This is the first article in a series focusing on WSS 3.0 development using Visual Studio 2008. This article is for beginners who are quite new to SharePoint web part development and want to learn about configuring WSS 3.0, developing web parts using Visual Studio 2008, deploying and publishing web parts and finally debugging a web part.
The entire source code for this article is available in the form of a free downloadable zip file. The solution was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1. I didn’t really test it in any other environment. I request that you post in the discussion area if you have any problems in execution.
Configuring WSS 3.0: Create Sample web site and site collection
Once you have installed WSS 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Extensions from the previous URLs provided, you can go through the following steps to create a sample web site and web page where our web parts can be tested.
NOTE: Once WSS is installed, the default web site (in IIS) gets stopped and the WSS web site runs on port 80 of IIS.
Go to http://localhost/default.aspx.
Go to Site Actions || Create
Select “Sites and Workspaces.”
In the “New Sharepoint Site” page, provide the Title, Description and URL name as follows, select “Blank Site” as the template and finally hit “Create.”
Once new web site gets created, go to the web site and go to Site Actions || Create.
Select “Document Library.”
Provide details for the new document library as follows,
and create it.
Configuring WSS 3.0: Create a web part web page
So far, we've created a new WSS site and document library. In this section we will create a web part page.
Once the new site collection gets created, go to that site collection and click on Site Actions || Create.
Select “Web Part Page.”
In the “Create New Web Part” page, provide details as follows.
From the above, you must understand that our custom web parts are being inherited from the “System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart” namespace. Unfortunately, there is no designer support in Visual Studio 2005/2008 for developing SharePoint web parts. Everything must be coded and developed in the same manner as an ASP.NET custom control.
Deploying and publishing a sample web part in WSS 3.0
Visual Studio 2008 has built-in support to deploy web parts directly to a WSS 3.0 site. This integrated approach saves lots of development time and also helps us to debug web parts very easily. Debugging web parts is covered in the last section of this article.
The following steps continue from where we left off.
Using Solution Explorer, right click on project and select “Deploy” as follows.
Open the Sharepoint Web Part page as shown below.
Change the mode to “Edit” by selecting Site Actions || Edit Page.
Click on “Add Web Part” as follows.
Select the deployed web part as shown below,
and click “Add.”
Finally, the web part must be shown as in the image below.
You must note that once a web part is deployed, the IIS gets restarted. This happens every time a web part is deployed using Visual Studio 2008.
The previous web part is a very simple web part which displays a simple message. Let us modify the previous web part to display two labels, two text boxes and a button in a table. Once the user clicks on the button, it should multiply both numbers and give the result in a new label.
Modify your code in the web part so that it looks similar to the following:
As Visual Studio 2008 doesn’t support a designer for developing Sharepoint web parts, we have to create all controls from scratch. We need to create a table having three rows with two columns (to hold six controls). Each of those controls must be added to each of those cells. Finally, the table must be added to page. The following explains how to do this in a step by step manner.
The first step is to create a table to hold all the controls. The following code does the same:
Dim tbl As New Table
Dim tRow1 As New TableRow
Dim tRow2 As New TableRow
Dim tRow3 As New TableRow
The above code creates a new table with three rows (rows are not added to table yet). Next, we need to create cells for each row.
Dim tR1C1 As New TableCell
Dim tR1C2 As New TableCell
Dim tR2C1 As New TableCell
Dim tR2C2 As New TableCell
Dim tR3C1 As New TableCell
Dim tR3C2 As New TableCell
Now we add the cells to their respective rows:
tRow1.Cells.Add(tR1C1)
tRow1.Cells.Add(tR1C2)
tRow2.Cells.Add(tR2C1)
tRow2.Cells.Add(tR2C2)
tRow3.Cells.Add(tR3C1)
tRow3.Cells.Add(tR3C2)
Then we add the rows to the table:
tbl.Rows.Add(tRow1)
tbl.Rows.Add(tRow2)
tbl.Rows.Add(tRow3)
Next, we create instances of the controls, provide values to properties and add event handlers (if any):
In some situations, it will be necessary to debug a web part. In order to make a WSS web part able to be debugged, the web.config of the WSS web site must be modified. The default location of the WSS 3.0 web site will be installed in the following folder:
Open the Web.config file and modify the existing options to look like the following:
Once the web.config is modified, you can directly hit F5 in a Visual Studio environment. If a break point is provided for a line in a button click event, it should stop at the same location, similar to the following:
In this article, we have seen simple SharePoint web part development using Visual Studio 2008 and WSS 3.0. In my upcoming articles, we will see more and more examples of SharePoint development. I hope you enjoyed the article and any suggestions, bugs, errors, enhancements etc. are highly appreciated at http://jagchat.spaces.live.com
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