Monday, January 23, 2012

Deploying a Visual Web Part to your Remote-Hosted Fpweb.net SharePoint Site using Visual Studio 11 (Dev Preview)


(Update: this post also published on Developer Wiki of NothingButSharePoint.com)

The Developer Preview of Visual Studio 11 is now available, and I’ve been exploring its new capabilities, especially as it relates to SharePoint development. Two of the great new features in Visual Studio 11 that I’ll discuss are

  • the ability to deploy visual web parts as sandboxed solutions
  • the ability to automatically deploy sandboxed solutions to remote SharePoint sites

At the end of this article, I’ll explain why I think this is such a big deal. But for now, I’ll walk thru the 3 easy steps necessary to take advantage of these features. In my case, the remote SharePoint site I’ll use is my Fpweb.net Hosted SharePoint account.

Friday, January 20, 2012

InfoPath 2010 presentation at Buckeye SPUG: May the FORMS Be With You…

Last nite I gave my InfoPath 2010 talk to the attendees at the Buckeye SharePoint User Group. Despite a nasty snow storm that swept in inconveniently right at the evening rush hour, lots of folks braved the cold and joined me in an engaging and entertaining talk about the untapped power of InfoPath 2010.

The end of the talk included a demo of a form I created call the Dog Lover’s Application. It’s simply a way to demonstrate some standard, and some not-so-standard, features of InfoPath. I used SharePoint 2010’s imagebuilt-in InfoPath Web Part to embed the form on the homepage of my site. I then asked the audience – “how do you know this isn’t a custom-built web part??” The point I was trying to make is that, with enough clever design, InfoPath forms designers can create some pretty fancy composites that might otherwise normally only be associated with the realm of the all-powerful Developer. : )

My goal was to hopefully make people see the value that InfoPath delivers as another tool in their SharePoint arsenal, and to show that it can be used for more than just the basic form.

The slidedeck can be found below, or on Slideshare::

Saturday, January 14, 2012

SharePoint spotted at Codemash

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SharePoint made an appearance at Codemash this year!

This great event is normally light on SharePoint love, but this year I was able to present a 20-minute vendor session for Improving Enterprises that focused on the development features that a [non-SharePoint] developer should know about when contemplating SharePoint development. In my opinion, SharePoint as a dev platform can be a developer paradise because of large collection of tools, libraries, services & utilities at your disposal. And as I’m exploring the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview (more on that to come), I think many will see that it’s about to get even better.

You can find my slide deck here, and for more info on Codemash, check out the website, or view the very active twitter feed.