Professional SharePoint® 2010 Development

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Dyana Eckstein who was a loved sister, aunt, and friend. She will always be loved and remembered in our thoughts. We miss and love you.

I would like to dedicate this book to S. Khatoon. Thank you for being the love of my life, my best friend, and my family!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

TOM RIZZO is a senior director in the SharePoint team at Microsoft. This is Tom’s second stint with SharePoint having worked in the SharePoint and Exchange Server teams back in the SharePoint 2001 timeframe. Before working in SharePoint, Tom worked in the SQL Server team and also as a technical specialist in the Microsoft field organization, where he evaluated and deployed Microsoft technologies for the United States Department of Defense. You can reach Tom, who authored chapters 1 through 4, 7, 14, and Appendix A, at thomriz@microsoft.com.

REZA ALIREZAEI is an independent consultant and a five-time recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server & Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. He is focused on designing and implementing enterprise solutions for SharePoint, related .Net technologies, and Microsoft Business Intelligence stack. Reza can be reached at reza@devhorizon.com.

PAUL J. SWIDER is a freelance consultant and the Enterprise SharePoint Strategist for OnClick Solutions. In addition, he is President of the Charleston SharePoint Users Group and an accomplished entrepreneur. Paul has trained and consulted thousands of SharePoint administrators, developers, and architects. In addition, he writes and teaches about enterprise collaboration concepts with demonstrated knowledge you can only get in “the trenches.” His specialties include enterprise information architecture, SharePoint development patterns, and social media integration. When not working, Paul enjoys sailing and snowboarding. He wrote chapters 5 and 10.

SCOT HILLIER is an independent consultant and Microsoft SharePoint Most Valuable Professional focused on creating solutions for Information Workers with SharePoint, Office, and related .NET technologies. He is the author/coauthor of 12 books on Microsoft technologies including “Inside SharePoint 2010.” Scot splits his time between consulting on SharePoint projects and training for Critical Path Training (www.criticalpathtraining.com). Scot is a former U. S. Navy submarine officer and graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. Scot authored chapter 11 and can be reached at scot@shillier.com.

JEFF FRIED is a senior product manager at Microsoft, specializing in strategic applications of search technology. Jeff is a frequent speaker and writer in the industry, holds 15 patents, has authored more than 50 technical papers, and has led the creation of pioneering offerings in next generation search engines, networks, and contact centers. He wrote chapter 6.

KENNETH SCHAEFER is an independent developer and designer focusing on SharePoint and web-based solutions. Ken lives in the Chicago area with his daughter, Alexa. Ken, who authored chapter 8, can be reached at ken@kenschaefer.name.

ABOUT THE TECHNICAL EDITORS

MATT RANLETT, a SQL Server MVP, has been a fixture of the Atlanta .NET developer community for many years. A founding member of the Atlanta Dot Net Regular Guys (www.devcow.com), Matt has formed and leads several area user groups. Despite spending dozens of hours after work on local and national community activities such as the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! series (www.sharepoint123.com), organizing three Atlanta Code Camps, working on the INETA Board of Directors as the Vice President of Technology, and appearing in several Pod Casts such as .Net Rocks and the ASP.Net Pod Cast, Matt recently found the time to get married to a wonderful woman named Kim, who he helps to raise three monstrous dogs. Matt currently works as a Senior Consultant with Intellinet and is part of the team committed to helping people succeed by delivering innovative solutions that create business value.

KANWAL KHIPPLE is an independent consultant and Microsoft SharePoint MVP working with enterprise clients in America and Canada. Kanwal strives to build SharePoint solutions that make life easier for Information Workers. His passion lies with Information Architecture, Governance, Business Process Automation, and Branding. Kanwal is an integral part of the global SharePoint Community, contributing through his blog www.sharepointbuzz.com. He can be reached at kanwal@khipple.com.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Spencer Harbar and Robert Bogue who answered some of my technical questions during the process of writing my chapters. I also want to thank those at Microsoft who provided their kind support: Chris Keyser, Arpan Shah and Pej Javaheri. And, a special thanks goes to Vahid Haeri, a close friend who always made sure that I had access to my testing farms with the latest bits installed.

THIS BOOK IS FOR ANYONE INTERESTED in developing applications on top of SharePoint 2010. While some knowledge is assumed about SharePoint, readers will find the examples comprehensive and easy to follow if they have previous knowledge of web development and development tools.

SharePoint 2010 is a big product and this book is a big, diverse book. So, before you dive into the book, we wanted to give you a little feel for what each chapter entails and what you can expect once you have read the chapter.

The first couple of chapters provide an introduction to SharePoint 2010, since the 2010 release is a large release across all the many SharePoint workloads. In these chapters, you will develop an understanding of the features that 2010 provides, from creating collaboration sites to managing your content.

From there, you will explore the new developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint. With the 2010 release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has invested in making Visual Studio a first-class SharePoint development tool with new development, debugging, and testing tools targeted specifically at SharePoint 2010.

Finally, you will see the IT professional improvements for developers. These improvements make deploying and debugging with your IT counterparts faster and easier.

The next section of the book is about the base platform services and APIs provided by SharePoint. This is a big section since SharePoint is a big product with a lot of platform services. This section also serves as a basis for the rest of the book when it comes to the APIs and protocols that you will use to develop with SharePoint.

The majority of the book focuses on the workload services and platform provided by SharePoint. This includes social networking, content management, search, forms, and business intelligence. This section of the book is where you can learn to build applications that extend the built-in workloads of SharePoint and shape them to perform the functionality you need to solve your business problems.

The last section introduces you to moving your applications to Microsoft’s cloud services called Microsoft Online Services. Through these cloud services, specifically Microsoft SharePoint Online, you can start hosting and sharing your application in the cloud with either coworkers or business partners without having to run the IT infrastructure yourself.

This book is structured to build logically on the skills you learn as you progress through it. After the initial introduction and base platform chapters, the book moves into the more advanced part of the platform. Each chapter builds on knowledge acquired from earlier in the book, so you will want to read through the chapters in succession or at the very least read the introduction and platform chapters before reading later chapters in the book.

First, you will need a copy of SharePoint 2010. The book is written to the public beta of SharePoint 2010, so you will want to download the beta. We have done our best to also test against the released version of SharePoint, so please check the WROX site regularly to see if there are updated code samples available.

Besides SharePoint 2010, you will need Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010. The easiest way to get all these products is to download the pre-build virtual machine, which includes these products that Microsoft will release after the RTM of SharePoint 2010.

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what’s happening, we’ve used a number of conventions throughout the book.

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At http://p2p.wrox.com you will find a number of different forums that will help you not only as you read this book, but also as you develop your own applications. To join the forums, just follow these steps:

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Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 introduces a lot of new functionality that you need to understand in order to write better applications on the platform. Beyond increasing the new features in each of the SharePoint workloads, such as collaboration or portal, Microsoft has added entirely new products to the SharePoint family, including the acquired FAST technologies for Enterprise Search and the PerformancePoint services that enhance SharePoint’s business intelligence (BI) capabilities. With these new additions, the surface area of SharePoint has doubled, so this chapter will quickly introduce the new set of features in both SharePoint and the Office client.

SharePoint, as a development platform, has matured over time from server APIs to web services to now supporting the latest developer technologies, such as Silverlight, LINQ, and REST APIs. Developers who build on the SharePoint platform will find some very welcome additions to the platform, which users have been requesting for a number of years, such as the ability to develop and test on client operating systems, including Windows Vista and Windows 7. You no longer need to do remote development or run a virtual server OS on your client machine to develop on SharePoint. Let’s look at the top new enhancements in the platform that you can build against.

In the 2008 release of Visual Studio and .NET 3.5, Microsoft introduced new technology and semantics that allow developers to write against objects that map back to a number of different datasources, even if those datasources do not store the data using object storage. Effectively, LINQ is an object mapper with special operators in the .NET languages. Therefore, you can take a relational database table, use Visual Studio to map the database to your objects, and then write to your objects. For LINQ to work, you need a provider that takes the object calls and translates them into the correct native calls of the underlying datasource, such as SQL queries for databases. With SharePoint 2010, a new LINQ provider for SharePoint converts object operations into the correct SharePoint operations using the native CAML language that SharePoint understands.

Lists are a critical part of the SharePoint platform. In fact, everything in SharePoint is powered by lists, whether it’s a built-in application or your own custom application. With the 2010 release, lists have new, long-awaited functionality, including new scale limits, XSLT views for better customization, list relationships that allow cascade deletes and updates to work, and formula validation for columns in a list. There is also a new list type called the External Data List. This type of list allows you to surface external data, such as database or web service data, inside SharePoint with read/write capabilities. You’ll learn more about this new type of list later in the book.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the new name for the Business Data Catalog technologies from SharePoint 2007. BCS is greatly enhanced in the 2010 release with read/write capabilities, support for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and new client capabilities so that you have APIs both on the server and client, and can sync Line-of-Business (LOB) data from your backend systems to the client cache and work on that LOB data when offline. BCS will synchronize the data from the client with the server when you can reconnect. As part of the tooling, SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio include entity-modeling tools for BCS so that you can create business objects that connect to your LOB datasources from within these tools, and write your business logic for reading and writing your LOB data.

If you are using SharePoint 2007, one of the biggest challenges is trying to get Silverlight to work in a SharePoint environment. You have to modify your web.config, hack around to deploy your Silverlight application to a content viewer web part, and then hope you don’t need to debug the application. Silverlight shipped after SharePoint 2007, which made it difficult for the SharePoint team to foresee the requirements of being a great Silverlight host. With the 2010 release, SharePoint has become that great Silverlight host. Built into SharePoint is a Silverlight web part; you can drag and drop this web part onto your page, point it to your Silverlight application, and start using the Silverlight application in your SharePoint environment in minutes.

Frequently, developers want to write applications that need to talk to SharePoint from a client operating system and from client applications, such as the ones in the Office suite. With the addition of Silverlight integration to SharePoint, a client object model is critical because it makes it easier for developers to write applications against a full object model, rather than trying to call web services from within their client applications. Additionally, because Silverlight runs on the client rather than running server-side, the client Object Model (OM) makes it easier for developers to build rich Silverlight applications on SharePoint. SharePoint 2007 requires you to write against untyped web services for remoting your applications. The client object model provides a more productive development experience since it provides a typesafe environment that works with the Intellisense in Visual Studio.

There are a number of new protocols and standards that SharePoint 2010 implements across its workloads. Some are considered “Web 2.0” protocols, such as Representational State Transfer (REST), Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (AJAX), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and ATOMSub/Pub, while others are going through standards validation, such as the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). SharePoint still continues to support other standards such as WebDAV and web services. Adding these newer protocols and standards allows SharePoint to interoperate with other systems more easily, whether it is to create mash-ups between systems hosted in SharePoint or to allow data interoperability between systems.

One of the biggest downsides to developing custom solutions in SharePoint 2007 is the requirement for the solution developer to be an administrator on the server. Often, IT administrators will not allow developers to access the server with the elevated privileges they need to deploy their solution, as custom web parts or other SharePoint solutions require that you place your code in the global assembly cache (GAC) or in the file system related to your SharePoint site. Plus, the administrator has no simple way to ensure that badly written code does not slow down the system, crash it, or perform malicious activities. You could implement code access security (CAS), but that requires the developer to write the code to implement it; in addition, managing CAS policies is not a simple task.

However, with SharePoint 2010, there is a new feature called Sandbox Solutions that allows for the deployment of SharePoint solutions inside a secure environment hosted in SharePoint. Because it is a secure environment, the IT administrator can control who can deploy solutions and how many resources these solutions receive through the new resource governors built into the system. For example, if a custom-developed solution is using too many CPU resources, SharePoint will automatically stop running the solution. That said, today the Sandbox Solution offers only a subset of the SharePoint object model, so while it might be a good solution for some custom applications, you will have to evaluate if there is enough functionality to meet your application needs.

Besides making SharePoint Designer (SPD) free, Microsoft has invested in making SharePoint Designer better in the 2010 release. SPD has been redesigned to have more of a SharePoint-based view than the folder-based view it previously had. Now, you can browse by the types of items you are looking for rather than just through the site hierarchy. In addition, SPD introduces a new entity modeler to make it easier for you to build BCS connections to your backend systems and model the backend data inside of the SharePoint entity system. Finally, SPD has enhanced the workflow design capabilities that import Visio diagrams into SPD and allow you to add business logic to those diagrams using the SPD Workflow Designer, and then display the graphical status of your workflow overlaid on those diagrams as part of your workflow.

Two new web companions are available in SharePoint 2010, Visio Services and Access Services, in addition to the previous web companions — Excel Services and InfoPath Form Services. With Visio Services, you can design your Visio diagrams, connect those diagrams to backend systems for visualization of data, and then post those diagrams to SharePoint. SharePoint will render your diagram, with the data connectivity, through the SharePoint web experience.

With Access Services, you can convert your Access applications to web-based applications. With the previous version of Access, Access 2007, you could take certain Access databases that were compatible with SharePoint’s logical data model and export that data to SharePoint but still manipulate it from within Access. With the new capabilities that Access Services provides, you can take your Access forms and move them over to web-based forms to complete the transformation of your application.

InfoPath Form Services has a number of new enhancements, including the ability to replace list item forms for activities such as editing properties on an item. This makes it easier to build richer forms with business logic and data connectivity that work in the rich client through the new SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove), which is covered later in this chapter, and in the browser. In addition, InfoPath Forms Services adds new mobile form capabilities that let you create forms that run across mobile devices, browsers, and Office clients.

With Visual Studio (VS) 2010, there is a major jump ahead for SharePoint developers. Previously, VS did not have much SharePoint development functionality and you had to download the community-supported Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. With VS 2010, you can browse your SharePoint environment from the Server Explorer to quickly see your lists, libraries, content types, workflows, and other SharePoint artifacts. A visual Web Part Designer frees you from having to hand code HTML to add visual elements to your web parts. An entity modeling tool works with the BCS technologies that were discussed earlier so that you can model your business entities, write your business logic, and connect SharePoint to your backend systems. Finally, VS integrates SharePoint development into a team development environment with support for Team Foundation Server and easy deployment using the new Web Solution Package format, which is discussed next.

To make it easier to package and deploy solutions, SharePoint 2010 improves the Web Solution Package (WSP) format so that it is supported across all tools, allowing you to export your site through the browser, SharePoint Designer, and Visual Studio. This means that you can quickly upgrade or downgrade your solutions between the tools, depending on the person working on the solution or the tool required to build the solution. In addition, SharePoint Online, the Microsoft-hosted version of SharePoint, supports this format so that you can move solutions from on-premises to the cloud without having to change formats or rework the package.

One of most common culprits of poorly performing SharePoint sites is poorly performing code, whether the problem is bad .NET code, bad database calls the .NET code makes, or coding errors that cause excessive CPU, disk, or memory utilization. Tracking down and figuring out where the issues are in the code was a laborious process in the 2007 release. SharePoint 2010 introduces a new developer dashboard that allows you to see all the calls made on a page right inside of the user interface. Those calls can be ones that SharePoint is making or they can be your custom code. By looking at the call stack, response times, and utilization, you can quickly uncover where your code is performing poorly and try to fix it.

Collaboration and social computing are two of the fastest changing technologies in the industry. Looking back just a few years, you’ll note a number of technologies in this space did not exist, such as social tagging, microblogging, and the APIs that support these technologies. SharePoint 2010 adds new capabilities in these areas, but this space is not done innovating, so at some point you may have to build your own social capabilities on top of SharePoint 2010 to take advantage of future technology advances in this area.

SharePoint 2007 introduced blog and wiki capabilities to the SharePoint product. The most interesting piece of the blog and wiki capability was the integration with the rest of the SharePoint functionality for versioning and content approval. Unfortunately, blogs and wikis were a late addition to the 2007 product, so not all of the desired functionality made it into the final release. In the 2010 product, blogs and wikis are enhanced to add new capabilities to the core blog and wiki functionality. Also, these applications can take better advantage of new 2010 capabilities, such as content rating, tagging, and feeds. In addition, records management can now be applied to blogs and wikis just like any other content in SharePoint so that you can have compliance and governance on your blog and wiki content. Finally, SharePoint also introduces enterprise wikis, which combine the content publishing and social features to provide a more robust wiki solution that has capabilities such as ratings of wiki pages.

One phenomenon on the Internet is social tagging and content rating. If you have ever used Delicious or Digg, then you’ve used a social tagging technology where you can search, sort, and filter by tag, track what other people are tagging, and obtain feeds on your tags related to your areas of interest. Combined with tagging, ratings help you understand the value of the content and can help filter out poor content based on other people’s ratings. Both of these features are implemented in the 2010 release so that you can tag anything in SharePoint, whether it’s content or people. Plus, you can rate all of your content, so if you want to find all Word documents rated with four or more stars, you can quickly search your site to find this information. There is a blurring of the line between social and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) areas, as you will see throughout this book. The two areas are converging, with social being the bottom-up technology driven by users and ECM being the top-down technology that helps with compliance in your social environment. Many of the features are shared between the two technological areas, especially tagging, where the social tag infrastructure, called folksonomies, are actually open term sets in a corporate taxonomy. Finally, as everyone always asks about this in regard to 2007: yes, SharePoint 2010 does ship with a Tag Cloud web part.

If you have used Facebook or MySpace, then you know how powerful it is to have the ability to track what your circle of friends is doing. In a corporate environment, understanding what is happening in your social network is important so that if someone is working on a document that you may be interested in and that information appears in your social feed, you can quickly view the document. Another example is if there is a tag that you have been tracking as an interest area; you may want to get an activity feed on that tag as people tag other content or people with it.

Often, there are interesting web bookmarks that people want to share with other members of their organizations. These bookmarks can be internal or external websites and can be rated, tagged, or shared using the other social features included in SharePoint.

In both large and small organizations, browsing through an organizational chart is a good way to get an understanding of which people are in which groups and what they work on. While SharePoint 2007 shipped a simple organizational tree view, many customers wanted something richer with which to look at their organizational hierarchy and the rich profile information stored in their organization. SharePoint 2010 ships a Silverlight-based organizational browser. The advantages of using Silverlight are a better navigation experience and the ability to quickly navigate the organizational hierarchy without postbacks to the server.

No social solution would be complete without integrating into the most popular information management client that people leave open on their desktop all day — Outlook. While Outlook and SharePoint integrate today for working with tasks, discussions, and documents, Outlook 2010 now integrates with SharePoint and other social technologies, such as Facebook or MySpace, through its ability to surface richer information about people such as pictures, activity feeds, previous conversations, and even previous instant messaging sessions. By showing related information, you can quickly surmise the semantics around the conversation and the people involved.

Beyond social newsfeeds, Outlook supports expertise mining by discovering, surfacing, and allowing you to approve keywords associated with you based on your email communications. These keywords are stored with your profile, so they are searchable, which makes connecting to experts in an organization easier.

One of the new developments on the Internet is microblogs — 140 character blogs — from services such as Twitter. With SharePoint, you are able to create microblogs and, with the new implementation of the SharePoint Mobile client, write those microblogs on your mobile device. The mobile client also supports browsing your SharePoint sites, synchronizing the content offline to your mobile device, and performing searches. By having a mobile client, you can quickly find information about people, including their status updates, tags, expertise, and other social information.

Once you start using the new social features of SharePoint, finding information becomes easier because of the ability of the search engine to leverage the social information contained in other pieces of the product. Tags work with search queries, content rating can be used to refine results, and you get better social distance calculations and expertise results because of the enhanced people profiles. An improved search user interface makes finding the right information easier with a preview of Office documents, expertise location, and better navigators for filtering down to the right content or person.

With the acquisition of FAST, Microsoft is making a lot of changes in search from the low-end to the high-end. With these changes come new challenges for the developer in understanding which technologies to use and how to write custom code. But, it also presents new opportunities to innovate in the applications you create that are powered by search.

One criticism of the 2007 release was that search did not support wildcards, suffix matchings, grouping of query terms, or logical operators. Many of these deficiencies were not the result of the engine not supporting these options; it was that the search web parts did not expose these capabilities. So, developers had to write custom user interfaces to the search API if they wanted this functionality, which meant recreating all the functionality shipped in the web parts. With 2010, you no longer need to write this functionality yourself. In fact, the search web parts are also extensible in this release, unlike in 2007, in which they were sealed from developers.

There are a number of new capabilities in the visualization of search results. If you have seen search results for people in 2007, then you will be familiar with navigators which allow you to refine your results based on different properties, such as a person’s title or department. This capability has been expanded to support not just people results but also core content results so that when you run a search, you can filter by author, document type, or other properties.

Beyond the navigators, search also provides rich previewing of content by leveraging the integrated FAST technologies. When an Office document is the search result, end users can preview that document. They do not have to open the document to see if it is the result they wanted. Instead, they can just preview the document, and then open it if they want to, which saves time hunting and pecking for the right content.

Often when people are searching for another person, they don’t know how to spell certain parts of the other person’s name. They may know how it sounds phonetically but not the exact spelling. Normally, with search, if you don’t spell the name correctly, the engine can’t find it. However, with the 2010 release, the query engine has phonetic search capability for searching for people. As long as the spelling sounds like the name of the person (such as searching for Tom Risso when you are in fact looking for Tom Rizzo), the engine will sound out the search term and find the right person.