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I demonstrated how to make an external content type programmatically during the SPC 405 - Business Connectivity Services Runtime and Object Model Deep Dive session at the 2009 Microsoft SharePoint Conference. Since the conference I have received a couple of dozen emails about the this topic. Most of the emails ask for the code samples and an explanation of the code, and at least half of the emails inquire about when and why you may need to create an external content type programmatically. Because this is obviously a hot topic I decided to write it up in a blog post.
Sample...
When MOSS 2007 came out I created a blog post very similar to this one. It turned out to be one of my most popular posts and I received many comments and private emails thanking me for putting the post together. Since the post helped out so many folks I decided to create an updated version for SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010 ships with many predefined site templates you may use to create site collections and sub sites. Sometimes the out of the box site templates will meet the needs of your project. Other times, the out of the box site templates may...
In part 1of this blog post series I showed you how to create a .NET Assembly Connector to read data from a flat file. This blog post shows you how to register an external content type associated with a .NET Assembly Connector with the SharePoint search search service so you can index and search the data coming from the external content type.
The Business Context
As I mentioned in part 1 of this blog post series, it’s commonplace to find critical business data stored inside flat files in large, mature organizations. In addition to being able to browse the data inside web...
The Business Context
In many large organizations business data is stored inside of flat files from mainframes or other legacy systems. These systems chug along just fine everyday and support many key elements of the business; they aren’t going away anytime soon. Traditionally, accessing flat file data, making it viewable in a web pages, and making it searchable requires an enormous amount of custom code.
The Solution
New functionality inside SharePoint 2010’s Business Connectivity Services (BCS) makes it extremely easy to connect to flat file data sources (or any other data source), display it in web pages, and make it searchable. This...
Creating SharePoint themes used to require editing CSS style sheets manually or using a tool like SharePoint Designer. Furthermore, packaging and deploying the themes required administrative access to the server. This is no longer the case! Now you can create a SharePoint theme without ever having to see a single CSS style and you can easily deploy it to your server and apply it all within your web browser! Here's how it's done with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.
Create the theme
First, open Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and proceed to create an Office theme just like you would for a PowerPoint presentation. See this...
This article describes how to create a custom site definition in SharePoint 2010. The process to create a custom site definition has not changed much since the last version of SharePoint, the only differences are the directory names and some of the XML in the WEBTEMP files. See this blog post if you would like to see how this is done in WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007.
Site Definition basics
Site definitions are located in the following folder on the SharePoint server:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates
Each site definition has its own sub directory under this folder.
Inside each site...
New content was added to the www.mssharepointdeveloper.com web site last week! This content includes the SharePoint on the web modules and the much anticipated release of the AdventureWorks Travel Site installer!
Update: Download the installer here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/spotw/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2702
The new SharePoint On The Web modules cover the following topics:
Getting Started with SharePoint Development on the Web
Site Structure and Branding
Custom Field Types and Mode
FBA Authentication
Web Interoperability
SharePoint Search
Content Deployment
Minimal Publishing Site Definition
...
Thanks to everyone who came to my Go Beyond With The BDC! session last week at the Microsoft TechEd 2009 North America conference! You can find the Site Template Package (STP) for the SharePoint site I used for my demos here. See this post for more details about the AdventureWorks Travel Site that I used to demonstrate Silverlight, SharePoint, and the BDC working together.
Andrew Connell and I will be posting the session materials from the session we co-presented - Extending the Content Query Web Part to Aggregate Data Across Site Collections and External Sources - sometime soon (this week or...
If you look hard enough you can find several articles on the Internet which describe different ways to enhance SharePoint User Profiles with the Business Data Catalog. Each of the articles takes a different approach to implementing this functionality, however none of the articles provide a prescriptive step by step approach and end to end example. This article is geared toward someone who has limited or no experience with the BDC and provides a prescriptive step by step approach and sample code.
The other articles I found on the Internet about this topic include the following, they are well worth reading.
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Thanks to everyone who came to my session last week at the Microsoft TechEd 2008 North America Developer conference! It was really nice to see so many past students at the show and I enjoyed catching up with everyone. On Wednesday night I had the chance to hang out with many of the Microsoft MVPs and watch the Blues Brothers kick it at the House of Blues. Eric Shupps accompanied the Blues Brothers for a song, I wish I had a picture of it, I thought he did pretty well. :) I met Brett Lonsdale for the first time, Nick...
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