Intro–InfoPath 2010 Form Design with C# Code-Behind (Part 1 of 2)

Last week I had to create my first InfoPath 2010 form with code-behind for some custom business logic (as the business requirements were explained to me it quickly became apparent that “Rules” available in InfoPath weren’t going to be sufficient).

InfoPath is admittedly not a strong suit for me.  The small amount of interaction I had with it in IP 2007 and MOSS 2007 left me with a feeling that it wasn’t quite ready for prime-time, so I largely ignored it.

I have a new respect though for the most recent incarnation.  InfoPath 2010 is an incredibly powerful tool as I’ve learned.  Here’s Part 1 of a brief 2-part blog post describing how I went about implementing some custom business logic – including data access to a SQL 2008 R2 database – with custom C# code behind an InfoPath 2010 form, rendered as a browser form in SharePoint 2010.

“MySites” in SharePoint 2010

This post simply references a video I recorded for a customer a few months ago.  In it I give a brief overview of some of the new features of “MySites” in SharePoint 2010, and perhaps more importantly, some of the business reasons why these social features actually provide value in the enterprise. 

Many clients I’ve worked with in these early days of deploying SharePoint have chosen to disable the social features of SharePoint 2010.  While I understand the initial impression (“I don’t want Facebook inside my company!”), there is real business value to be gained by many of these features. 

This screencast was recorded as a reference point so my client could revisit some of these business reasons later down the road when they made a final decision about whether or not social features will be enabled for their organization. 

(P.S., I’m also testing Google Alerts to see how quickly this gets picked up!)

Here’s the screencast (thank you Camtasia!):

http://www.screencast.com/users/JonSchultz/folders/Default/media/58e6fb89-f1fd-41a2-990d-a1f022fb3541

 

Jonathon Schultz
mobile: 407.923.4946 | fax: 866.569.2615 | email: jon@jonschultz.com

Team Foundation Server 2010–Work Item Basics

 

Here’s how to create a new bug in TFS, create custom queries, and track them in the SharePoint Foundation Site created for my sample TFS Project.  

Creating and Assigning a Bug (or other type of Work Item)

So most of the time you’ll create and assign bugs from within Visual Studio (within the Team Explorer plug-in for VS2010 to be precise).  So if you expand the tree view of the Team Project you’re working with and right-click “Work Items”, you can choose “New Work Item” > “Bug”:

 

Fill in the details, and assign it to someone (in this case I assigned it to my colleague Kagan):

Now we’re done creating and assigning the bug. 

 

Querying Work Items

If you expand “Work Items” then “Team Queries”, there’s already a bunch of queries to display “My Bugs”, “My Tasks”, etc.  You can also create your own:

In this sample I created a custom query that shows me any type of work item, for any project, assigned to Kagan.  When I click “Run” you can see I get one result:

When I change “Assigned To” to the parameterized “@Me” keyword, I get zero results:

Hit the “Save Query” button and I can save this under “My Queries” (so only I can see the query), or under “Team Queries” so anyone can use it:

Project Dashboard

If I go to the project dashboard site (right-click the Team Project in Team Explorer and choose “Show Project Portal”), it takes me here (http://hqsrv107/sites/DefaultCollection/UTPurchaseOrders/Dashboards/ProjectDashboard_wss.aspx):

On the right side of the screen I can click where it says “1 Bug” and it takes me to a list of all active bugs:

Double-click the bug and we get a window where we can see details of the work item, and make changes if we want.  I’ll change the “Assigned To” field to me and leave a comment.  Then click “Save and Close”:

Now, when I click “My Dashboard” on the left-hand side of SharePoint, the “My Bugs” web part now shows that I have one bug that’s currently active and assigned to me:

 

Jonathon Schultz
mobile: 407.923.4946 | fax: 866.569.2615 | email: jon@jonschultz.com