SharePoint Development Improves in Visual Studio 2010

The focus of the tooling is to automate tedious tasks, enhance the debugging experience, and provide a GUI surface for visually exploring deployment and feature packaging. These tools will replace the much-derided SharePoint Designer.

VS 2010 Tools for SP Quick info:

Building and Debugging
Visual Studio will be able to building and debug SharePoint projects. "F5 Just Works!"

Server Explorer Integration
SharePoint Connections will be an option in the VS Server Explorer. Standard Sharepoint artifacts will be viewable: ContentTypes, Features, Templates, Lists, Sites, Workflows, Workspaces. Direct manipulation of some artifact attributes will be supported through VS property grid integration.

Windows SharePoint Services Project (WSP) Import
This will automate the manual task of creating Windows SharePoint Services solution package files. Previously, to create a solution package file, a developer had to use the Makecab.exe console application that is included in the Microsoft Cabinet Software Development Kit (SDK). Makecab.exe requires specifying the Diamond Directive File (.ddf) that contains a list of all the files to include in the package. Much of this will be automated.

Visual Web Part Designer
A new WSYWIG designer will exist for authoring Web Parts. The designer will also load a user control as a web part for SharePoint. This seems to be a more tightly integrated version of the widely used SmartPart, which is a Web Part that allows hosting of ASP.NET User Controls in SharePoint.

Event Receiver Wizard
Adding Event Receivers and connecting them to Sources can be done visually through a wizard.

Workflow Integration
A new ASPX Workflow Initiation form for Workflow Project will be added. Workflow initiation forms will have a visual designer.

Packaging Editor
A new Packaging Explorer will exist that supports editing Packaging and structuring the SharePoint Features and WSP file.

Programmatically retrieving Site Usage in MOSS 2007

Site Usage reports can be retrieved programmatically by using the GetUsageData method from the SPWeb class. This method would return a Data Table that contains information about the usage of the site based on the specified type of report, interval, number of columns and the last day to display. The GetUsageData method can be obtained from the Microsoft.SharePoint Namespace.

Alternatively site usage reports can also be viewed from the site settings menu. However this option is available when it is enabled from the Central Administration's Usage Analysis Logging. The log file is located by default in the 12 hive of SharePoint in the LOGS folder. However there is an option available in central administration to change the logging path.

Business Data Catalog Overview

The Business Data Catalog feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an easy way to integrate business data from back-end server applications, such as SAP or Siebel, with your corporate portal to provide rich solutions for end users without writing any code. You register business data exposed in databases or through Web services in the Business Data Catalog by creating metadata that describes the database or Web service. The Business Data Catalog then uses this metadata to make the right calls into the data source to retrieve the relevant data.

After you register a data source in the Business Data Catalog, the business data entities are available for use by any of the following business data features:

• Business Data Web Parts Generic Web Parts that display any entity from the Business Data Catalog, without deploying new code. The Web Parts provide customization, Web Part connections, and the standard Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services look-and-feel capabilities (paging, filtering, and style).

• Business Data in Lists New field type that allows you to add any entity defined in the Business Data Catalog to a SharePoint list or document library.

• Business Data Actions Business Data Actions bridge the gap between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and a native application user interface by providing a link back to the back-end data source. You can use Business Data Actions to build applications with write-back scenarios, such as a Customer Profile view that allows a user to update profile information directly in a back-end server application, such as SAP or Siebel. Actions are implemented as links, so you can also use actions to perform simple actions such as send an e-mail message or open a customer’s home page.

• Business Data Search Offers full-text search of the data sources registered in the Business Data Catalog. You can create new search result types based on the specific data entities registered in the Business Data Catalog.

• Business Data in User Profiles You can augment Office SharePoint Server 2007 user profiles from any external data source registered in the Business Data Catalog.

Excel Services - Architecture

Excel Services is built on the SharePoint products and technologies platform. There are three core components of Excel Services:

1. Excel Calculation Service
2. Excel Web Access
3. Excel Web Service

Here is what each of these components do.

• Excel Web Access – This is a web-part in SharePoint that performs the “rendering” (development team speak for “creating the HTML”) of Excel Workbooks on a web page. This is perhaps the most visible component for the end user. For those of you familiar with SharePoint, you can use it like any other web part in SharePoint to create a wide range of web pages.

• Excel Web Services – This component provides the programmatic access that I talked about yesterday. It is a web service hosted in SharePoint. You can use methods in this web service to develop applications that incorporate calculations done by Excel Services and to automate the update of Excel spreadsheets.

• Excel Calculation Service – This is the component that loads the spreadsheets, calculates them, refreshes external data, and maintains session state for interactivity. This is the heart of Excel Services.

Additionally, there is also a proxy that is used internally to handle the communication between the components on the web front end and the application server in multiple-server configurations. It also handles the load balancing in case there are multiple application servers in your installation.

These three components are divided in two major groups – those that live on a front-end server (which we refer to as a “web front end”), and those that live on a back-end application server. In the simplest of the configurations, all these components could be running on the same machine (we call this a “single box” installation). In a typical production environment with significant number of users, the components on the web front end and the application server would be on different machines. It is possible to scale (up or out) these components independently.

Security

Excel Services leverages the security infrastructure provided by SharePoint. Excel services uses SharePoint for authentication (who can log into the server) as well as authorization (who has access to which spreadsheet and the type of access; read, write, view only etc.). This provides a robust security environment for protecting your spreadsheets.

Performance and Scalability

Excel Services are optimized for scenarios in which multiple users access the same spreadsheets. We have done a lot of work to optimize for this scenario – for example, caching at multiple levels so that collective performance for a group of users is improved by caching spreadsheets as well as external data queried by the spreadsheets. All this is transparent to the end user except for the good response time. (Anticipating a question, we only share cached results between users that have the same rights.)

Excel Services can be scaled up by adding additional CPUs or memory to the server it runs on. It will take full advantage of multiple CPUs to handle multiple requests concurrently. It also supports 64bit CPUs. And it is possible to scale out the web front end and application server components independently, so you can adjust either based on server load and performance requirements. For example, if there is a bottleneck in rendering spreadsheets with Excel Web Access, then you can add more web front ends, and if there is a bottleneck is in calculations, then you can add more application servers to the farm. A lot will depend on the type, size of the workbooks and external data connections in the workbooks you are planning to use with Excel Services. For large deployments, some planning will need to go into the number of users as well as the anticipated workbook mix for the installation. The architecture is designed to meet the needs of a spectrum of deployments from a departmental to enterprise. The multi-tiered approach also allows for better security and isolation of services, for example in extranet scenarios.

Disable Right Click On SharePoint Site

Follow these steps to prevent users from right-clicking in your sharepoint site.

• Add a content editor web .
• Add the following piece of code in the source editor of the content editor web part.

<HTML>
<BODY OnContextMenu = "return false;">
No Right Click on this Page.
</BODY>
</HTML>

• Save the content editor web part.

Users are now prevented from the right click option on the page.

Reconnecting Content Databases in MOSS 2007

After the failover of a SharePoint Products and technologies database, it is required to reconnect the content databases. The following are the databases that are required to be reconnected,

• Content database
• Admin database
• Configuration Database
• Search Database
• Shared Services Provider

The following stsadm commands are used to reconnect to the content database after a failover, the deletecontentdb will remove the reference to the old database server and the addcontentdb will add the new database as the content database

stsadm –o deletecontentdb –url [Site] -databasename -databaseserver [Old Principal]

stsadm –o addcontentdb –url [Site] -databasename -databaseserver [Old Principal]

Reconnecting content databases can also be done using Central Administration,

1. Navigate to Central Administration.
2. Navigate to Application management page
3. Click on the Content Databases.
4. Select the content database that has failed-over.
5. In the Manage Content Databases page, choose the Remove content database option, and then click OK.
6. Select the Add a content database option, and enter the required details.
7. Replace the Database Server box with the new principal server, and then click OK.

Apply a Theme to all sub sites in SharePoint 2007

Apply a Theme to all sub sites:(works for MOSS 2007 only, not WSS 3.0)

• Change the top site to the theme of your choice using the normal method in Site Actions > Site Settings > Site Theme.

• Navigate to the top site to see the newly applied theme.

• View the HTML source of the SharePoint page using the theme you want.

• Look for a link tag containing the .css file for the applied theme. It will look something like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" id="onetidThemeCSS" href="/apps/afe/_themes/Belltown/Bell1011-65001.css?rev=12%2E0%2E0%2E4518"/>

• Copy the href value to your clipboard or to a text file if you like. It should look something like:/apps/afe/_themes/Belltown/Bell1011-65001.css

• On your top level site, go to the Site Actions > Site Settings > Master Page screen. Scroll to the bottom where the Alternate CSS URL section is. Select the "Specify a CSS file..." option.

• Paste the path copied from the href above into the text box.

• Check the Reset all sub-sites to inherit this alternate CSS URL option.

• Click OK.

• Navigate to your sub-sites and verify the theme has been applied.