Unfortunately this cannot be done within the Module.xml

So I created a method which automatically connects the consumer WebParts to their correct provider WebParts.

To do this I basically used the SPLimitedWebPartManager, ProviderConnectionPoint, ConsumerConnectionPoint and some other nice classes.

The method (warning long block of code)

/// <summary>
/// Connects the web parts on page.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="web">The web.</param>
/// <param name="pageUrl">The page URL.</param>
/// <param name="publish">if set to <c>true</c> [publish].</param>
public static void ConnectWebPartsOnPage(SPWeb web, string pageUrl, bool publish)
{
	// get the page from the url
	SPFile page = web.GetFile(pageUrl);

	// make sure the page exists
	if (page.Exists)
	{
		// if the page is checked out, check it in because then the user can do an rollback
		if (page.Level == SPFileLevel.Checkout)
		{
			page.CheckIn("Page was checked out, needs to be checked in before connecting webparts", SPCheckinType.MinorCheckIn);
		}

		// check out the page because we are going to do changes on it
		page.CheckOut();

		// get the webpartmanager for the page
		using (Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPLimitedWebPartManager mgr = page.GetLimitedWebPartManager(PersonalizationScope.Shared))
		{
			try
			{
				// try to connect the webparts on the page
				if (ConnectWebParts(mgr))
				{
					string checkinComment = "Auto connected WebParts on page";

					// webparts are connected so update the page and check it in
					page.Update();
					page.CheckIn(checkinComment);

					if (publish)
					{
						page.Publish(checkinComment);
						page.Approve(checkinComment);
					}
				}
			}
			catch (Exception ex)
			{
				page.UndoCheckOut();
				throw ex;
			}
		}
	}
}

/// <summary>
/// Checks if a WebPart connection exists.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="connections">The connections.</param>
/// <param name="provider">The provider.</param>
/// <param name="consumer">The consumer.</param>
/// <returns></returns>
private static bool WebPartConnectionExist(Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPWebPartConnectionCollection connections,
	System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart provider, System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart consumer)
{
	foreach (Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPWebPartConnection conn in connections)
	{
		if (conn.Provider == provider && conn.Consumer == consumer)
		{
			return true;
		}
	}

	return false;
}

/// <summary>
/// Connects the web parts.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="manager">The manager.</param>
/// <returns></returns>
private static bool ConnectWebParts(Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPLimitedWebPartManager manager)
{
	bool connectionMade = false;

	// get the webparts on the page
	Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPLimitedWebPartCollection webparts = manager.WebParts;

	// only continu if there are any webparts
	if (webparts.Count > 0)
	{
		ProviderConnectionPointCollection provColl;
		ConsumerConnectionPointCollection consColl;
		// walk through all the webparts on the page to find provider webparts
		foreach (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart providerPart in webparts)
		{

			// check if the webpart is a Provider webpart
			provColl = manager.GetProviderConnectionPoints(providerPart);
			if (provColl != null && provColl.Default != null)
			{

				// walk through all the webparts on the page again now to find the consumer webparts
				foreach (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart consumerPart in webparts)
				{

					// first make sure the webpart isn't the provider webpart
					if (consumerPart != providerPart)
					{
						// check if the webpart is a Consumer webpart,
						// then make sure the consumer webpart isn't already connected to the provider webpart
						// then check if the interface of the consumer webpart is assignable from the interface of the provider webpart
						consColl = manager.GetConsumerConnectionPoints(consumerPart);
						if (consColl != null && consColl.Default != null
							&& !WebPartConnectionExist(manager.SPWebPartConnections, providerPart, consumerPart)
							&& consColl.Default.InterfaceType.IsAssignableFrom(provColl.Default.InterfaceType))
						{
							// connect the webparts
							manager.SPConnectWebParts(providerPart, provColl.Default, consumerPart, consColl.Default);
							connectionMade = true;
						}
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}
	return connectionMade;
}

Sample usage (console application)

try
{
	using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://localhost"))
	using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
	{
		ConnectWebPartsOnPage(web, "pages/default.aspx", false);
	}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
	Console.WriteLine();
	Console.WriteLine("Message:\n{0}\n\nStack:\n{1}\n\n", ex.Message, ex.StackTrace);
}

NEN 2082 is a Dutch standard which is similar the DoD5015 and MoReq standards.

This project was done for the Gemeente Nieuwegein, which is a Dutch local Government.

Gemeente Nieuwegein

For this project we have also been nominated for the “Innovation of the year” award:

LRG Innovator Nomination 2010

More information (Dutch)

My colleagues at QNH:

• Jeroer Derde – http://derde.net/blog
• Alexander Ketelaar – http://sharepoint2010.nl
• Robert Sep

The problem occurs when trying to create a new Document Library in the site based on the custom Site Definition.

Error while trying to add a new Document Library

Error message:

Error

An error occurred while getting items from the "" provider:
Cannot complete this action.

Please try again.

Read on to see the solution for this error.

Visual Studio 2010 now has native integration of SharePoint 2010 projects.

New Site Definition in Visual Studio 2010

After creating the new Site Definition Project in the onet.xml file contains the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project Title="SampleSiteDefinition" Revision="2" ListDir="" xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <NavBars>
  </NavBars>
  <Configurations>
    <Configuration ID="0" Name="SampleSiteDefinition">
      <Lists/>
      <SiteFeatures>
      </SiteFeatures>
      <WebFeatures>
      </WebFeatures>
      <Modules>
        <Module Name="DefaultBlank" />
      </Modules>
    </Configuration>
  </Configurations>
  <Modules>
    <Module Name="DefaultBlank" Url="" Path="">
      <File Url="default.aspx">
      </File>
    </Module>
  </Modules>
</Project>

Now you can modify to the onet.xml and default.aspx as you like.

When deploying the new Site Definition, creating a site, and then trying to create a new Document Library you get the error above.  The solution for the error turned out to be the missing declaration of the <DocumentTemplates> XML node.

Correct default onet.xml should be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project Title="SampleSiteDefinition" Revision="2" ListDir="" xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <NavBars>
  </NavBars>
  <DocumentTemplates>
  </DocumentTemplates>
  <Configurations>
      <Lists/>
      <SiteFeatures>
      </SiteFeatures>
      <WebFeatures>
      </WebFeatures>
      <Modules>
        <Module Name="DefaultBlank" />
      </Modules>
    </Configuration>
  </Configurations>
  <Modules>
    <Module Name="DefaultBlank" Url="" Path="">
      <File Url="default.aspx">
      </File>
    </Module>
  </Modules>
</Project>

After re-deploying the Site Definition and creating a new Site, you are able to create a Document Library.

Working new Document Library

Reference:

Microsoft’s Reference for SharePoint 2010 onet.xml

I needed default SharePoint feature guids for the development of a custom Site Definition. Using a custom Site Definition you can automatically activate SharePoint features within the onet.xml file.

Here we go:

1. Open the SharePoint site in IE8 (or IE7).
2. Go to the Site Settings page.
   
3. Click on the Manage Site features (or Site Collection features)
   
4. Use the Developer Tools (shortcut F12)
5. Click in the toolbar on Find –> Select Element by Click (shortcut CTRL+B, but this opens bookmarks manager on my machine)
   
6. Select the Activate (or Deactivate) button next to the feature you need the GUID from.
   
7. Developer Tools scrolls down to the HTML source for the specific button, the button tag is contained within a Div tag. This Div tag contains an ID attribute and thats the GUID for the feature!
   
8. In this case the GUID is: 9c03e124-eef7-4dc6-b5eb-86ccd207cb87
   

This trick also works for SharePoint 2007!

Looking for help in hosting

If you have a server that hosts PHP and you want to support the Scraper service please contact me (info at thumnet dot com).

Service currently down, due to too many request to IMDb, working on a fix!

• Added Picture in imdb-name request
• Added result count limitation param (see the guide)
• Some small bugfixes:
  • missing tt and nm prefix in ImdbID property in imdb-name-search request,
  • missing ImdbID for Writers and Directors in imdb-title request,
  • changed Season and Episode in imdb-episode request to SeasonNR and EpisodeNR
  • added result type to the summary element, to identify the result data

Update 2009-12-02

• Added Name search functionality, with imdb-name-search url param (imdb-search is now imdb-title-search)
• Added Name details, with imdb-name url param

Update 2009-12-01

• Fixed the Plot and Tagline for imdb title’s, see comments below.

It’s been some time since my post about the IMDB webservice but I’m proud to tell you readers there is a new version available.

Some important changes include:

• Restructured output (sorry to you guys who have to update their software)
• Output available in XML, JSON and debug (other output formats can be added on request)
• Automatic support for gzipping the output
• Summary information, containing:
  • data source
  • timestamp of the data
  • time taken in ms
  • scraper info
  • error code (0 for no error!) and error description
• Easily extendable scrape framework, so in the future more sites can be scraped!
• Admin interface to review the data you guys produce

Still interested or just curious?

Well the new url is: http://scraper.thumnet.com

The old version (imdb.thumnet.com) will only be available until 1 december 2009.

airTranslate features:

• Multi platform
• Auto detection of input language
• Drag and drop input text (with auto translation)
• Dock to tray icon (Windows only)
• Translate from clipboard (with auto translation)
• Auto store last chosen translation language
• Update notification

airTranslate is available at Google code: http://code.google.com/p/thumnet/downloads/list

The project is open source, and sources are available at http://code.google.com/p/thumnet/source/browse/#svn/trunk/Air. It is possible to request new functions and report issues through the Google code website.

To run Adobe AIR programs you need to download and install the Adobe AIR runtime

Well about 2 months ago I send the creator of the Pixeled theme an email requesting him to read my blogpost about the changes I had made to his theme.
But since then I haven’t heard anything from him, so I decided to release the pixeled-multicolor theme myself.

Some screenshots:

Download Pixeled-Multicolor (release 20090701)

First off let me start with a quick summary of main new feauture for the different versions of the C# that are released.

• C# 1.0, Managed code
• C# 2.0, Generics
• C# 3.0, Language Integrated Query, short LINQ
• C# 4.0, Dynamic programming

Some off the innovation for C# 4.0 are:

Dynamic Language Runtime
The new version of C# has a new type of object declaration, called dynamic. This looks a bit the var keyword. With the var keyword the compiler replaced the var with the object type on compile time, intellisense and code completion still was available in Visual Studio. With the new dynamic keyword the compiler doesn’t replace this and even more important the compiler can’t check for syntax error on a dynamic object. Intellisense and code complition are also not available for objects defined with dynamic.

Dynamic objects are losely typed instead of strongly.

After reading this you might think whats the use of this new DLR, in the following sample I’ll try to explain this. We have a simple C# class called Calculator, and use it like below.

Calculator calc = GetCalculator();
int sum = calc.Add(10, 20);

Now suppose the calculator class is not strongly typed, the code would like something like the following

object calc = GetCalculator();
Type calcType = calc.GetType();
object res = calcType.InvokeMember("Add", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, new object[] { 10, 20 });
int sum = Convert.ToInt32(res);

With the new dynamic keyword in C# 4.0 it would simply be

dynamic calc = GetCalculator();
int sum = calc.Add(10, 20);

Optional Named Parameters
To show you the what this means take a look at the examples below.

In previous version of C# method overloads would be used.

public void Add(string lineOfText);
public void Add(string lineOfText, bool isError);
public void Add(string lineOfText, int repeat);
public void Add(string lineOfText, int repeat, bool isError);

With the new C# 4.0, the method declaration would like this

public void Add(string lineOfText, int repeat = 1, bool isError = false);

As you can see in the sample above, it’s now possible to specify default values for a method parameter. Some samples of how to use the Add method are:

Add("This is the line", repeat : 5);
Add(isError : true, lineOfText : "Another line of text");

For people using JavaScript this might look very familiar.

Another cewl new thing I saw at the demo, was the ability to interpret and compile a string of C# code at runtime. This functionality offers some great new possibilities. Again for the Javascript people reading this it’s like the eval function.

Dataservices is an implementation of WCF but has some restrictions to it.

• Dataservices makes use of the ATOM or the JSON format to transport the data, no other format is supported.
• The data is transported over the HTTP or HTTPS protocol and no other protocol is supported.
• Agarding to authentication you can´t use of the WCF authentication model. You are restricted to the standard authentication model ASP.NET offers you, Windows Authentication and Forms authentication.
• Dataservices has a REST based interface implementation, witch means a request to the service can only be done using REST.

Getting started with Dataservices.

To get started with Dataservices you first need to define a datasource. This datasource needs to implement IQueryable<T> for the Dataservices to use it. Two commonly used framework that implement this interface are LINQ2SQL and the Entity Framework. For use with Dataservices it’s prefered to use the EntityFramework. The  IQueryable<T>makes it possible for Dataservices to query the data but to be able to update insert and delete data the datasource also has to implement the IUpdateAble<T> interface, wich is implemented by the Entity Framework and not by LINQ2SQL.

Now the datasource is created the Dataservice has to be created. There is a new template for adding the dataservice in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

New Ado Service

After this has been added the dataservice needs to be pointed to the datasource, below is a sample of that where a NorthwindDataService  is Created which is pointed to a NorthwindDataContext. In the example the security is also set to read for all entities in the InitializeService method. The security can be set per entity and per method.

public class NorthwindDataService : WebDataService<NorthwindDataContext> {
InitializeService(IWebDataServiceConfiguration config)
{
config.SetResourceContainerAccessRule
("*", ResourceContainerRights.AllRead);
}
}

Dataservices is queried by REST, this can be tested in a browser by calling the service. In the examples below it’s shown how to query the service. For this example the url of the service is ‘http://localhost:5555/Bookmarks.svc’.

The url below request for the model of the data.

‘http://localhost:5555/Bookmarks.svc$metadata’

Metadata

To request a list of all the bookmarks put the url below in the browser. Here the ‘/Bookmarks‘ refers to the entityset Bookmarks.

‘http://localhost:5555/Bookmarks.svc/Bookmarks’

As is shown in the metadata the key of Bookmark is the Id property. Every entity needs a key property. To get just 1 bookmark with id 1 the following url can be used:
‘http://localhost:5555/Bookmarks.svc/Bookmarks(1)’

It’s also possible to get a list of entities based upon a filter. For example get all bookmarks with Tags Devdays. This is done by using keywords, which always begin with a ´$´, in the querystring.

‘http://localhost:5555/Bookmarks.svc/Bookmarks?$filter=Tags eq Devdays’

For Silverlight applications it’s possible to query dataservices using LINQ2Dataservices so you don’t have to create these url’s yourself buth you can just use LINQ to create queries.

Much more information about ADO.NET Dataservices can be found on MSDN.

A major disadvantage of RIA, Rich Internet Application, is that the state is of an application can not be recovered after the browser has been closed.

In Silverlight 3 there’s a solution for this problem. In SL3 you are now able to create a SL page. This in combination with the Frame and navigation Source make it possible to navigate through the same application based on the url.

The first part of the url is the path to the page on which the Silverlight page is located, for example http://localhost/SLapp.html.

After this the part of the url for the navigation within the application can be placed. This part must be preceded by a ‘#’, for example http://localhost/SLapp.html#SearchPage.xaml.

From webapplications we also now the querystring in the url for passing parameters to a site, this is also implemented in silverlight in the same way. The previously used url can then be formatted as followed http://localhost/SLapp.html#SearchPage.xaml?title=silverlight

More information about page navigation can be found at Mike Taulty’s blog.