Development

Custom Controls are invaluable when working with Web Content Management solutions on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Unfortunately they are pretty inconvenient to use with large portions of HTML markup. Find out how to create better controls in SharePoint 2010.

It is a common best practice, while working with the SharePoint server API, to always use context objects whenever possible. Because they have been already instantiated by SharePoint itself, reusing context data doesn’t cause additional calls to the database and allows you to create good performing solutions. However, just because you use SPContext.Current in your code, doesn’t mean your solution is built properly.

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools simplify working with SharePoint 2010 projects. By introducing SharePoint Project Items (SPIs) the tools hide the internals of creating SharePoint packages and allow you to focus on the real work. However, when you start moving SPIs around, things might get complicated and break. Find out how to prevent yourself from spending hours on fixing stuff using the standard functionality of the new developer tools.

SharePoint 2010 contains Developer Dashboard which can be invaluable in optimizing custom solutions for performance. By default the Developer Dashboard is visible only to authenticated users, but sometimes you might want to show it to anonymous users as well. Sounds insane? Find out why you would want it and how to do it.

In MOSS 2007 solutions one of the fixes to get cleaner and more accessible HTML markup was to remove Web Part tables using Control Adapters. Because SharePoint 2010 allows us to insert Web Parts in content there is more to this challenge. Find out what has changed and how to deal with it in SharePoint 2010.