Ten tools for sharepoint development

Web Browser
When you think of your Web browser, you probably think of going to Web sites and viewing information, and that’s fine — for openers. But SharePoint is a Web application born and bred — and it brings a whole new range of uses to your Web browser: You can do a large portion of SharePoint development and management right from the browser.

Microsoft has developed SharePoint Web applications and features to per- form all kinds of tasks, so you can create and develop various parts of your SharePoint system in the browser, from large sites and pages to the lists and libraries that appear on those pages. If you’re a SharePoint administrator, you even get a Web Application designed for administrators — namely, Central Administration — but you still use your browser to interact with that application and use it.

 

SharePoint Designer
SharePoint Designer is a standalone application created for developing and configuring solutions that run on the SharePoint platform. Because SharePoint stores all its content and configuration information in SQL Server databases, SharePoint Designer acts as a window into those databases, whether you’re looking for content or configuration data. The result is a fairly intuitive and straightforward development environment.

SharePoint Designer is tailored specifically to SharePoint Web development. If you’re developing Web applications on other Web platforms, then your best choice is a sister tool of SharePoint Designer called Expression Web.

Visual Studio
When you’re developing solutions that involve writing .NET code, then your application of choice is Visual Studio — a standalone application that serves as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for SharePoint.

Using Visual Studio, you can develop everything from custom event handlers to Web Parts. Then you can bundle up the finished code in a solution file and deploy it to SharePoint. (If only the rest of life where like that.)

Visual Studio wears many hats besides the one that says “SharePoint development tool.” In fact, most general development of Microsoft solutions involves Visual Studio in some form or another.

Report Builder
To begin at the beginning, the component of SQL Server that takes care of reporting is Reporting Services. No less than SharePoint, Reporting Services can be configured to provide seamless integration for end users. Under that arrangement, when actual reports are integrated, they live in the SharePoint environment, and are subject to SharePoint content management — versioning, check-in/check-out, security, workflow, the whole nine yards — just like any other content. Reporting Services gives users a fairly friendly, Office-like tool they can use to build their own reports. Result: self service reporting. The tool that gives end users that power has a name that’s as clear as it is obvious: Report Builder.

Report Builder uses a feature called ClickOnce to simplify installation, launch, and management of Report Builder on each user’s local computer; ClickOnce makes each of these tasks happen automatically when (yes) the user clicks a button — once — on the SharePoint site. Gotta love those no- nonsense feature names.)

The first time you use Report Builder, the tool downloads automatically and installs itself on the local computer; if a Report Builder update becomes avail- able, the update downloads automatically the very next time you launch the tool (all of which might seem a little creepy if it weren’t so convenient).

A Reporting Services report, which you build using Report Builder (hey, obvious things need love too), can connect to many different types of data sources in its quest for data to pull into the report. When the data is nicely tucked into the report, you can display the data in handy components such as tables, graphs, and gauges. Using SharePoint, the people who need to see the finished report can call it up and view it in their browsers without undue fuss. You can also embed a report directly into a SharePoint page; the Reporting Services Web Part handles that job.

 

Dashboard Designer
PerformancePoint Services is a component of SharePoint designed to provide the information needed for business intelligence (BI). This information is usually displayed on a Web page called a dashboard, which packages scorecards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of business data so they’re easily comprehensible at a glance. And the tool used to develop PerformancePoint dashboards has another gloriously obvious name: Dashboard Designer.

Dashboard Designer is a ClickOnce application just like Report Builder. When you create a new PerformancePoint item in SharePoint, ClickOnce launches Dashboard Designer for you. If it’s the first time you’ve opened Dashboard Designer, ClickOnce takes care of downloading and installing the application on your local machine.

When an updated version comes out, ClickOnce auto- matically updates Dashboard Designer the next time you launch it. (Relax. Your computer isn’t haunted. That’s just ClickOnce doing its thing.) Then, wielding Dashboard Designer, you can create mighty BI dashboard pages for your SharePoint farm.

A Dashboard Designer dashboard is, in essence, a logical container that holds other items such as scorecards, KPIs, reports, and charts. Each item can pull information from a different data source and display a different type of information, but all of them form the same cohesive view of how your busi- ness is operating. If a decision-maker is viewing the dashboard, it has fulfilled its purpose in life; when you’ve put together a dashboard that can do that job with efficiency and (why not?) panache, you publish it to a SharePoint site and watch the kudos (or at least the usable information) roll in.

Dashboard Designer comes with the PerformancePoint Services feature of SharePoint. In order to get PerformancePoint Services you need the Enterprise edition of SharePoint Server.

Excel
In my experience, one of the most popular and widely used data-analysis programs is Microsoft Excel. Excel has found its way into everything from tracking lemonade-stand profits to crunching numbers at multibillion-dollar multinationals.

Recognizing the importance and pervasiveness of Excel, Microsoft has integrated it tightly with SharePoint, where a feature known as Excel Services endows the humble spreadsheet application with networked superpowers.

Excel Services allows you to continue using Excel spreadsheets to crunch numbers and perform analysis; no traumatic changes there. Then you can embed a finished spreadsheet in a SharePoint page, where users can find, view, and interact with the spreadsheet — without needing (or tweaking) their own copies of the file. They use a browser to navigate to the SharePoint page containing the one true, approved version of the spreadsheet. Gone are the idiosyncratic spreadsheet versions that used to crop up here and there and wander all over the organization via e-mail. The net reduction in confu- sion boosts morale. Productivity soars. Everybody gets a nice holiday bonus. (Hey, it could happen.)

Visio
A wise (or at least visually oriented) person once said that a picture is worth a thousand words. The Microsoft product that takes this principle to heart is called Visio. You can use Visio to create everything from business-process flows to architectural drawings — anything that requires drawings and diagrams. The service application that integrates Visio into SharePoint is called Visio Services.

Visio Services allows you to create interactive drawings and embed them in SharePoint pages; then the users can access and manipulate the images right from their browsers.

Nobody’s fool (but we knew that), Microsoft has set up Visio so business analysts can use it to create SharePoint workflow diagrams, export them, and then import them into SharePoint Designer. Once the workflow that was built using Visio has been imported into SharePoint Designer it is only a matter of connecting the conditions and actions of the workflow with the actual lists and libraries in SharePoint. This is often called wiring up the SharePoint workflow that was created by a business user. (Pretty slick.) The opposite is also true: Workflows developed in SharePoint Designer are easy to export to Visio, where you can translate all those words and numbers into a visual diagram that will clobber business users with immediate insight. (Well, we can hope.)

Visio Services also allows for the visualization of a workflow already in progress. For example, if you have an approval workflow going, you can see exactly who has approved the document and who hasn’t. Visio Services shows you the status of the workflow as a picture. (Also very slick.)

 

Word
Microsoft Office Word has to be one of the most heavily used software applications of all time. Everyone from schoolchildren to company executives have the need for a word-processing application. A persistent problem with documents, however, is that they lack an overall management system. In the business world, where documents proliferate daily, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system is critical. One reason SharePoint has taken off so rapidly is that it’s a world-class ECM platform. SharePoint integration with Microsoft Office Word allows for much more than simple word processing and content management.
SharePoint integrates with Word in a number ways:

 ✓ Managing metadata (data that describes the other data that makes up each document).
 ✓ Providing essential ECM features such as
 • Check-in/check-out — treating documents like library books (remember those?) to keep track of who has them and for how long.
 • Versioning — business-speak for limiting the number of versions a document can have, thus reducing confusion.
 • Security — controlling access to documents.
 • Workflow — fitting the creation and routing of documents into a sequence of tasks established as a file in SharePoint.

Best of all, users can take advantage of these features without leaving the Word client application.

In addition, the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) component of SharePoint enables Word to interact with line-of-business (LOB) systems that are specific to the work of the organization — and with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that allocate people and materials to specific jobs.

The result is a seamless and intuitive user experience for front-line workers who are comfortable using Word.

Developer Dashboard
The Developer Dashboard in SharePoint provides you with a way to monitor the performance of your development efforts on a page-by-page basis. When the Developer Dashboard is enabled, it shows up at the bottom of every page.

The Developer Dashboard provides information about the Web server and page such as the database query statistics for loading the page, events that were executed, and the order and timing of controls that loaded on the page. In addition you can also define your own sections of code to monitor and display on the Developer Dashboard.

The Developer Dashboard can be activated in the following ways:

 ✓ Using the STSADM command (which is being shown the door thanks to PowerShell).
 ✓ Using a PowerShell script (I explain this method in the upcoming steps).
 ✓ Using .NET code and the SharePoint object model.

When you activate the Developer Dashboard using PowerShell, you can put Developer Dashboard into any of three different modes. You choose the mode by changing a property of SharePoint, which I explain in a moment. The Developer Dashboard modes are

 ✓ Off: This is the default setting, which disables the Developer Dashboard.
 ✓ On: This setting turns on the Developer Dashboard for all pages. The result is that all pages that load contain the Developer Dashboard at the bottom of the page.
 ✓ OnDemand: This mode turns on the Developer Dashboard — but instead of rendering the page statistics automatically, it puts an icon in the top-right corner of the page next to the user’s sign-in name. When the user clicks the icon, the Developer Dashboard renders the page statistics and puts them on-screen.

You can activate the Developer Dashboard using the PowerShell command- line utility; just follow these steps:

 1. Choose Start➪All Programs➪Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products➪ SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.
  The SharePoint PowerShell Management Console opens.
 2. Set a variable to the DeveloperDashboardSettings object.
 3. Set the DisplayLevel property to either On or OnDemand.
 4. Check to make sure the property was set correctly and then update the DeveloperDashboardSettings object.

SharePoint on Windows 7
One of the biggest complaints with previous versions of SharePoint has been the lack of a proper development environment on developers’ workstations. Hey, give ’em a break — previous versions of SharePoint had to run on server operating systems such as Windows Server, even though many developers preferred to use a workstation operating system — which these days would be Windows 7. Well, the good news is that SharePoint 2010 can now be installed on the Windows 7 operating system. Just keep the bit width in mind. . . .

SharePoint 2010 requires a 64-bit operating system. Before you try to run SharePoint on Windows 7, make sure the operating system is 64-bit. Trust me, starting with a 64-bit version of Windows will save you gnashing of teeth later.

In addition, Microsoft has streamlined the process for installing a SharePoint 2010 development environment — now you can do it with only the SharePoint media.
If you haven’t yet installed Microsoft SQL Server — the part of the system that will house all those lovely SharePoint content and configuration databases — you can do that installation at the same time you’re installing SharePoint. If you already have SQL Server installed, you’ll need to point SharePoint at your installation during configuration.