Windows 8

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Windows 8 is coming, and I wanted to say something to set people's expectations right.  I think it'll help people align their views and appreciate this new version, if they choose to upgrade.

Don't expect Windows 8 to be Windows 7 plus more shiny new stuff.  Windows 8 was never designed in the same sense that Windows 7 was actually just Windows Vista plus more polish.  If you install Windows 8 thinking to get a minor update, you will be shocked.

Windows 8 is actually a completely different beast.  Designed with different goals altogether.  It just happens to run Windows (Windows 7) applications.

But at its core, Windows 8 is a different thing.

 

Historically, there was a suitable analogy, Microsoft build Windows NT to be the better kernel going forward, and combined the two systems streams (95, 98, ME) and (NT, 2000) finally into the same stream from XP.  Windows 2000 was vastly different beast from Windows 95, because it was fundamentally a different system, it just happened to run the old Windows 95 apps.

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne 2012

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I had a great time in Melbourne and presented my session on Building Custom REST services and consuming them with jQuery AJAX.  Thank you for attending my session and listen to me ranting for an hour.

 

As promised, there are a number of links:

 

There are a few things I missed:

On 2007, you can't easily deploy WCF or REST services to a 2007 installation.  But you can still use Javascript to talk to SharePoint 2007's built in WCF services.  Check:

For 2013, the WCF/REST solutions work fine.  I had a quick test and took some screenshots.

For DataService (ADO.NET / exposing Entity Framework via REST service), see the last feature in the demo project.

 

Drop me a comment if you want to ask me about anything specific and I'd love to geek out!

T: @johnnliu

E: john.liu at sharepointgurus.net

SP2013 Custom services deploys and runs on v15

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I fired up my SP2013 VM to do some simple tests tonight, I wanted to know if the REST services that I've built and demo'ed for SharePoint 2010 would run in SP2013.  Technically, they should.

So I deployed:

  • stsadm -o addsolution -filename .\SPGSvcWp.wsp
  • stsadm -o deploysolution -name SPGSvcWp.wsp -local -allowgacdeployment -allcontenturls

 

The files are copied to the services OK.

Deployed to ISAPI folder (_vti_bin)

image

 

DataService

image

 

REST service

image

SOAP service

image

 

Activate the features for the webpart:

image

 

Add the Web Part to the page:

image

 

The javascript needs a small modification - since the page in 2013 is loaded asynchronously.  But once I've re-attached the click event, the REST service itself works fine and returns the properties of the selected item.

The SharePoint Pinterest-style Image Library

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A picture is worth a thousand words.

 

In the latest version of spaspa.codeplex.com, I created a separate Knockout Template and bind the Images library (BaseTemplateID 851) to it.  Then I inserted a simple jQuery Plugin Wookmark https://github.com/GBKS/Wookmark-jQuery

The end result is that when we have pictures, they are displayed in an awesome layout.

As an added bonus, I'm calculating the thumbnail image from SharePoint, so instead of rendering:

http://spg-dev-jl/PublishingImages/wallpaper_08.jpg

image

Original: 78K

I'm rendering

http://spg-dev-jl/PublishingImages/_w/wallpaper_08_jpg.jpg

image

Thumbnail image generated by SharePoint.  Which is a far smaller file - 16k.

 

Next update, I'll try to resolve those pesky SharePoint users and get the correct user name and picture.  So we don't have Mr. Bill Gates staring back at us! ;-)