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:

Here is the second part for my Silverlight Sharepoint contacts coverflow!

In the first part, I created the Silverlight coverflow without any link to Sharepoint.

In this second part, I'll customize my Sharepoint to allow this link.

Here is my updated TOC :

In my previous post :

1. Implement the Silverlight coverflow

In this post post :

1. Customize a sharepoint contacts library

In a next post :

3.    Implement the Sharepoint contacts extraction

4.    Deploy the XAP in Sharepoint

5.    Add the Silverlight application to a Sharepoint page

Customize a sharepoint contacts library

To customize a contacts library, I need, of course, a contact list and a pictures library for the pictures of contacts.

Here is my contact library :

And here is my pictures library :

Now, I must create a column in my contacts list to add a picture to each contact item :

For each contact, I can then add a picture link to the picture library :

And finally, here is the result :

That's all for this time! I guess those steps were easily made if you've already played with Sharepoint!

See you later!

Yesterday, I spent my evening installing MOSS 2007 Enterprise on my Windows 7 RTM laptop.

This is quite easy with the Bamboo Nation's SharepointOnVista.

You just have to follow the guide for Windows Vista : http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

Pay attention that there is a prerequisite that wasn't needed on Windows Vista before starting the installation : http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2009/05/07/installing-wss-3-0-moss-sp2-on-windows-7-rc.aspx

MOSS 2007 is running very well on my laptop (Fujutsu Siemens Lifebook E with a 2.20 Ghz Core 2 T7500 and 4GB Ram – Windows 7 Ultimate X86/3,25 GB of usable RAM – MOSS 2007 Enterprise X86), really better than on Vista Ultimate!

Of course, I just made a basic MOSS setup. Let's see how it will run in a few days/weeks…

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!