BinaryWave WebPart Wrapper

Here it is. Enjoy.

BinaryWave.UserControlWrapper.WP.zip

Catching Up!

Trying to get caught up on some posts today. Read on to see what's going on.

The eGroup == BinaryWave

For reasons to numerous to go into we are re-branding ourselves as BinaryWave. This is fantastic news all around (unified branding in US and UK, finally get a dot com address etc... basically the reasons I said were to numerous above. huh).

So expect to see a new web site along with lots of great content, and maybe a new blogger or two!

BTW, BinaryWave is hiring! We are looking for talented, motivated developers. SharePoint experience is a plus, but by no means a requirement. In fact we would love to get a few junior developers in who have a willingness to learn. BinaryWave is one of the top SharePoint developers in the US and Europe and is a great place to expand your skill set and gain valuable experience. Plus, if you want to travel we have several UK clients that you could visit. And if you don't like to travel that's OK too! In a lot of cases we do all the development in our offices and only visit the clients for meetings and code hand-off. We focus exclusively on SharePoint and applications that integrate into SharePoint. We leave everything else to our partners. You wont spend a lot of time doing install and config either! We ONLY do development. And we have a lot of really great projects for you to work on, so there is never any bench time.

If you are interested, please let us know.

Also, look for myself (Sean) or my boss (Eric) at the Dallas SharePoint User Group meetings and at the UK SharePoint User Group meetings. Feel free to introduce yourselves! We won't bite.

And our new logo!

Custom Work Flows in SharePoint and VS2005

Now a topic near and dear to my heart. And it's only that way because writing the first one almost killed me ;-)

There is not a lot of (ie not any) documentation out the for doing custom work flows in MOSS and using custom ASPX forms for the instantiation, association etc... forms. Well we (AKA BinaryWave, AKA The eGroup) have done all the hard work for you! We have developed a custom work flow in VS2005 for SharePoint, and developed some custom ASPX forms for use with the work flow. This should be great news for those of you who do NOT want to use InfoPath forms. More to come...

(if you can't wait, leave me a comment and I will respond!)

Using User Controls in SharePoint 200x

I am a huge fan of using user controls in SharePoint. It makes the developers life easier since most good .Net devs should be VERY familiar with the concept. You get the UI designer in Visual Studio to make layout and placement of controls much easier. This can also lead to a richer user experience.

Now getting those user controls wrapped up in a web part and deployed is not always the easiest thing in the world. Thanks to the great Jan Tielens you can use the SmartPart. The SmartPart is great and I used it a lot when I was first starting out in SharePoint development. However I soon ran into situations where the SmartPart was not appropriate. Plus I hate to use third party controls where I don't have access to the source so I can really tweak it out. (*Note, Jan has released the source to at least a few versions of SmartPart so you can check out how he did things too!) So inspired by the great work done by Jan I decided to write my own web part that encapsulates user controls. I have used this part on several projects with great success. I will be releasing a sample project that contains a basic working sample of the techniques required to host a user control. This should be ready in the next few days.

Let me know if there are any specific needs and I will try and address them in the release, or in a follow-up release.