Business Connectivity Services (BCS) are the   upgraded version of Business Data Catalog  from SharePoint Server 2007. BCS allow you to connect your SharePoint based content with external data (often called LOB Data – Line Of B... [More]

Up till now, we have published two blogs in this series about SharePoint 2010 external list, Walkthrough of creating a SharePoint 2010 external list using Visual Studio 2010 Beta and Walkthrough of enabling CRUD for SharePoint 2010 external lists usi... [More]

I see many users progressing along the adoption timeline with SharePoint: they begin slowly, uploading a few documents, and then progress to using workflows and forms and ultimately wanting to surface external data on their site. It isn’t until you s... [More]

The new packaging and deployment stuff for SharePoint 2010 is certainly a lot better than VSeWSS but there are a few things missing, such as the ability to add a WCF service as a project item. One of these days I’ll build a template to do it but for now here’s a quick step by step guide.

Add SVC file to Layouts folder
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Creating custom workflow activities for use in Visual Studio is all fine and well but what happens if we want to make those activities available within SharePoint Designer? Thankfully the process is pretty straightforward.

Since SharePoint Designer is a client tool, it’s designed to run remotely as opposed to on the SharePoint Server. As a result of this, when determining which workflow action should be available for use on a particular site, SharePoint Designer connects to the server to retrieve a list of available actions. The list of actions is stored at %SPRoot%\Template\1033\Workflow. In this folder there are a number of .actions files, each containing Xml that defines the actions that are available and how they should be configured.

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Develop Custom Workflow Activity for SharePoint 2010 Workflow
In this article, I’d be discussing the steps to create a custom workflow activity for SharePoint 2010. The need for custom workflow activity arises, when the out-of-box workflow activities do not suffice our requirement. The functionality of developing a custom activity for SharePoint 2010 Workflow is not a new feature in SharePoint 2010. This was available in SharePoint 2007, which is now continued to SharePoint 2010. Once the custom workflow activity is created, it can be made available for use inside SharePoint Designer 2010.

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SharePoint 2010 comes with several inbuilt workflow templates, such as one for document approval. Sometimes these templates are not suitable and new workflows need to be created.  You can do this in one of the following ways: Using the Share... [More]

After every seminar I give, people come up and say: “you’re the SharePoint Workflow guy – explain it to me in 3 minutes”.  Here’s what you need to know: SharePoint 2010 workflows can: Automate common business steps Help manage long-runn... [More]

With Microsoft Visio Premium 2010, you can create a workflow in Visio and then export it to Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. Business analysts and process analysts who are already familiar with flowcharting in Visio can use Visio to design a workf... [More]

ASP.NET Web Pages with Razor syntax is a programming framework for creating Web applications. It is included as part of Microsoft WebMatrix, which is a free development environment that includes a database (SQL Server Compact) and a Web server for te... [More]