ThumNet

Together with 3 colleagues from QNH Business Integration I am currently finishing implementing a already NEN 2082 certified project based on SharePoint 2010.
When SharePoint 2010 hits RTM there will be another audit for this version of SharePoint, because currently the pre release version has been certified.

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.

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

More information (Dutch)

My colleagues at QNH:

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

I encountered the following problem while creating a new custom Site Definition in Visual Studio 2010 beta 2.

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

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.

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.

Reference:

Microsoft’s Reference for SharePoint 2010 onet.xml

Have you ever been looking for a feature (GU)ID in SharePoint? Well here is an easy way to find them.

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!

This post is about the session called C# 4.0 / The Future of C# given by Krishnan Subramanian.

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.

ADO.NET Dataservices is a new way to open your data to the web. It’s especially usefull in combination with a Rich Internet Client Application, such as a silverlight application or an AJAX application.

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.

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’

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.