP.NET? Same thing; instead of just having one single control s layer. Silverlight is also independent from which version of.net is being run. For example, you can have Silverlight 3 running with.net 3.5 or.net 4 without any differences.

16 When a Silverlight application is packaged, it creates a.xap file. You can place that file on some different locations: A document library The 14 hive, somewhere in the LAYOUTS folder A local directory When you have Silverlight applications that run across the server, is more acceptable having the.xap on the LAYOUTS folder, but when it is web-specific, have it on a document library and you are good to go. Accessing SharePoint data from Silverlight applications is not so trivial as accessing data from Web parts or another SharePoint SPI. Instead, you must build support in your application to use client-based access. Now you think of web services and the new client object model of SharePoint. For the last choice, you ll need to refer to the 2 assemblies Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll, both located at LAYOUTS\ClientBin folder. It s interesting to think that you can use the Silverlight Web part OOB of SP 2010 and still have to access code only from client-side and not server-side. AJAX It s ok to build RIAs so you have a better user experience across your website, but what if you want just to stick to your ASP.NET classic controls and still have a decent user experience without post-backs? Update panel is your first savior and you can t deny. Even though this control is known to delay the execution of the page addressing the whole view state through post-backs, the result is ok if you care only about appearance and not on some milliseconds performance that another approach could save you. Each SharePoint page now with v4 comes with a ScriptManager so you don t have to create it on your WebPart, Application page or whatsoever. Ribbon You can extend the Ribbon declaratively using Server ribbon XML and simple ECMAScript (Javascript, JScript), or you can use ribbon XML and a page component for more advance scenarios. The top-level elements in the ribbon are tabs. Tabs appear across the top of the page in a SharePoint site. Each tab is responsible for holding a set of groups. These groups contain sets of controls and they are identified by a label. The controls inside a group include buttons, drop-

17 down menus, check boxes, combo boxes, split menus, and galleries. Each of these controls is tied to a unique command. When customizing the Server ribbon, you can add, replace, and remove controls, groups, and tabs. Customizations to the ribbon are defined by using Server ribbon XML in a feature and can be deployed in a solution package (.wsp file). Ribbon customizations can be scoped to Lists, Webs or Sites. Delegate controls With delegate controls you have the ability to attach some controls to a specific functionality by ensuring you create a functionality provider. Suppose that you have on a Search page a Delegate Control such as: 1: <SharePoint:DelegateControl ControlId="SmallSearchInputBox"/> Now what you want to do is ensure that when your custom Search Box Web part gets activated through it s feature, it will automatically replace the OOB Search Box Web part. We know that by default, the sequence number 100 is the given number for OOB controls. So you ll want to assign a number lower than 100 to show your activated feature on the Search Page, doing all that configuration in the Feature s elements, like that: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 2: <Elements xmlns=" 3: <Control 4: Id="SmallSearchInputBox" 5: Sequence="50" 6: ControlClass="MySearchControl" 7: ControlAssembly="MyAssembly"/> 8: </Elements> At runtime, the DelegateControl will accept the union of control elements coming from all places, such as the Server farm, Web application, Site collection and Web site. There is the AllowMultipleControls property that will render in the Sequence order the controls that match the Delegate Control s ControlId. Custom field types

18 As you store more and more data to your SharePoint instance, you might get yourself in situations where the OOB field types do not fulfill yours need of either customization or just entering the right data in the system. That s when Custom field types come into hand. They can include custom data validation and custom field rendering. When you create a custom field type, you got to build it s definition and build it s rendering for the display, new and edit forms and in list views. Dialog Beyond working with notifications and status bars, SharePoint also offers the dialog framework in a.js file that you can write code to. Displaying dialogs with SP 2010 makes you go through a modal grayed background experience, except for the dialog that is displayed of course, which remembers you the modal pop-ups from AJAX Control Toolkit. SharePoint s dialog is so cool, you can drag it on the screen, maximize/close it and have it working with a nice theme as your site will be running also. When programming against it, you ll be able to set callback functions, for the close event for example, and you ll be able to pass some parameters when opening the modal, as the following: width, height, autosize, x, y, allowmaximize, showmaximized, showclose, url, Html, Title, dialogreturnvaluecallback. You could have something like that working to you: 1: function OpenDialog() 2: { 3: var options = SP.UI.$create_DialogOptions(); 4: options.url = " 5: alert('navigating to dialog at: ' + options.url); 6: options.width = 400; 7: options.height = 300; 8: options.title = "My Custom Dialog"; 9: options.dialogreturnvaluecallback = Function.createDelegate(null, CloseCallback); 10: SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(options); 11: } 12: 13: function CloseCallback(result, returnvalue)

19 14: { 15: alert('result from dialog was: '+ result); 16: if(result === SP.UI.DialogResult.OK) 17: { 18: alert('you clicked OK'); 19: } 20: else if (result == SP.UI.DialogResult.cancel) 21: { 22: alert('you clicked Cancel'); 23: } 24: } Plan branding strategy Themes If you want to change the user interface, you have a couple of options: you go around changing the CSS files, master pages, moving around inline SharePoint styles, or you can now with SP 2010 use the Theming Infrastructure. Themes can be created by Web developers that have much more experience or common users with the help of the Office applications, PowerPoint for example. Elements in SharePoint that provide being themed are the Ribbon, Site title, Site icon, Site description, Quick Launch, Tree Control, Top navigation bar, Site Actions menu, Welcome menu, Breadcrumb menu, Layout pages, Popup dialogs, Error messages/pages, the Web Part chrome/tool pane, Search control, Forms, and others. You could create your CSS files and upload them together with Images or something. You could store those files on your database or you could upload them to the File System, like the TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\<language>\STYLES\Themable folder. To support Theming, SP 2010 counts with the site theme interface so that you can preview your changes before applying them.

20 Programming is also possible with the Theme API using the Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.ThmxTheme type. It s then possible to create new themes or query existing themes in the system. Templates Site Templates were before simple STP files that couldn t be changed in any ways. Now for Site Templates, SP 2010 generates WSP files that enables one to move them around and modify its content both from UI and VS This was only possible changing the WebTemplate element and CustomSchema attributes for ListInstance elements. One of the biggest downsides from Site Templates shows up when talking about Publishing Sites. Those kind particular sites do not allow you to save them as templates, and that s why the option of saving them as templates was hidden. Publishing sites have complex references and dependencies, which have to be carefully defined even for site definitions. Saving those kind of sites as templates is not supported. Templates for list and site are almost the same thing as site/list definitions, because they will do the same effect, but they differ on the way they re created. Templates are created by using SharePoint Designer or using the UI, definitions are created using the VS. Instances can be then created by both templates and instances. Site definitions This is used to define and deploy a site into a site collection. Your site can also contain elements such as lists or Web Parts, items that are available from the Project Item Templates. Master pages When pages loads from within a SharePoint site, their construction is not done without help. Behind the scenes, they leverage what is called Master pages, which provides some structure and styling for the SharePoint pages. Master pages exists from ASP.NET framework, so SharePoint inherits it s behavior, changing some aspects like adding several ContentPlaceHolders so the pages that inherit from that Master page can render correctly. Page layouts Publishing in SP is fundamentally a means of authoring and displaying information by using a set of templates. With regards to publishing in SP 2010, there are two fundamental templates to understand, the Master Pages and the Page Layout. All Page Layouts and Master Pages files are stored in a document library on the top level of the Site Collection, called the Page Layout Library. All Page layouts reference a Master Page that is based on the CustomMasterUrl property. Page layouts hosts controls called Field controls

21 that bind fields on the master page list item. Field controls enable content to be edited and rendered for display. Page Layouts can be used by all page instances that are based on that Page Layout. Content types also make a role on this Page layouts concept, because they are the base of the Page layout existence. Each page layout must be bind to a Content type, then each Publishing page that will be created based on that Content type s page layouts. CSS style and JavaScript If you use SharePoint Designer for customizing the appearance of your pages, you may want to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is a way of providing custom formatting and structure to your Web pages. You can apply the CSS transformations at design-time with SPD to see the changes. You may also want to include JavaScript functions, which you can also use in SharePoint designer. Javascript is a dynamic language that runs on the client side. What that means is that when the client loads the browser and subsequently the page, it runs the script that you ve embedded to the page. When using JavaScript code on Web pages, it s recommended using the ClientScriptManager to ensure that the script gets added to the page only one time. For example, the following code snippet shows a simple method that ensures only one instance of each script added to a page: 1: public static void RegisterScript(ref ClientScriptManager csm,string key, string url) 2: { 3: if (!csm.isclientscriptblockregistered(key)) 4: csm.registerclientscriptinclude(key, url); 5: } Design application customization strategy Supportable customizations allowed through SharePoint UI One of the powerful customizations that are made through SharePoint UI is the Navigation. When sites or lists are created, SharePoint gives options to include them on the Quick launch or Top link bar navigations. You can chose one or another and then at a later time change your decisions through the Site Actions menu. When the Publishing feature is turned on, there is no Quick launch or Top link bar, but only Navigation. You can also customize SharePoint forms (edit, new and display) by using InfoPath. This resource is only available for SPS 2010 Enterprise users, but it s so useful, including the change to change the user experience from default forms to customized forms without having to code

22 any.net language code or having to worry about deploys. InfoPath forms can be published once the site collection feature of the Enterprise version is turned on. Themes are another way of customizing the look and feel of your SharePoint site. For example, it defines the color scheme, fonts, styles and so on. In this way, it s similar to a Windows theme. To alter a SharePoint site theme, choose Site Actions > Site Settings and then choose Site Theme from the Look and Feel section of the Site Settings Page. SharePoint Designer 2010 SharePoint Designer 2010 is a free client application that provides added customization options for SP If you want to do a lot of SharePoint development, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 would be the tool of choice, but if you need to create custom master pages, add custom lists, or create powerful new views or custom formatting, then SPD 2010 is the right choice. With SPD you can also create Page layouts, Workflows, custom forms, manage Web pages, work with CSS and JavaScript, you can even code inline using.net scripts. Site columns Site columns are a way to provide a central, reusable model for column definition. When you add that column to a list, it will always have the same definition, and you won t have to do the tedious work of reproducing the column in each list for example. They help you to ensure consistency of metadata across sites and lists. Additionally, site columns provide you with the simplicity of a single maintenance point. Much like content types, you define site columns at the site collection level, independent of any list or content type. When you add a site column to a list, SharePoint will automatically copy that site column locally onto the list as a list column. You can then make changes to that column, which will only be applied on that list. Design navigation strategy Navigation items With only SPS 2010, it s possible to control navigation through a menu link on the Site Settings page, called Navigation. It allows you to manage some options,for example: Global Navigation: Either inherit from the parent s site or list the subsites under the current site is the main role of this option. You can also select apart from each other if pages and subsites should be visible on the menu. Selecting the maximum number of links (pages and subsites) can be configured.

23 Current Navigation: Now you are going to play with the Quick Launch menu bar, choosing either to inherit the listed items from the parent site, or list the current site s siblings, or list the items in the current site. Following the same Global Navigation rules, you can control if pages and subsites should be visible on the menu / set the maximum number of links. Customizing: If you chose not to inherit the navigation bar from the parent site, you can add/edit/delete links and headers from the navigation bar and from the quick launch. You can also select if you want the Show / Hided Ribbon being shown on the Site Actions menu. Site map provider, consume or create? There are some ASP.NET controls like the Menu, TreeView and SiteMapPath controls that take as the data source a provider so they can let the user navigate on a links structure. Usually, there controls use the XmlSiteMapProvider to read site map information from a.sitemap XML file. In.NET projects, if you require a site map data source other than the default, you are free to implement your own site map provider. This can be done inheriting from the abstract class System.Web.SiteMapProvider class and implementing the methods GetRootNodeCore, GetParentNode, GetChildNodes and finally FindSiteMapNode. Of course, for complex Web site s structures, this is no easy task, but it can be done for sure. Now, particularly to SharePoint, there exists some special site map providers, called navigation providers, which are actually declared on the web.config file of each Web Application. SPF ones are: SPNavigationProvider: it s used when the Publishing feature is not turned on, specially by the top link bar and quick launch menus SPSiteMapProvider: it s used to the default breadcrumb navigation. It relays first on the SPSite and then on the SPWebs. SPContentMapProvider: this is also used on the breadcrumb navigation, clicking on the folder icon. It has some links for the content information of the current page, like lists, folders and list forms. SPXmlContentMapProvider: this provider is used for breadcrumb navigation within application pages Now SPS only: AdministrationQuickLaunchProvider CombinedNavSiteMapProvider CurrentNavigation CurrentNavSiteMapProvider CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode

24 ExtandedSearchXmlContentProvider GlobalNavigation GlobalNavSiteMapProvider MySiteMapProvider SharedServicesQuickLaunchProvider SiteDirectoryCategoryProvider UsagePagesSiteMapProvider Navigation control, consume or create? There are some reasons to create Navigation controls, for example when developing Internet facing sites that have a business core and the menu got to reflect those aspects even though the site s structure isn t really based on it. On Intranet/Extranet sites, the most common option is to create some of those links web parts that come OOTB and let the users be guided by them, if the default navigation controls don t succeed on that. Managing Application Development Design for localization and globalization Resource files For web content on Intranet and public Internet sites, it is sometimes very important that the content be localized, depending on the person looking at the web page; you can expect that someone from Germany will only read German, whereas a Brazilian will read only Portuguese. There is an OOTB localization method on SharePoint, right inside the Welcome.ascx control that shows the username logged on. If you have language packs installed on your WFE server and you enabled those languages on your web site, you ll have the choice of selecting the site s language, and what this really does is to change the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture property s value. Expect having for example the value 1033 for en-us, or 1046 for pt-br. Now that you know what happens in SharePoint, you can shape your content to have the correct values according to the language set. In the case of SharePoint features, you are free to build resource files (.resx) and to add them either on the assembly or on the 14 directory. You can implement this localization concept everywhere on your features, including on their description, title, and the controls in your Web Part (labels, etc). Variations