| As Somasegar announced last week, Microsoft has just released the RTM version of the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012, which are available here: OfficeDevToolsForVS2012. These tools provide many useful templates, and IDE extensions for developing Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 apps and solutions. It was already available a Preview 2 version of the tools, since the last SharePoint Conference 2012 (SPC12) in Las Vegas. About the areas of investment and improvement - between the Preview 2 and the RTM versions of the product – a key role is played by the workflow development tools. For those of you, who already played or developed workflows for SharePoint 2013, using the Preview 2 version of the tools, here are the main changes and the new features introduced, for your convenience. - The workflow Initiation Form item template has been rewritten. Now supports both list workflows, and site workflows. Moreover, in the Preview 2 there was a partial sample of supporting the server side People Picker control, now this sample has been removed. Just in case, you should use the new client-side People Picker. You can find further information at the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj713593.aspx.
- It has been introduced a template for the workflow Association Form.
- All the activities available in the Preview 2 version under the “SP – Condition” category (CreatedBy, CreatedInRange, IsValidUser, ModifiedBy, ModifiedInRange, WordsInTitle) have been removed.
- The GetCurrentItemGuid activity has been replaced by the GetCurrentItemId, which now returns an ID of type Int32, instead of a GUID.
- The GetCurrentListId activity has been removed.
- Now, while configuring activities, you have the option to choose implicit values like (current item) or (current list).
- The SetField activity has been removed.
- The LookupSPListItemProperty activity has been removed.
- The SingleTask and CompositeTask activities now provide custom designers for configuring their properties, and have a lot of pre-configured properties.
- The LookupSPPrincipalProperty activity has been removed.
- The LookupSPUserProperty activity has been removed.
- It has been added a new activity with name AppOnlySequence, which is almost the same as the App Step available in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2013.
- It has been introduced the DelayUntil activity.
- It has been introduced the LookupSPChoiceFieldIndex activity.
- In the messaging fields, have been removed the Subscribe and Unsubscribe activities.
Without any shadow of doubt, the designers for SingleTask and CompositeTask activities are huge improvements. Here you can see a screen shot of the SingleTask activity designer. 
Another interesting thing to be aware of, even if it was already available before RTM, is the availability of a workflow debugger, which allows you to debug workflow definitions running within SharePoint 2013, providing a debugger-oriented Workflow Manager engine. So far, that’s what I discovered inspecting the RTM version of the tools. Of course, in case of any errors or misunderstandings, please drop me a comment and I will be glad to discussa about them. In my upcoming book “Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Developer Reference” (Available on Amazon for preo-rdering, as well as in Early Release on O’Reilly) I cover the workflow topics within 4 chapters: - Chapter 15 - Windows Workflows Foundation Overview
- Chapter 16 - SharePoint Workflows Fundamentals
- Chapter 17 - Developing Workflows
- Chapter 18 - Advanced Workflows
There, you will find a great deal of information and samples about developing workflows in farm-level solutions, SharePoint apps, developing custom task and task forms, creating custom activities and managing workflows using the new Workflow Services Manager. |
| In order to validate credit card numbers, you can leverage a kind of CRC (cyclic redundancy check) known with name LUHN from the name of its inventor. The algorithm is for example documented at the following URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm. On the Internet, you will find tons of code samples for validating credit card numbers using this algorithm. However, starting from .NET 4.5 there is a native class called CreditCardAttribute, which is available in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace, and which is useful for validating credit card numbers. Here is a code excerpt to use it: class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
CreditCardAttribute cc = new CreditCardAttribute();
var result = cc.IsValid("4111-1111-1111-1111");
Console.WriteLine("Card valid? {0}", result);
}
}
Enjoy! |
| Thanks everybody for attending my session about Windows Azure ACS in .NET and Windows Store Apps, yesterday at the Community Days 2013 in Microsoft Italy. Here you can find slides and demos of my session AZ01. Enjoy. |
| Here are the demos of the session I’ve just done at the European SharePoint Conference 2013. Enjoy! |
| The sample SP2013 Recipes app (Windows Store App) that I will demo at the upcoming European SharePoint Conference 2013 is ready and up’n’running.
 
Come to attend my session to learn how to build such an app, consuming a SharePoint 2013 list of items as an external data source. |
| I'm speaking at the European SharePoint Conference 2013 and I’m delighted to be a part of this fantastic gathering of the SharePoint Community, Feb 4-7 2013, in Copenhagen, Denmark. I will be conducting three sessions – “Remote Event Receivers in SharePoint 2013 “, "Consuming SharePoint 2013 from Windows 8 Apps" both aimed at developers and Deploying SharePoint on Windows Azure VMs aimed at IT Professionals. Remote Event Receivers in SharePoint 2013 Remote Event Receivers are a new feature of SharePoint 2013, which allows creating business solutions and Apps leveraging a WCF-based communication model. The communication can happen between SharePoint 2013 and external software components, or against SharePoint 2013 Apps. This new feature introduces a great potential for all those business software solutions that need to integrate with SharePoint, triggering actions related to users' actions. In this session we will cover the architecture of Remote Event Receivers, as well as how to develop them. There will also be advanced considerations about reliability, security and hosting of Remote Event Receivers. Consuming SharePoint 2013 from Windows 8 Apps Windows 8 introduces the new App model to develop Windows Store Apps. SharePoint 2013 introduces a new set of APIs, as well as an OData service to consume its data. The conjunction of these technologies enables easily creating Windows 8 Apps to consume SharePoint 2013 and interact with data and features hosted inside SharePoint 2013. In my session you will learn, by practical examples, how to develop a Window 8 App that consumes (read and write) a set of items stored in SharePoint 2013 and that will interact with a SharePoint 2013 process/workflow. Deploying SharePoint on Windows Azure VMs Microsoft Windows Azure is now a cloud offering including an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. SharePoint, both versions 2010 and 2013, are solution frameworks that need to be hosted in server farms with an articulated logical and physical topology. You can benefit from the new IaaS offering from Windows Azure, using it to host SharePoint farms for production environments, as well as for labs.
In this session, we will examine how to design, deploy and maintain a SharePoint farm on Windows Azure VMs. Specific considerations apply in this field. The session will focus on a real case study, which publishes a CMS/WCM solution on a highly available farm hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure. I am speaking alongside renowned experts on SharePoint as well as sharing the stage with some of Microsoft's product team from Redmond covering Search, Apps, Social, Cloud, Project, Migration & Upgrade, Governance and much more. With over 110 SharePoint sessions, keynotes, hands on labs, SharePoint Shootouts, ask the experts, community lounge, tutorials, Europe's largest SharePoint focused expo, SharePints, parties, meetings, networking events, competitions and more.... this is a MUST attend event for all SharePoint enthusiasts! Check out the full conference Programme>> to see all sessions and topics that are being covered by myself and many others. |
| Here you can see how to consume, via CSOM, a SharePoint site hosted on SharePoint Online/Office 365 using PowerShell. First of all you need to load the CSOM libraries in the PowerShell context. Add-Type –Path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll"
Add-Type –Path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll" Then you need to reference the site URL, as well as to retrieve the credentials for accessing the site. $siteUrl = “https://yoursitename.sharepoint.com/”
$username = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter username"
$password = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter password" -AsSecureString Now you are ready to use CSOM to interact with the site. In the following code excerpt I will change the title of the current web site. $ctx = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($siteUrl)
$credentials = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($username, $password)
$ctx.Credentials = $credentials $web = $ctx.Web
$ctx.Load($web)
$ctx.ExecuteQuery() Write-Host $web.Title
$web.Title += " - changed remotely"
$web.Update() $ctx.ExecuteQuery() Notice the usage of the SharePointOnlineCredentials type, as well as the SecureString for storing the password. All the other lines of code are just classic CSOM, simply used inside PowerShell. That’s all! Enjoy! |
| Here you can find an article, which I wrote in the last weeks, about deploying a SharePoint 2013 Farm (mainly for testing purposes) onto a Windows Azure VMs infrastructure. The PowerShell scripts and the article are in “draft mode” … and any suggestions or improvements will be really appreciated. Enjoy playing with SharePoint 2013! |
| Browsing in the SDK of the SharePoint 2013 Preview I found this: Two API sets are still supported in the SharePoint 2013 Preview framework for backward compatibility, but we recommend that you not use them for new projects: the ASP.NET (asmx) web services, and direct Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) calls to the owssvr.dll file.
I am so happy that the old style and ancient ASMX are now (finally!) deprecated! Welcome SharePoint 2013! |
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Welcome to the SharePoint Developer Reference Blog. I'm Paolo Pialorsi and I'm a senior consultant, author and trainer, focused on SharePoint development and customization. I'm based in Italy, but I work whereever it is needed (mainly EMEA). I'm a Microsoft Certified Master on SharePoint 2010.
You also can follow me on twitter: @PaoloPia
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