SharePoint 2010 Development & Scripting

SharePoint is one of Microsoft's most used server applications. It is used in

Intranets, Extranets and business decision areas and even as a content

management system for many public websites.

SharePoint was available in

different versions — Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, Microsoft Office

SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Standard Edition and MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition.

With the new Office 2010 coming up, SharePoint too gets a new version. WSS

has now been renamed to SharePoint Foundation Services and MOSS remains the

same. There are a huge number of changes in this new version of SharePoint — for

admins, developers and users. We will delve into the changes for developers in

this series. You will need the SharePoint Beta or RC for the code in this

series. These are available for free download from Microsoft's site.

SharePoint for Developers



One of the pain points of earlier SharePoint development was that you needed

to use Windows Server on each developer's machine to install SharePoint and the

developer tools. One of the coolest new changes for developers in SharePoint

2010 is that these can be now installed on client operating systems such as

Windows Vista and Windows 7. Of course, you cannot run a production site off

these client OSs, but it can really help the developers.

The main development tools for SharePoint 2010 will be Visual Studio 2010 and

SharePoint Designer 2010. Both come with pre-built templates and connections to

SharePoint services that help you build a solution very quickly. We will look

into using these for various tasks throughout this series.

Out of the Box Capabilities



SharePoint 2010 defines the OOB capabilities in the form of the pie displayed.

Sites: allow users to store and retrieve lists and documents along

with tight integration with Office client applications (Word, Excel, etc.).

Communities: allows users to interact with other users by using

features such as search, tagging,  and rating.

Content: managing content on a page, list, records or more.

Search: search content both stored with SharePoint itself or anywhere

else such as enterprise data stores or databases

Insights: ability to digest data in a meaningful form such as

dashboards or KPIs

Composites: extend solutions by business users for their own needs

The SharePoint ecosystem and capabilities matrix.

Each of these can be leveraged by a developer and extended, customized and

solutions created out of them.

Other New Developer Enhancements



SharePoint 2010 has a huge number of other enhancements especially for
developers. The SharePoint SDK has a number of new objects and methods that can

help developers to write code better. SharePoint is based on the .NET Framework

3.5 and not 4.0 and is a 64-bit application.

The UI of SharePoint now contains the ubiquitous Ribbon which is Web based

but works in exactly the same way as in the client applications like Word and

Excel. Developers can extend this ribbon very easily as well.

SharePoint home page after installation.

SharePoint is much more AJAX friendly too now. Most actions result in a

dialog box that refreshes data on the parent without refreshing the entire page

— only the data that changed. This makes for smaller postbacks and faster

rendering. Many dialogs now also support SilverLight based controls making for a

much richer experience than what was available earlier.

Workflows can now be attached to a site rather than a particular list. This

makes for creating reusable workflows much easier and development of these are

very easy. LINQ to SharePoint is another new feature that allows developers to

query lists without resorting to CAML. Developers can use the much more

developer oriented language to query data from within SharePoint.

PowerShell



SharePoint 2010 is also very scriptable using the PowerShell architecture.
Powershell is a great combination of the Windows Command Prompt, UNIX Bash and

an object oriented shell. SharePoint 2010 comes with a built in snap in that

provides access to many of its functions through PowerShell. Let's take a look

at some simple scripting commands that you can perform with SharePoint 2010 on

PowerShell.

Start up PowerShell v2 on a machine that has SharePoint

2010 installed. To use the SharePoint features you need to load the PowerShell

snap-in using this command:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell

Selecting a WebPart adds new contextual tabs to the Ribbon.

To see all the different things that you can do with

Powershell on SharePoint, run the command:

Get-Command -PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

This will show you the whole list of commands you can use

with SharePoint. For instance you can create a new sub web site using the

following command:

New-SPWeb -URL “http://server/Demo01” -Template “STS#0”

-Name “Demo 01” —AddToTopNav —UseParentTopNav

This will create a new site called “Demo 01” on the

SharePoint server and use the STS#0 (Team Web) template. If you wish to delete

the site you can do this:

Remove-SPWeb -Identity “http://server/Demo01” —Confirm:$false

Working with the Object Model



Let's create a simple little project that works with the object model of

SharePoint 2010 in this first part of the series. To do this, open up Visual

Studio 2010 and create a new console application. Make sure it's selected as

.NET Framework 3.5. The first thing to do is to go the properties of the project

and set its build target platform to x64.

A new Task list created and populated through the code.

Once this is done, add a new reference to the

Microsoft.SharePoint and System.Web namespaces. Add a using statement to

reference these on top of the code like this Add the following code to the

application.

static void Main(string<> args)



{


string targetSite = "
http://Win08R2/";



string targetWeb = "Demo01";


using (SPSite siteCollection = new SPSite(targetSite))


{


using (SPWeb site = siteCollection.AllWebs)


{


Console.WriteLine("Creating a new list: My Demo Tasks");


string ListTitle = "My Demo Tasks";


string ListDesc = "Demo Task List created using SP Object Model";


CreateList(site, ListTitle, ListDesc);


Console.WriteLine("Complete");


}


}


}


private static void CreateList(SPWeb site,string ListTitle,string ListDesc)


{


Guid ListID = site.Lists.Add(ListTitle, ListDesc, SPListTemplateType.Tasks);


SPList myTasks = site.Lists;


myTasks.OnQuickLaunch = true;


myTasks.Update();


SPListItem newTask = myTasks.Items.Add();


newTask<"Title"> = "New Task";


newTask<"Assigned To"> = site.CurrentUser;


newTask<"Due Date"> = DateTime.Today;


newTask.Update();


}

This code basically goes ahead and connects to a SharePoint

site and within the web goes and creates a new Task list with a single item

within it. As you can see, the code is fairly simple and self-explanatory.

We've looked at some of the different things that are new

in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. We will delve deeper into many of them

as we go further in this series, so keep an eye on this space.