SharePoint 2007 is an extension of ASP.NET and IIS. This chapter walks through the main architectural components of IIS and... more

SharePoint 2007 is an extension of ASP.NET and IIS. This chapter walks through the main architectural components of IIS and ASP.NET and shows you how these components are extended to add support for SharePoint functionalities.

Because IIS is one of the many options for hosting ASP.NET, the discussion begins with the coverage of the ASP.NET hosting environment where HTTP worker requests and runtime classes are discussed. Next, the chapter covers IIS concepts such as web sites and application pools followed by discussions of the related SharePoint object model classes. The ASP.NET HTTP Runtime Pipeline and the SharePoint extensions to this pipeline are discussed in depth. You’ll also learn about the ASP.NET dynamic compilation model and the role it plays in SharePoint.

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SharePoint comes with an XML-based markup language known as Collaborative Application Markup Language... more

SharePoint comes with an XML-based markup language known as Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) that you can use to perform SharePoint queries and define SharePoint components in a declarative fashion. The first part of this chapter covers this markup language. The rest of the chapter uses CAML to implement features and custom actions. This chapter also shows you how to implement application pages, which can be accessed from custom actions on the SharePoint menus.

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SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures enabling you to manage and to organize your collaborative... more

SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures enabling you to manage and to organize your collaborative content in terms of abstractions such as site collections, sites, lists, list items, content types, site columns, field types, and so on. Users work with these SharePoint abstractions through the SharePoint forms infrastructure. This and the next few chapters provide an in-depth coverage of these SharePoint abstractions and SharePoint forms infrastructure. The main focus of this chapter is list types and the skills you need to learn to implement custom list types.

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As discussed in the previous chapter, SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures, enabling you... more

As discussed in the previous chapter, SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures, enabling you to manage and to organize your collaborative content in terms of abstractions such as site collections, sites, lists, list items, content types, site columns, field types, and so on. Users work with these SharePoint abstractions through SharePoint forms infrastructure. Form-rendering server controls form a major portion of the SharePoint forms infrastructure. This chapter provides an in-depth coverage of these server controls.

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As I’ve discussed in the previous chapters, SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures, enabling... more

As I’ve discussed in the previous chapters, SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures, enabling you to manage and to organize your collaborative content in terms of abstractions such as site collections, sites, lists, list items, content types, field types, site columns, and so on. Field type is one of these abstractions. There are times when your collaborative content cannot be organized through standard field types, but SharePoint enables you to implement your own custom field types and deploy them to SharePoint. This section helps you gain the skills and knowledge you need to implement custom field types.

The discussion starts with the simplest possible scenario and progressively presents more complex situations as the chapter progresses. Developing a custom field type, at a minimum, requires you to implement a field type class and a field type definition. A field type class is a .NET class that inherits directly or indirectly from the SPField class. A field type definition is an XML document that contains the information that SharePoint uses to render the field type.

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As discussed in previous chapters, SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures, enabling you to... more

As discussed in previous chapters, SharePoint virtualizes the underlying IIS and ASP.NET infrastructures, enabling you to manage and to organize your collaborative content in terms of abstractions such as site collections, sites, lists, list items, content types, field types, site columns, and so on. Site columns, site content types, and site definitions are three of these abstractions. This chapter helps you gain the skills that you need to implement your own custom site columns and site content types.

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This chapter dives into site definitions and site provisioning providers and uses examples to show you how to implement your... more

This chapter dives into site definitions and site provisioning providers and uses examples to show you how to implement your own custom site definitions and site provisioning providers.

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The next two chapters dive into advanced SharePoint programming topics. This chapter covers the following:... more

The next two chapters dive into advanced SharePoint programming topics. This chapter covers the following:

• Web configuration modification via the SharePoint object model

• Extending the STSADM command-line utility to add support for custom operations

• Feature receivers

• Developing custom timer jobs

• Feature dependency

• Feature stapling

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This chapter provides in-depth coverage of the three main types of event receivers and uses numerous examples to help you... more

This chapter provides in-depth coverage of the three main types of event receivers and uses numerous examples to help you gain the skills you need to implement your own event receivers. The chapter starts with list event receivers, which enable you to respond to events that SharePoint lists fire. Next, item event receivers are discussed. You can use these event receivers to execute custom code in response to events that a list item raises. Finally, the chapter looks at web event receivers, which enable you to run custom code when a site fires a specified event.

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SharePoint Web parts work on top of the ASP.NET Web Parts Framework. As such, this chapter begins with an overview of the... more

SharePoint Web parts work on top of the ASP.NET Web Parts Framework. As such, this chapter begins with an overview of the ASP.NET Web Parts Framework and its components. The main goal of this overview is three-fold. First, the ASP.NET Web Parts Framework is the foundation upon which the SharePoint Web parts are built. Second, SharePoint extends and replaces some of the extensible components of the ASP.NET Web Parts Framework. These extensibility points and replacements are pointed out during the overview. Third, some aspects of the ASP.NET Web Parts Framework are not applicable in SharePoint. These differences are pointed out during the overview as well.

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Role-based security works by using the roles in which an authenticated user is to authorize what the user can and cannot... more

Role-based security works by using the roles in which an authenticated user is to authorize what the user can and cannot access. Such a user-centric authorization mechanism assumes that as long as the user is authorized everything should be working as it was configured. This overlooks the fact that a trustworthy user normally executes pieces of code coming from different sources. These pieces of code execute under the trustworthy user’s security context. Some of these pieces of code could be malicious, and others might have bugs that could be used by malicious code to mount an attack. Still others may have bugs that could cause the code to do things that it is not authorized to do. The security problems in these situations do not stem from the fact that the user is untrustworthy or malicious. The security problems arise from the code itself. Code Access Security (CAS) authorizes code, not users, and determines whether a piece of code has the permission to access a protected resource or perform a protected operation. If the code does not have the required permission, the runtime’s security system will not allow the code to access the protected resource or perform the protected operation. Another related issue is the fact that users do need to run code that originates from untrustworthy sources. Code Access Security enables administrators to establish a security context or sandbox where code that originates from variety of sources can execute without compromising the security of the system. In other words, CAS is a solution that prevents untrustworthy code from performing privileged actions.

Code Access Security provides the following important benefits among many others:

• Prevents malicious code from accessing protected resources and performing protected operations

• Prevents malicious code from using trustworthy code to access protected resources and operations

• Prevents a bug in trustworthy code from getting unauthorized access to protected resources and operations

• Enables users to execute code originating from a variety of untrustworthy sources within a security sandbox established by the local security policy

• Allows you to trust code to varying degrees based on the identity of the code, which also includes the location where the code originated. In other words, the trust is not all or nothing. There are degrees of trust based on the identity of the code. This minimizes the amount of code that you have to fully trust.

• Minimizes the likelihood that malicious code can take advantage of the vulnerabilities of your trustworthy code because you can explicitly specify not only what permissions your code must be granted to operate properly but also what permission your code should never be granted. This reduces your liability.

As you’ll see in this chapter, CAS plays a fundamental role in SharePoint Web part solutions. This chapter provides in-depth coverage of CAS and shows how to take advantage of it in your own code.

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This chapter provides in-depth coverage of the SharePoint deployment, allowing you to learn how to package your SharePoint... more

This chapter provides in-depth coverage of the SharePoint deployment, allowing you to learn how to package your SharePoint solution in a single deployment package and deploy it as a single unit.

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Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a major challenge facing any corporation that needs to integrate data from a... more

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a major challenge facing any corporation that needs to integrate data from a disparate array of Line of Business (LOB) applications into a unified presentation layer. This presentation layer in this case is a SharePoint portal site. The Business Data Catalog (BDC) enables a SharePoint portal site to bring in business data from various database and web service LOB applications and expose them as if they were SharePoint data. This enables the users of the SharePoint portal site to view data from these back-end database and web service LOB applications, as if they were viewing SharePoint data.

All you need to do is add metadata for your database or web service LOB application to the BDC metadata repository. This metadata must describe everything that the BDC needs to know to fetch the business data from the LOB application including how to connect to the application, which methods to call on the application to fetch the business data, and which parameters to pass into these methods. Because the BDC is implemented as a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) shared service, metadata is stored in the Share Services database, which is a standard SQL Server database. This database contains tables where metadata is stored. As you can see, the metadata for a LOB application is stored as relational data.

The BDC introduces a special XML markup language that you can use to describe a database or web service LOB application in XML format. The XML file that contains this XML document is known as a BDC application definition file because it defines or describes the LOB application to the BDC. This chapter provides in-depth coverage of this XML markup language and its associated schema.

Once the metadata for a LOB application is added to the metadata repository, the BDC automatically takes care of establishing a connection to the back-end LOB application and fetching the business data without a single line of code on your part. The BDC automatically takes care of everything for you.

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