MSDN Magazine - October 2008 - (Page 53) VENDOR-SPONSORED CONTENT The 10 First SharePoint Artifacts to Learn About As a new SharePoint Developer you need to know where to start.SharePoint has many features and capabilities that can be extended by software developers. But any application built on SharePoint can be thought of as having user Interface,business logic,data and services.In this section we will look at the first 10 artifacts that you should learn about building for SharePoint. The ASP.NET Web Parts you develop can now be reused in SharePoint sites. The figure shows the custom driving directions Web Part we described running in an ASP.NET 2.0 Web page and also in a SharePoint site. The SharePoint Web Parts you create can also provide a complete set of Windows SharePoint Services features, such as document services, events, workflow, search, site columns and content types. 2. Data Lists Windows SharePoint Services enables you to create and customize lists to include specific columns of information. A list consists of items or rows, and columns or fields that contain data. Using ASP.NET, you must create or get access to a Microsoft SQL Server database, create the tables and columns you need, and then build the UI components to allow users to populate the columns with this data. The lists you create and customize in Windows SharePoint Services provide a user-friendly foundation for managing data structures and entering data into these data structures. Let’s take a scenario in which you are a consultant tracking several development projects. Your manager asks you to create a custom list of projects and share the list by using intranet resources. Because your company has a SharePoint site, you decide to create a custom list that displays the title, delivery date, status, documentation, owners, and cost of each project. The figure shows a custom “Projects” list. An online set of resources is available to help you learn how to build these artifacts for SharePoint. See http:// MSSharePointDeveloper.com Let’s look at the first 10 artifacts you should learn about building with SharePoint Products and Technologies. 1. Web Parts Build SharePoint Web Parts just as you build Web Parts in ASP.NET, and enjoy the added benefit that site administrators can easily deploy your Web Parts to SharePoint sites. As part of a SharePoint site, your SharePoint Web Part is available immediately to users to add to pages or to personalize pages. For example, let’s say you create a custom ASP.NET Web Part that displays driving directions based on a custom start point property that users can personalize.To create this Web Part,you create a custom class library project that contains a control that inherits from the System.Web.UI.WebControls. WebParts.WebPart class. In this class, you override the CreateChildControls method to control the rendering of HTML. After you finish the code of the class, you compile the project and add a reference to the Web Part project’s .DLL in your Web project. Finally, to display your Web Part in a Web Form, you add the control to a Web Part zone. By providing this list in a SharePoint site, you can share project information with your co-workers. Better yet, as a developer you can access data stored in this list programmatically.Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides a set of Web services and classes you can use to allow users to access data from SharePoint lists. 3. Event Handlers An event handler (or event receiver) is a piece of code, which is executed when a certain event occurs. You can create receiver classes that handle both synchronous and asynchronous events. You can hook up and override multiple event handler assemblies from your custom lists, document libraries, sites and user operations, giving you a broad extensibility mechanism for common SharePoint operations. For example, let’s say you want to prevent users from deleting items from your custom “Projects” list. To handle this event, you override the asynchronous ItemDeleting http://www.MSSharePointDeveloper.com http://www.MSSharePointDeveloper.com
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