B# .NET Blog : IW stuff - Office, SharePoint, IBF

LINQ to SharePoint - 0.1.2.0 Alpha release available now

bart — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 23:43:18 GMT

It's been a long ten days since the first announcement of the LINQ to SharePoint project, with lots of implementation and testing work but tonight I'm very excited to announce the availability of the first public alpha of the LINQ to SharePoint project. A few highlights of this release:

Supports writing LINQ queries for SharePoint lists in both C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0
The SpMetal entity type creation tool supports both C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0
Talks to SharePoint over web services or though the SharePoint Object Model
Most CAML query constructs are available via LINQ

The current alpha release is built for the Orcas March 07 CTP. An update for Orcas Beta 1 will follow later.

For more information, visit the following pages:

LINQ to SharePoint homepage
Samples and getting started (watch the getting started videos)
Download the 0.1.2.0 release
Licensing information

Warning: This release is an alpha release; use it at your own risk. You shouldn't use the alpha release in any production environment whatsoever.

A little sample of a (very simple) LINQ to SharePoint query in C# and VB:

C# 3.0 LINQ-to-SharePoint query

 1 var users = new SharePointDataSource<User>(new Uri("http://wss.mycompany.local"));
 2 
 3 var res = from u in users
 4           orderby u.Birthdate descending
 5           where u.FirstName.StartsWith("B") && u.Age >= 24 && u.FavoriteFood == FavoriteFood.Pizza
 6           select new { u.FullName, u.Age, Interest = u.AccountBalance * 0.07 };
 7  
 8 foreach (var u in res)
 9     Console.WriteLine(u);
10

VB 9.0 LINQ-to-SharePoint query

 1 Dim users As New SharePointDataSource(Of User)(New Uri("http://wss.mycompany.local"))
 2 
 3 Dim res = From u In users _
 4           Order By u.Birthdate Descending _
 5           Where u.FirstName.StartsWith("B") And u.Age >= 24 And u.FavoriteFood.Value = FavoriteFood.Pizza _
 6           Select u.FullName, u.Age, Interest = u.AccountBalance.Value * 0.07
 7 
 8 For Each u In res
 9     Console.WriteLine(u)
10 Next

Much more complicated queries are supported though, allowing you to focus on the query itself rather than on the CAML plumbing. A list of a few complexities that LINQ-to-SharePoint can deal with:

Recursive parsing of query trees and translation of boolean negation into normal forms using De Morgan's laws.
Analysis of projection operations to create a list of required fields in the query to reduce bandwith.
Condition analysis and validation required for translation to supported CAML constructs.
Nullable type support language differences between VB and C#.
MultiChoice-to-enum mapping and support for fill-in choices.
Visual Basic's runtime libraries for string comparisons.

Please report any issues with the software via the project website. You feedback is highly appreciated!

Enjoy!

About "My Network Places", Nethood, target.lnk and attrib

bart — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 08:17:00 GMT

Today I've been playing around to find a mechanism to update the My Network Places folder in a network environment to contain links to all SharePoint Document Libraries on a given server. I still have to put pieces together and fill in missing links, but here are some frustrating things I've been sailing around :o. Notice that all of the following only works on a machine with Office 2003 (maybe earlier releases too) to introduce the notion of "web folders" in the shell.

1. My Network Places contains links to - guess what - network locations. These are stored in %HOMEPATH%\Nethood under a user's profile in the form of folders (which have the name of the link that appears in the list in Windows Explorer) containing two files: target.lnk and desktop.ini

2. target.lnk is the hardest one to get right. Up till now, I've not found a way to create such a link programmatically (doing a lot of P/Invoke and interop stuff in C#). The pieces of the puzzle are called IShellLink, it's method SetIDList, PIDL and SHGetFolderLocation and CSIDL_NETHOOD. If someone finds a way to create a .lnk file to a web folder using these pieces of the puzzle, let me know (C# managed code preferred, but WSH/VBScript or C++ solutions are also welcome). In most cases, the file was renamed to a .url file which is handled by IE.

3. desktop.ini contains the following:

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}
Flags=2

4. Retrieving all document libraries in all subwebs of a given SharePoint site was a piece of cake using the SharePoint .asmx files. You can find the code of my "crawler" over here in a zip file: sharepointwebcrawler.zip. It retrieves the title and url of every document library it can find recursively. Please notice this code can be improved further, especially the tricky part to extract the document library's base URL.

5. Once you have the list of all document libraries (URL + title) you need to create the target.lnk files and the folders. Right now, this is the missing link in my solution (see point 2 above) and requires manual interaction.

6. Deploy the created .lnk files to all target machines. If you thought it was as easy as doing xcopy of the entire Nethood folder, you're wrong. Okay, it's basically that but first you should not forget to copy the hidden desktop.ini file too, and second, all folders need to be marked as read-only (otherwise these don't appear as "shortcuts" but as normal folders containing a target.lnk file). I did end up with something like this:

cd %USERPROFILE%\Nethood
xcopy /E /H %SOURCEDIR% .
attrib +R /D /S .*

What a nightmare :s. Dreaming of .lnk files to become XML-files :-).

SharePoint Web Services - Obtain a collection of lists

bart — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 23:03:00 GMT

Since a couple of weeks now I'm involved in a SharePoint development project for a local company based in Belgium. Dedicated to this topic, I've create a post category called "IW stuff - Office, SharePoint, IBF" where I'll post some useful information in. Today I'll kick off with a very simple piece of code to obtain a collection of the lists on a Windows SharePoint Services site using the SharePoint Web Services.

First of all, if you've not done so yet, please download the SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 SDK over here. This API contains a single chm file called spptsdk.chm with a lot of documentation in it. You'll certainly find this useful (I, as a SharePoint development newbie, do).

SharePoint provides a series of web services that can be used to interact with a SharePoint-driven website for administration and management tasks. I grabbed the following table directly from the API:

Service	Description
Administration	Provides methods for managing a deployment ofWindows SharePoint Services, such as for creating or deleting sites.
Alerts	Provides methods for working with alerts for list items in a SharePoint site.
Document Workspace	Exposes the Document Workspace Web service and its eleven methods for managing Document Workspace sites and the data they contain.
Forms	Provides methods for returning forms used in the user interface when working with the contents of a list.
Imaging	Provides methods that enable you to create and manage picture libraries.
List Data Retrieval	Provides a method for performing queries against lists in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.
Lists	Provides methods for working with lists and list data.
Meetings	Provides methods that enable you to create and manage Meeting Workspace sites.
Permissions	Provides methods for working with the permissions for a site or list.
Site Data	Provides methods that return metadata or list data from sites or lists in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.
Sites	Provides a method for returning information about the site templates for a site collection.
Users and Groups	Provides methods for working with users, site groups, and cross-site groups.
Versions	Provides methods for working with file versions.
Views	Provides methods for working with views of lists.
Web Part Pages	Provides the methods to send information to and retrieve information from XML Web services.
Webs	Provides methods for working with sites and subsites.

As I'm currently interested in the Lists stuff, I'll focus on this in this first SharePoint-related post. On my development machine, I created a http://sharepointdev website for all of my experiments. The web services can be found in the _vti_bin folder which is actually a virtual directory to the %programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\isapi folder on your system. You won't find very useful information in the .asmx files over there, as these are just stubs for a code-behind implementation, but it's nice to know where these files physically reside on the system. Now, go to Visual Studio .NET and add a Web Reference to http://sharepointdev/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx (well, do substitute the host part of the URL as needed of course). Over here, I'm using a Windows Forms C# project to visualize the data as a first test. The following code assumes there is a DataGrid control on the form (Dock = Fill) named "dataGrid1":

//
//Create the proxy object
//
sharepointdev.Lists l = new sharepointdev.Lists();

//
//Integrated Windows authentication credentials
//
l.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

//
//Query the service for a collection of lists
//
XmlNode node = l.GetListCollection();

//
//Create a reader to populate a DataSet
//
XmlTextReader r = new XmlTextReader(node.OuterXml, XmlNodeType.Document, null);

//
//Create a DataSet and populate it using the constructed XmlReader
//
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
ds.ReadXml(r);

//
//For sake of demo, just bind the DataSet's first (and only) table to a DataGrid control
//
dataGrid1.DataSource = ds.Tables[0];

What this does is pretty basic: it just populates a DataSet with information about the lists on the SharePoint website. Not so exciting but nevertheless pretty cool as a first SharePoint Web Services development adventures sample. I already have some nice ideas to interact with SharePoint through these services. Check out my "IW stuff - Office, SharePoint, IBF" blog post category regularly to keep on track!