Visual Studio

InfoPath 2010 Filtering

David Gerhardt — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:12:46 GMT

Control filtering is one of the out-of-the-box features not supported in InfoPath 2007 browser scenarios. The InfoPath team posted a Web service workaround for this, and I described a managed-code fix as well.

With InfoPath 2010, it appears that these workarounds are no longer necessary. In the video I posted earlier this month about richer browser forms, see the filtering functionality at work in an InfoPath 2010 browser scenario. At least that's one big improvement to the browser form experience...

Office 2010 Videos: Part 1

David Gerhardt — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:38:39 GMT

Microsoft demonstrated many of the new Office 2010 features this week at the Worldwide Partner Conference. Some of these feature demos were converted to 30-to-60-second vignettes and posted to YouTube. 3Sharp produced many of these vignettes, and I published a few of them to GetSharp as well...

For a sneak preview of Office 2010 functionality, check out these videos. We will be posting more to GetSharp in the coming weeks...

Content Type Book Corrections

David Gerhardt — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:22:56 GMT

I would like to thank everyone who has purchased our book Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007 (all three of you ☺). In a previous lifetime, I was a copy editor at a daily newspaper. That experience helped me to notice a few things that were slightly "off" when re-reading my own work. So, in an effort to bring you the highest quality of reading material, I want to point out the following corrections in the first printing:

Page 48, first paragraph, ninth line - It should read "The New Site Column page allows you to define a site column...". The "to" is missing. I know that is a picky catch, but I am a picky person.
Page 55, second line of the note - The name of the Office Word 2007 document template that is available at http://www.courseptr.com/downloads is Performance_Appraisal.docx. Note the "_" character between "Performance" and "Appraisal".
Page 89, first paragraph, fourth line - It should read "...which will be displayed in the date picker content control...". The AppraisalDate column is mapped to a date picker content control, not a plain text content control.
Page 122, first paragraph, third line - It should read "...can contain a hard-coded link to the appraiser document library...". In the email message body, we provide a link to the library, not the appraisal document.

Hopefully, these and other minor errors will be cleaned up in subsequent book printings.

SharePoint Connections Session Decks

David Gerhardt — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:02:40 GMT

A few people who did not attend SharePoint Connections last month have asked how to get the decks I used in my presentations. The quickest and easiest way: download them here.

In the Can

David Gerhardt — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:54:51 GMT

No, I am not in the bathroom (or potty, as my kids like to say). The book that Kevin Martin and I have been working on, Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007, is in the can (i.e., it shipped yesterday). So, if you have ever created or thought about creating document-centric SharePoint solutions, you might want to add this book to your holiday shopping list. If anything, it should be a great bedtime read for young ones. :-)

I am grateful to everyone who helped or offered to help with this project. I especially want to thank Jen Blaney (our editorial assistant at Charles River Media), Marta Justak (our project editor), and Stacia Misner (our technical editor). Without them, none of this would have been possible.

SharePoint Connections Session Code

David Gerhardt — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:03:45 GMT

Thanks to all who attended my sessions last week at SharePoint Connections. I was especially pleased with the attendance of my last session (Developing InfoPath Browser Forms for SharePoint). Asking people to get up for a session at 8am on the last day of a conference in Las Vegas can be a challenge, but the turnout was still high, and there was no shortage of good questions.

As I promised, the code from my two InfoPath sessions is available for download here. I could not include the form templates used for the demos, as they are owned by a third party, but the code snippets are there and can be included in your Visual Studio solutions. You will just need to modify the code to fit your form data source.

Update on the Content Types Book

David Gerhardt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:29:24 GMT

Last month I provided a teaser about the book I am writing with Kevin Martin (a 3Sharp colleague) titled Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007. We are in the final editing stages now and should be completely done in the next few weeks. If all goes well, I will have a flier to pass out at SharePoint Connections for those interested. The chapter titles (which may be subject to change) are as follows:

What Is a Content Type?
Included Content Types
Site Columns
Document Template
Document Information Panel
Workflows
Information Management Policies and Document Conversions
Out-of-the-Box Solution Walkthrough
Automating the Performance Appraisal Solution
Completing and Deploying the Appraisal Process

The last mile is always the most difficult...

Integrating Lotus Notes with the 2007 Release

David Gerhardt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:58:08 GMT

Last year we worked with Gary Devendorf to create a two-day training course about 2007 Microsoft Office system interoperability with Lotus Notes 7. The course was geared toward Notes developers and had sessions about Visual Studio 2005 and Domino Web services, ASP.NET, the Open XML Formats, InfoPath, Access, and Excel, to name a few.

For the next month or so we will be working with Gary again to upgrade the materials. The new training course will still use Lotus Notes 7, but we will convert the Visual Studio 2005 projects to Visual Studio 2008 and add new content for subjects such as the Business Data Catalog, InfoPath Forms Services, custom workflows, and mobile development activities. Gary will be providing training updates on his blog. For more interoperability information, check out the InteropTips Community Site for developers of .NET and Lotus Notes applications.

SharePoint Connections Fall 2008

David Gerhardt — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:42:33 GMT

The fall event for SharePoint Connections 2008 is a little more than a month away from now (November 10–13 in Las Vegas). Once again, I am lucky enough to be one of the speakers, and my sessions are as follows:

Developing InfoPath Client-Only Forms for SharePoint — This session explores many of the form designer capabilities for InfoPath client-only solutions.
Developing InfoPath Browser Forms for SharePoint — This session explains some of the limitations in working with InfoPath Forms Services and discusses ways to optimize browser forms using out-of-the-box and managed code techniques.
Adding Codeless Workflows to InfoPath Form Solutions — This session identifies how you can integrate codeless workflows into SharePoint form solutions.

It should be a great event, and I look forward to meeting many of you there.

Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint

David Gerhardt — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:20:00 GMT

For the past few months Kevin Martin (a 3Sharp colleague) and I have been writing a book titled Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007. The book is a step-by-step walkthrough for building a performance appraisal solution with a SharePoint content type. It takes an approach similar to the one I used last year when writing about the time-off request solution, but with much more detail and a couple of chapters devoted to programmatic enhancements. The book is scheduled to be published later this year by Charles River Media. I will be providing more details on this site in the next month or so as we put the finishing touches on the book. Stay tuned...