This is just a quick recap of my presentation at this weekend’s Philly .net Code Camp. The purpose of the talk was to show that it is easy to incorporate the tools and technologies used in other web based and .net 3.5 based applications into your SharePoint solutions.
Here is a list of the items covered and some related links. If you have questions, please leave a comment, so others can benefit from the discussion.
- Including Third Party Web Controls: SharePoint is a web technology running on IIS and .net 3.5. So can you include these components in your SharePoint application pages and webparts? Absolutely! They work exactly like they do in .net web pages. You may need to transform your SPListItemCollection using the GetDataTable method, but that is an easy call to make. I showed how all of this works using Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls, but I have tried other vendor controls in the past with similar success. Look for a future post that takes you through the steps.
- Using LINQ to Objects to Perform Group Join of List Data: this is all explained in a previous blog post.
- Using jQuery to Expand and Collapse the Navigation Menu: this is also explained in a previous blog post.
- Using jQuery Framework to Provide Rich User Experience: There are a large number of frameworks that can perform just about any function you need to do on the web, so there is little reason to write your own. Getting them into your SharePoint solution can be tricky and require some additional trouble shooting. For my process, I like to download the tools and get them working in a normal asp.net web application (File | New Project | Asp.net WebForms application 3.5 version). This way you get to understand how they work without wondering if SharePoint is impacting your ability to use the tool. Once I get it working here, it is usually an easy jump to push this into a SharePoint solution. The tool I showed for this part of the presentation was Joyride and you can read all about this tool here. I also plan to create a post about this part of the presentation showing the basic installation and how to move the ordered list from being hard coded in the application page into a SharePoint list where the user can modify the content..
- Using SharePoint List Data to Populate an ASP.NET MVC 4 Single Page Application: The goal here was to take data created and stored in SharePoint and surface it through a web application. You can find out about the new Single Page Application templates on this TechEd Netherlands video. This was an interesting solution given MVC4 is still in beta and it works best with Entity Framework. I will write this up and post a link here when it is done.
If you were there, don’t forget to fill out the evaluation for the speakers and the event itself. (And get another chance to win an XBox.).
