Development

A couple of weeks ago I have added some new functionality to the Imtech Fields Explorer: generating wrapper classes allowing you to work with Site Columns and Content Types in an intuitive way. Just when I thought that it couldn't get any better I thought of something new: how about generating Page Layouts?!

If you've been following my Facebook updates, you probably noticed that I started working on a brand new SharePoint Web Content Management (WCM) solution. Just to prevent myself from from any dependencies whatsoever I have decided to use a brand new development environment. I've been developing for SharePoint for more than a year and a half now and I got really surprised seeing how many different tools I'm using while developing SharePoint solutions to simplify the process.

While working on new functionality for Imtech Fields Explorer I have noticed that there are Web Services in SharePoint 2007 which are missing the DISCO and the WSDL files. If you ever tried to attach a web reference to such Web Service you know that it will fail. While you might think that it's impossible, I have found a way of creating a WSDL file for an existing Web Service.

While testing the newest feature of Imtech Fields Explorer - generated Content Types and Site Columns wrapper classes I have discovered that there were some issues while using these classes for referring to Site Columns. To avoid problems while referring to Site Columns from custom code I have decided to use SPField.Id instead of SPField.InternalName. While generating wrapper classes Imtech Fields Explorer v1.4.1.0 will now use the InternalName for the property name and Id for the value:

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3 introduces the concept of Site Columns: reusable fields which can be used for creating content definition across the whole Site Collection. While this concept allows you to manage the way content is stored, you have to be really careful when working with Site Columns in custom development.