I was over at Bil Simser’s Blog the other day reading his post on extending SharePoint through Extension Methods where he describes adding a “ListExists()” extension onto the SPWeb object.  The goal of this method is to return a boolean value representing the existence of the list name passed to the extension. Extension Methods = cool, dangerous and sometimes obfuscated, but cool non-the-less. Using Extension Methods to enhance a developer’s experience when working with the SharePoint Object Model?  +3.  Anything helps there right? What really got me thinking was his method for determining the existence of the list and a discussion that ensued in the comments of his blog.  Just like everywhere else in the programming universe there are about 1... [More]

Lighting tools announced a price change for their Web Edition of the popular “BDC Meta Man” product.  If you’ve ever had to create a BDC (Business Data Catalog) application in SharePoint you’ve probable run across this utility.  They were the first – and Microsoft tried poorly to create an editor of their own. But for most people the cost of the Web Edition was just too costly.  Why spend the money just to get a different UI when most BDC definition files are created in a development or staging environment then simply uploaded to the production server after testing? Now it’s at least somewhat palatable; though if you truly want to GROK what goes on behind the scenes of the BDC my suggestion is still to suck-it-up and try creating a defi... [More]

One of the biggest time drains I experience when creating SharePoint solutions is the constant creation of new GUIDs, especially when creating site columns (Fields).  Each time I wanted to create a  new field I would typically copy the previous line and make the appropriate changes. When I code I want to do everything with keystrokes and not touch my mouse; it must be the old school developer in me. There are two major problems as I see it: 1. When you double click a section of a GUID, either in XML or in code, the intelligent highlighter only picks up the current segment of the GUID and doesn’t traverse the dashes or braces.  FAIL 2.  Even if we used the keyboard or mouse to select the entire GUID in code there’s no way with the keyboard to create and i... [More]

As Lars Fastrup pointed out in his blog entry Visual Studio Unit Tests and 64-bit SharePoint does not play the Microsoft philosophy of not providing 32-bit servers for their new platforms are going to wreak havoc on us developers, especially those that write unit tests. (if you don’t you NEED to!). Visual Studio, the web application host, and the unit test host process are all 32-bit even if you’re running a 64-bit Operating system. We can get around the debugging for web applications by using our local IIS process instead of the developer web host but we can’t get around running integrated unit tests. So when you’re developing for SharePoint in a 64-bit host what do you do? Enter NUnit. But that makes you leave the IDE to run your unit tests right? Nope! Giv... [More]