Weblog Ton Stegeman [MVP]

Last month I did a presentation on the DIWUG evening at Qurius in Rijswijk. The title of my presentation was “SharePoint – think building blocks”.

In this session I presented a number of building blocks that I created in intranet / collaboration projects for customers. A number of these block added new functionality to the SharePoint platform, while other blocks changed the out of the box behavior of SharePoint. For each of the blocks I discussed, I discussed the question of the customer, followed by a demo. After the demo I showed the technical architecture of the solution and discussed what alternative solutions I had considered. In SharePoint you can do things in multiple ways and I tried to clarify why I did things the way I did them.

The building blocks I showed:

1. Using the current user as default value in a SharePoint user field
2. Changing the behavior of the Close button (see this post)
3. Replace context search (OSSSearch.aspx) with a results page in the search center
4. Field level ‘security’ – show/hide SharePoint list fields depending on item values using a modified version of SPListDisplaySetting.
5. Adding navigation to a SharePoint wiki (see this post)
6. Easier user management by selecting users from a number of SharePoint groups (see this post)
7. Create a news site with multiple RSS feeds

The ZIP file contains the code for blocks 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. To create the WSP package, build the project in Release mode and run the ‘Create package.bat’ file in the folder ‘Package’. You can install the WSP by using the setup program in the same folder.

You can download the slides and the code samples using the links below:

Download the slides (Dutch)

Download the code