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January 16, 2007
MOSS 2007 Trainwreck Coming
I finally found a tutorial on creating custom WebParts for MOSS 2007 (How's that for a "friendly" URL?). Now before we go further, I should answer the question you're thinking; "Why would an accomplished programmer and all around superior thinker like you need a tutorial?" To which I reply that because I'm working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, a.k.a. MOSS 2007, before its official release date there are presently no authoritative docs. And while I certainly could poke around and attempt to synthesize my .NET and MCMS knowledge into a workable solution there's no guarantee that the methodologies I choose will be supported by MS. So I'm reduced to scrounging for tutorials released by MS "partners" who have better access to the next version of MOSS or more spare time than I.
To return to the main thrust of this post, I found a tutorial on using Visual Studio to build custom controls for MOSS. These are the fiddly bits that display data on web pages and whatnot. It's important to be able to create customized versions of these because the Microsoft provided versions are so over-engineered as to be practically useless. The tutorial was written in English by someone (Mart Muller) who's first language is Danish. Aside from the delicious cheese filling, there is no cross-over between the English and Danish languages. For the most part Mart does an excellent job of writing in his second tongue, and manages to convey the technical details of the project with some measure of clarity. After skimming over the article once, I decided that it was worth working through the outlined process. Besides, Mart included screenshots to help clarify things...
So I'm working through the steps; new project - check, add a reference - check, inherit from some class or other - no check. Better review the screenshot to make sure I'm inheriting properly. When I click the image the picture starts loading slowly. Slowly? But I'm on a UC network connection. We're, like, hooked into the backbone line of the 'net directly. Once the image finished loading I pulled up its properties, the two salient ones for this discussion are image type and size being:
- Bitmap and
- 1.7 megabytes.
Who uses bitmaps to display screenshot data (everyone knows that PNGs will do a much better job)? And who posts 1.7 meg images? Is Mart just being rude? Does he not realize his faux pas? Using an inappropriate image format and annoyingly large size makes me question the validity of the rest of the post. Like, why does he recommend using the Global Assembly Cache to house the compiled DLL? Isn't that an overly complex configuration for testing such a simple class? And, if this is what Microsoft "Gold Partners" are turning out, I see some very serious problems in the future for this application. When the best case studies available are, perhaps, less than stellar, business users will be lost. Their sites will crash. End of story.
Except it's not quite the end. I should note that I was able to implement a custom webpart by following Mart's instructions, and ignoring his screenshots. Unfortunately I haven't gotten the SharePoint to acknowledge the presence of that webpart yet. sigh
Posted by ashusta at January 16, 2007 03:49 PM