SharePoint

Visual Studio 2010 ships with new SharePoint Developer Tools that simplify the process of developing solutions for the SharePoint platform. Using nothing more than the standard functionality provided with the tools you can rapidly create custom solution by focusing on the real work instead of the plumbing. There are however things that you still have to do by hand.

Recently I published a new extended version of the Content Query Web Part. I extended the SharePoint 2010 version of CQWP with support for paging the results which is one of the things that our customers ask for very often. But that’s not the end of the extensibility possibilities of the CQWP. In this version I extended the Imtech Content Query Web Part even further by adding additional capabilities which make working with the CQWP even easier. Introducing: Imtech Content Query Web Part v14.2!

The first difference that I saw, was the installation size. In Beta 2 my configuration was around 3.7GB, in RC it increased to 4.2GB! Still, the Release Candidate makes it worth every MB, because it’s lightning fast! The Add reference window is “just there” and the whole IDE just feels very very responsive: great work VS team!

One of the coolest and probably most frequently used Web Parts in SharePoint 2007 was the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) – a great control that allowed you to display content aggregations to the users. Although it was pretty awesome, it had some serious drawbacks like for example the lack of a paging mechanism – something that almost every single Web Content Management project that I worked on required. Three years later in SharePoint 2010 the CQWP got a facelift and shipped with some seriously cool features like slots and the Content to Content concept. Unfortunately still no sign of paging. So what if you want to create an aggregation of your content and page the contents? Do you have to create a custom and bad performing Web Part? Not really… Introducing Imtech Content Query Web Part v14!