Here are the highlights from days three and four of the SharePoint Conference.
Heather Solomon gave a two part session on best practices for styling and branding SharePoint sites. Most of what she went through were techniques that PointBridge has already employed successfully on our WWW and blogs sites as well as client sites such as WK Audio Books, MyLww.com, and eJournals (and many others I am sure). It was good to learn that we are already following the standards and practices of one of the leaders in the field.
Steve Peschka, from the SharePoint product team, gave a great introduction to using AJAX and LINQ in SharePoint. Most interestingly, he showed how to use LINQ to Object to perform joins across multiple SharePoint lists.
Ted Pattison continued on the theme begun by Andrew Connell and provided us with an in-depth look at STSDEV. This is a tool that I am very excited to start using. Even though it is only a proof-of-concept, it already has a number of great features that will make our lives as SharePoint developers better. Best of all, the tool will only get more useful as people contribute to project on CodePlex.
SharePoint Tools for Style: Advanced Techniques for Branding SharePoint (Heather Solomon)
SharePoint branding can be flexible, fun, and frustrating all at once. During this session, we do a deep dive into the details of branding and look at how to handle CSS, multiple designs, navigation styling and manipulating content placeholders. We also address branding other SharePoint elements such as application screens, My Sites, and Blogs.
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Download Presentation (Session 2)
Rendering Data in SharePoint Using AJAX and LINQ (Steve Peschka)
This session offers more code than slides, as we examine some advanced techniques for retrieving and rendering data in SharePoint. Learn how to create custom web services that are integrated into a SharePoint farm, and how to use AJAX to retrieve data. Learn to create a web part that uses JSON to parse and render the data on the client side, which can be a great solution for problems such as low bandwidth implementations, moving lengthy processing off of the web front ends, etc. We also look at LINQ in .NET 3.5 and show how you can use this common query language to work with data in SharePoint lists in ways that were previously not possible.
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The presenter said to check the SharePoint team blog site for source code downloads. They were not posted as of March 9, but I will keep checking back and will post an update once they are available.
Best Practices for SharePoint Solution Deployment (Ted Pattison)
Solution packages are a critical aspect of deployment in SharePoint 2007 and understanding the techniques for creating and distributing them is an absolute requirement for administrators and developers alike. This session examines the different types of components that can be developed for a SharePoint environment and shows the steps involved with building a solution package for best-practice distribution and deployment. See the proper way to configure SafeControl and Code Access Security (CAS) setting in Web Part deployment, and hear the benefits and drawback of Assembly deployment in the Global Assembly Cache versus the local bin directory for a particular Web Application. Also, learn best-practice techniques for modifying the web.config file for a Web Application using a Web Application-scoped feature which contains code using the WSS object model that is pushed out into a SharePoint farm using a solution package.
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Source code samples from the presentation can be found here:
http://www.tedpattison.net/downloads/SPC_Deployment.zip
Design Patterns for Collaborative Applications (Ben German)
SharePoint provides powerful collaborative workspaces, but that’s only the beginning of what’s possible. During this session we review real-world designs for taking collaboration to the next level with collaborative applications that incorporate line-of-business integration, workflow, forms, and dashboards into SharePoint workspaces. The session is targeted at architects and business analysts.
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