Developer’s Toolset for #SP2013 – Add MVC and mix in Razor!

The clear message from Microsoft for SharePoint 2013 development is a move to the app model. Here’s an introduction:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj164084.aspx
. SharePoint 2013 apps moves your code assemblies out of the SharePoint platform and into separate web applications. There are two reason for this:

1. A requirement for a more stable SharePoint platform. If you’re running SharePoint across your organization you don’t want badly written applications impacting reliability.

2. In Office 365 you can only add assemblies in sandboxed solutions. However, because of the very constrained subset of the SharePoint API available to such solutions their functionality is limited. Now, Office 365 will use functionality provided by SharePoint apps.

The move to SharePoint 2013 brings SharePoint 2013 developers fully back into the ASP.NET development  fold. In particular, MVC with Razor greatly simplifies web application development. You will be using the SharePoint Client Object Model to access SharePoint objects from your app.

Here are some links that help you get started with building SharePoint 2013 apps:

• How to: Create high-trust apps for SharePoint 2013 using the server-to-server protocol: 
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179901
  . Essential for building on-premise SharePoint 2013 apps.
• Building ASP.NET MVC Based SharePoint Cloud Apps: 
  http://www.ilovesharepoint.com/2012/07/building-aspnet-mvc-based-sharepoint.html
  . A number of steps in this guide are automatically performed with Visual Studio 2012 released version.
• ASP.NET MVC 4: 
  http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/mvc-4
  . An excellent introduction to get you up to speed with ASP.NET MVC with Razor.

 

 

 

Disappointing – SharePoint 2013 single server install failures

SharePoint 2013 is now at RTM and available for preview. It’s disappointing that a default, single server install has issues that occur often and predictably, even on a clean Windows 2012 Server install. Of course, we expect errors and problems, especially with early release software. However, the default install should just work at this stage of the product lifecycle.

There are several blog posts that describe how to correct these issues. This is one of the better ones: 
http://squidpip.com/blog/sharepoint-2013-preview-configuration/
.

Also, there’s a deployment guide from Microsoft which can be found here: 
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx
?id=30384 . Be prepared though, it’s 675 pages long!

Assembly deployment to “bin” virtual folder deprecated in SharePoint 2013

For some time now deploying assemblies in the “bin” folder in virtual folders under inetpub has been frowned on in SharePoint. Well, it’s now deprecated in SharePoint 2013 and an attempt to do this will cause Install-SPSolution to fail.

If you really, really, have to you can use the -FullTrustBinDeployment parameter to allow this behavior. However, you should really look to deploy assemblies to the GAC.

SharePoint 2013 – Links get Promoted!

SharePoint 2013 now has links that animate when the user moves the mouse over them:

These are implemented by creating a “Promoted Links” list. You can create your own promoted links list:

• Select Settings + Add an app
• Click the Promoted Links  app (which is actually a list template):

• Enter a name for the new list and click Create :

Once the list is created, items can be added to define each of the promoted links:

You can see that the item has a title, a URL for the image, a description showed when the icon is moused over and the target URL. The Prompted List has a “Tiles” view that will display the items in the list using the animated images:

And when moused over the image animates:

Of course, the Tiles view can be displayed in a Web Part that can be included on any ASPX page. So, easy to get a Metro type feel in your applications.

Sign in as Different User and SharePoint 2013

It’s been noted that the “Sign in as a Different User” menu command is missing in SharePoint 2013 (e.g., see 
http://dirkvandenberghe.com/2012/07/18/sharepoint-2013-login-as-a-different-user.html
).

One suggestion for a fix can be found here: 
http://www.little.org/blog/2012/07/17/launch-your-web-browser-as-another-user/
.

This “Sign in as Different User” menu item is very useful when testing applications, but it can lead to problems especially when opening documents, say in Microsoft Word. So, it may be for these reasons that the option has been removed in SharePoint 2013.

You can add the menu item back in, but I would suggest only doing this on test or development SharePoint servers. To do this, repeat this edit on all servers in your SharePoint farm:

• Locate the file \15\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\Welcome.ascx and open in a text editor.
• Add the following element before the existing element with the id of “ID_RequestAccess”:

<SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server" ID="ID_LoginAsDifferentUser"
 Text="<%$Resources:wss,personalactions_loginasdifferentuser%>"
 Description="<%$Resources:wss,personalactions_loginasdifferentuserdescription%>"
 MenuGroupId="100"
 Sequence="100"
 UseShortId="true"
 />

• Save the file.

Now, the menu item shall be displayed:

While loops in SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflows

Two types of workflows are available in SharePoint 2013:

• SharePoint 2010 Workflows: Traditional SharePoint workflows using Workflow Foundation classes with .NET 3.5
• SharePoint 2013 Workflows: Windows Azure Workflow server with .NET 4.0 (see 
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163181(v=office.15).aspx
   for an overview and 
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163276(v=office.15).aspx
   for installation instruction).

The good news is when running SharePoint 2013 Workflows you can create while loops in SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows. Here’s how they look.

Once you’ve opened a site and a list in SharePoint Designer 2013 you can create a new List Workflow:

 

The “Create List Workflow” dialog allows you to select the platform for the workflow – you must select SharePoint 2013 Workflow to enable the loop option:

Now the ribbon will display a new button “Loop” with two available loop:

And so loops can now be added to the workflow:

Joy of joys!  Of course, enabling while loops in SharePoint Designer 2010 is much more difficult – you can find one solution here:  
http://nickgrattan.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/while-loops-in-sharepoint-designer-workflows/

 

 

SharePoint 2013: Standalone Installation Issue

OK, so you’ve downloaded the SharePoint 2013 Preview and tried to do a standalone installation – and get an error “Failed to connect to the configuration database” and “Service running under Network Service account in workgroup environment is not supported”. 

This is apparently to do with the the AppFrabic caching service. Well, “TomBlog””s already sorted the problem: 
http://tomblog.insomniacminds.com/2012/07/17/sharepoint-2013-standalone-installation-issue/comment-page-1/#comment-80831
. Thanks – great work.

SharePoint 2013 Download and Training Materials

Can now be found here: 
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/fp142366

Lots of PowerPoints and presentations and evaluation download of SharePoint 2013 Server and Foundation.

Even More SharePoint 2013 Snippets

See here: 
http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2012/03/31/sharepoint-2013-features-and-resources/
. There’s an additional list of resources at the end of this post.

Note: 16.Enable workflow looping in SharePoint Designer, eliminating the need for the Visual Studio development environment for that function.

Well, at last! Our Action Pack (see here) has been providing a work around for a number of years, but a platform supported solution is most welcome.

Update: Confirmed, they are supported but only with Azure Workflows, see: 
http://nickgrattan.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/while-loops-in-sharepoint-designer-2013-workflows/

More SharePoint 2013 Snippets

Take a look here: 
http://jeffreypaarhuis.com/2012/03/12/whats-new-in-sharepoint-15-sharepoint-2013/

The “App” support section is perhaps the most interesting here, particularly since it can be scoped at the organization level.

Also , the ability to have custom SQL Server databases for these Apps is very important. Even with the SharePoint 2010 list relationship features using multiple SharePoint lists doesn’t really compare to relational database functionality.

Of course, this is all pure conjecture…