Customizing SharePoint 2010 List Forms with InfoPath 2010

In Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, list forms were regular ASP.NET pages serving as the visual interfaces to add an item to, or edit or display an item in, that list. Typically, list forms were defined in the list template and instantiated upon the creation of a new list instance. Although there are several ways to replace the out-of-the-box list forms (DispForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx, and NewForm.aspx) with custom ASPX pages each approach introduces its own challenges.

One of the exciting features in InfoPath 2010 is the ability to extend or enhance the forms used by SharePoint lists for creating, editing, or showing list items. Today, you can modify list forms layouts, set validation rules, or create additional views using little or no code. When you are finished modifying the list forms, reflecting your changes back to SharePoint is just a matter of using the one-click publishing capability that comes out of the box with the list form.

Customizing the SharePoint 2010 Search User Experience

While the SharePoint 2010 Search out-of-the-box user interface is very intuitive and useful for information workers, power users can create their own search experiences. SharePoint Server 2010 includes many search-related web parts for power users to create customized search experiences, including Best Bets, refinement panel extensions, featured content, and predefined queries. Figure 6-21 shows the standard Search web parts.

IT pros or developers can configure the built-in search web parts to tailor the search experience. As a developer, you can also extend the web parts, to change the behavior of built-in web parts on search results pages. Instead of building new web parts, developers can build onto the functionality of existing ones.

Setting Up Your Sharepoint 2010 Development Environment

Before you can start SharePoint 2010 development, you need to set up your development environment. There are some new twists with SharePoint 2010 when it comes to the development environments that it supports. One of these twists is that SharePoint can run, for development purposes, on a desktop OS such as Vista or Windows 7. The other twist is that SharePoint, at the time of writing, supports only the .NET Framework 3.5, which will require some extra configuration on your part when you’re building applications and could cause some gotchas if you forget to target the 3.5 framework.

Excerpt from Professional Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Using Microsoft Silverlight 2 

By Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs

The first thing you need to do is create a simple Silverlight control. In this case, you will create a very simple control that has a textbox and a button. You could also use one of the controls you created in one of the previous chapters or download one of the samples from http://silverlight.net/. The example uses the most basic control possible so that you can focus on the interactions with SharePoint. In this case, we will not get into the XAML very much but focus on using the visual designers or Visual Studio and Expression Blend to do most of the work.