Donald Hessing

How to add YouTube movies with the Content Editor Web Part in SharePoint 2010

dhessing — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 13:08:00 GMT

During the Microsoft SharePoint Connections 2010 in Amsterdam someone from the audience came with the question ”how to add a YouTube movie to a publishing page in SharePoint 2010”. According to the attendee, the content editor corrects or filters the html / object tag inside the rich text editor of a YouTube movie. So back at home, I tried to figure this out. You can add a YouTube movie to a page by adding the embed tag of the movie. For example

My first try was to paste the HTML by going to the HTML editor mode. You can do this by selecting the content editor web part and go to HTML à Edit HTML Source. By pasting the embed tag for the YouTube movie, the YouTube movie appeared in the page. However, after doing several page edits / check-in / publishing etc, the YouTube movie didn’t show up anymore. After investigating the HTML, it looks liked the content editor encoded parts of the inserted HTML. This makes sense, in order to comply to the XHTML rules.

In my search for disabling the encoding behavior of the content editor, I found a new property in the property pane of the web part called Content Link. By setting the Content Link property to a document which is uploaded to your SharePoint site, the Content Link property will load the content and insert that inside the content of the Content Editor web part.

So what I did is the following. I created a text file with the embedded html for the YouTube movie and uploaded that to the document library of the site. I then configured the Content Link property in the web part panel (go to edit properties of the rich text editor web part) to “/documents/youtube.txt” (use test link before click apply). After that, the content editor web part loads the content of the file and shows the YouTube movie. It turns out that this content is not encoded anymore after edit, check in – publish actions J

SharePoint 2010 Beta announced at PDC09

dhessing — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:44:00 GMT

Today at the second day of the Microsoft PDC in Los Angeles Microsft announced the public Beta for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. While the Technical preview was only available for some of the MVP's / MCM's and early adapters. The public BETA is now available for the SharePoint Community. So what is in the box:

- SharePoint Foundation 2010 (formerly known as WSS)

- SharePoint Server 2010

- FAST Search Server 2010

- Project Server 2010

- SharePoint Designer 2010 (free)

- Office 2010

- Office 2010 for mobile

- Office Web Applications

One of the many new features in SharePoint 2010 is the support for social networks. New in this Beta which was not previously announced is the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector brings social networks to your inbox. While browsing through your email, you can now see information from social networks. First social network who will make a plugin available is Linked In. Later this year, a connector for Windows Live will become available as well. The Social Connector also ships with a SDK for integrating your own connector for enabling your backoffice HRM system.

For more information see the blog post at the Microsoft Outlook Team Blog.

The public Beta of SharePoint 2010 can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/ZF2010

Microsoft SharePoint Connections Amsterdam

dhessing — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:45:00 GMT

Microsoft Netherlands will organize a two day event on 18 and 19 January for SharePoint IT-Professionals and Developers. This conference will cover many of the existing announcements and highlights of the International SharePoint 2010 conference held in Las Vegas. If you want to learn more about the coming SharePoint 2010 version, than this is the place to be. International top speakers like Steve Fox, Spencer Harbar, Neil Hodgkinson, Richard Taylor, Asif Rehmani and Jan Tielens already confirmed.

Check out the website at http://www.devconnections.com/shows/NED2010SP/default.asp?c=2&s=149

Webpart connections - data provider / data consumer

dhessing — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:50:00 GMT

Ever needed a solution where several webparts on the same page are consuming the same datasource? Webpart connections can be the solution!

In one of my current projects we have a profile page with several web parts were each webpart shows a part of the user profile information. For instance:

- a webpart with the basic profileinformation like name, phone and profilepicture.

- a webpart for showing the favorite links stored in the userprofile

- a webpart for showing the skills of the user, stored in the userprofile

In this scenario, each webpart has to retrieve the same userprofile information. This is a little bit sad considered the performance penalty being paid for retrieving the same data for each webpart. Considered the penalty, i wanted a solution which only loads the userprofile once.

In a traditional Asp.Net website, the code behind of the page would be responsible for retrieving the data and pass that data to the webparts by using a public property on the webpart. SharePoint publishing pages don’t have the ability to have code behind files. So we need a different kind of solution.

I could created a dataaccess layer for retrieving the userprofile data and cache the profile for several seconds so that the other webparts could read this data from the cache.

Just before writing the dataaccess and caching code, i wondered whatever it was possible to achieve this by using webpart connections. See it like data provider webpart and a data consumer webpart.

To keep it short. I came up with the following solution.

I created a custom webpart witch implements the IUserProfileData interface. This interface defines the contract of the data being send through the webpart connections.

public class UserProfileData

{

public string FistName { get; set; }

public string LastName{ get; set; }

public string PictureUrl { get; set; }

}

public interface IUserProfileProvider

{

UserProfileData ProfileData{ get; }

}

The easiest way to communicate between webparts is by using the ConnectionProvider and the ConnectionConsumer attribute. All you need to do in the provider webpart is implementing a method with the ConnectionProvider attribute. The webpart infrastructure will deal with the communication callbacks between the webparts

[ConnectionProvider("ProviderID")]

public IUserProfileProvider GetUserProfileProvider()

{

return this;

}

All the consumer webpart has to do is implement a method with the ConnectionConsumer attribute for retrieving the provider.

[ConnectionConsumer("ConsumerID")]

public void RegisterUserProfileProvider(IUserProfileProvider provider)

{

this.provider = provider;

}

The final step is to create a webpart connection between the provider and the consumer webparts. This can be done by using the SharePoint userinterface.

Example code can be downloaded here. If you want to deploy the example, make sure you have STSDEV(can be found on codeplex) installed. Want to know more about webpart connections? Read this excellent article on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178187.aspx).

Session material: Microsoft Developers Days 2009

dhessing — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:01:00 GMT

I have been quite busy last months with presenting at several conferences, finishing projects, but most of all attending the Microsoft Certified Master Program. Once again, the organisation of the Developers Days did a great job in selecting sessions and speakers from all over the world. With a line up of David Chappell, Mike Taulty, Ingo Rammer, Keith Brown, Gert Drapers, Aaron Skonnard, and many more, they may have one of the best conference in europe. I did the session "Web Content Management with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" together with my colleague Reinhard Brongers. The session is recorded and hosted at Channel 9. For those who understand the dutch langauge, have fun!

(Please visit the site to view this media)

In the demo's we showed a jQeury menu, jQuery image webpart and a Silverlight 2 video player field control. The source code can be downloaded here. The solutions are just for demoing purpose only, so do not use it in production. Before you open the solution in Visual Studio 2008, make sure you have installed Visual Studio SP1, .NET framework 3.5 with SP1, Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. If you want to deploy the solution, install STSDEV, and make sure you have configured youre website for Silverlight (.xap extension in IIS) and the .Net framework 3.5 SP1 (web.config modifications). Deploying and configuring a SharePoint solution with Silverlight can be hard. For a basic walkthrough of developing a Silverlight Webpart take a look at the MSDN Ramp up for SharePoint

The attached solution includes:

Sitedefintion for Devdays2009
Masterpage
Pagelayouts
Fieldcontrol for Silverlight 2 player
Image carousel webpart with jQuery
jQuery menu

Have fun!

Session material Software Development Event June

dhessing — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:21:00 GMT

Just back from my MCM SharePoint experience in Redmond I received an email from the dutch Software Development Network (SDN) organisation to give a talk on friday june 26th. It seems that Bob Fox couldn't make it, so they needed a stand-in. Duo presentations are my favorite, so I was lucky that Mirjam van Olst wanted to join the presentation about Architectural Design and Development Considerations. Despite the short preperation time and beeing jetlagged, I think we did a good job. For those who are interested in the sql scripts, they can be downloaded here.

How to disable access for anonymous users on forms and application pages - ViewFormPagesLockDown

dhessing — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:19:00 GMT

Recently I did a couple of projects on building public facing internet sites with MOSS 2007. I’ve noticed that for one specific project the application pages and the forms pages were accessible for anonymous users. Because of the fact that anonymous users have by default no rights on lists other than read, they can't do any harm to the site. But I didn't like the idea that anyone could read my reusable content or pages list just by requesting the url http://myserver/pages/forms/allitems.aspx. In my search for an explanation, I found this excellent article from the SharePoint team blog. Public internet sites build on the publishing portal site definition have by default a feature called ViewFormPagesLockDown activated. The feature disables anonymous users to forms pages and most of the application pages. If you build your own site definition, this feature is not enabled by default. You still can disable anonymous access to these pages by activating the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature to the site collection of the public website. You can do this by running the following command on the site collection of the public site:

stsadm.exe –o activatefeature –url <site collection url> -filename ViewFormPagesLockdown\feature.xml