Recently I've worked on a small Silverlight application that targets Sharepoint 2010 file operations (copy, move, delete, …).

Sharepoint 2010 has a lot of great enhancements compare to Sharepoint 2007 but still lacks of basic file operations facilities (e.g. if you want to copy a file from a doclib to another doclib, you must give the URL of the destination doclib).

This V 0.1 of Sharepoint 2010 SilverXplorer currently only offers files & folders browsing.

Here is how the application looks like inside of Sharepoint :

Here is how the loading progress looks:

To change the Sharepoint site, click the button and choose a new site URL:

To go inside a folder, just click it!

To go up, click the button.

You can also use it in an out of browser way (with elevated trust).

On the Silverlight side, the new Sharepoint 2010 Client Object Model has been used.

If you take a look at the code, you'll also note that I've used a Resource Dictionary & Merged Dictionaries for styles and states and that I'm playing a lot with states (I like them!).

Sharepoint queries were optimized by Mathieu Gretry who joined the project!

To download the V 0.1 of the XAP or to access the source code, just go to : http://spsilverxplorer.codeplex.com/

Imagine this scenario :

• You've built a Silverlight application with the out-of-browser feature.
• This application is installed on multiple computers.
• You may work with your Silverlight app without being connected.
• You want to avoid complex sync programming and you don't want to use server-side data service(s).

In this scenario, you need to work with a local repository to persist your data. Keep it simple and let's consider an XML file to serialize your data (for more complex scenario, this article may be a source of inspiration).

But… Implementing a data sync pattern may lead to headache.

How to avoid writing a server sync service, a (proprietary?) client agent (with a nice data changes detection), and how to remain the less system-dependant as possible?

Others have done it for you with Dropbox!

Simply said, Dropbox "is software that syncs your files online and across your computers".

Dropbox is stable, secure and very seamless. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

For more information about it and if you want to register, go here (and, at your turn, invite your friends to earn more space).

So, come back to our Silverlight OOB application. Here is then my architecture suggestion:

You can try it with this application : DropboxSLOOB

To use it :

• Install the application on your computer (out-of-browser with elevated privileges) clicking the button

  

• Your Dropbox folder MUST be installed in your "My Documents" folder.
• Create a small XML file in your Dropbox folder, copy this :

  <? xml version ="1.0"encoding="utf-8"?>

  < Items >

  < Item data ="This is an item data" />

  < Item data ="This is another item data" />

  < Item data ="efefe" />

  </ Items >

Now you can get your items and create new ones. And if you try to use another computer with the same application, you'll see that your data is synced! 

To download this test application and the test XML file (it's inside the Visual Studio project), go here.

This application is made under VS 2010 RC with SL 4.0 RC.

Once you've installed Office Web App on your Sharepoint 2010 Beta 2 (on a single server farm in my case), you may encounter the message "an error has occurred" when you try to open an office document in Office Web App.

Don't forget to activate the Office Web App feature on your site collections if you want to avoid that :

• Go into the "Site Actions" of your site collection

• In the "Site Collection Administration", select the "Site collection features"

• Activate the "Office Web Apps" Feature :

And have fun with this very nice feature!

Good news for RIA lovers : Silverlight is now really present in Sharepoint 2010!

Here is the message you may read if you go to the menu "More Options" of the Site Actions menu if you don't have Silverlight installed.

That doesn't mean that you can't do anything but here is how the options dialog looks like :

If you install the Silverlight plug-in, here is the new look of this dialog :

It's hard to show with a snapshot but this new presentation is really nice, with small animations and fluent navigation.

More than that, Microsoft added a new Silverlight Web Part. It has never been so easy to run a Silverlight application inside Sharepoint.

To use this Web Part, simply edit a Web Part page and add a new Web Part.

In the categories, choose Media and Content and then the Silverlight Web Part :

A new dialog will then appear asking for the silverlight XAP URL :

Enter the URL of a XAP (hosted in a document library, in the 14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS folder or anywhere else). In my case, I'll reuse a Silverlight XAP hosted in the IIS hosting my blog.

Here is the result :

Of course, you can modify the URL, appearance, layout and other stuffs in the editor part.

If time permits, I'll write another post about the new Client Object Model an how to use it in a Silverlight application.

During my holidays, I installed the Sharepoint Server 2010 public beta.

It's quite heavy to run it in a VM. I finally installed it using VirtualBox on a W7 64 bits computer with 4 GB RAM. It's far from the ideal speed but it's usable.

I won't go through the Central Administration here. I just created a Web Application, a site collection and a site. This is more comfortable with the new Central Administration:

I then created a Team Site in this site collection. All of that is quite similar to what we do in WSS 3.0./Sharepoint 2007.

When your site is created, and if you've the right permissions to do it, the easier way to create a document library is to use the site actions menu:

In this list of actions, you'll find the action "New Document Library.

If you click on it, you'll not be lost if you already know Sharepoint 2007/WSS 3.0.

Once a document library is created, we can meet the new ribbon of Sharepoint 2010. This ribbon is, of course, contextual.

For a document library, we can observe 2 linked tabs : a Documents tab and a Library tab.

The Documents tab is used for all the features linked to documents : check out, check in, versions, permissions, workflows, …

The Library tab is used for all the features linked to the library itself : views, settings, connections, exports, permissions, …

As for WSS 3.0/Sharepoint 2007, a contextual menu is available on a file saved in a document library:

Yes, there will be a Silverlight Webpart in Sharepoint 2010.

This is announced there : http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

By the way, a lot of other Sharepoint 2010 stuffs are previewed there. The root site is : http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

I don't see any big revolution in this small preview (*the day after* the biggest revolution is in the Sharepoint Object Model available in Silverlight... See a later post!) on the sneak peek site but wait and see…

See you later!