with Christian Ståhl In this session, you will learn how you can devise powerful solutions from beginning to end without deploying any managed code with two of the biggest proponents of this approach. We’ll take a business problem and go through the actual solution in SharePoint 2013, but we’ll dip into SharePoint 2010 as well to see how the solution might work there and discuss how we might approach things differently. You’ll get the solution in a WSP as well as the underlying code.

1. Create a Business Solution,
Step by Step, with No
Managed Code
Christian Ståhl & Marc D Anderson

2. Who Is Christian?
• Senior SharePoint Consultant, Humandata.
• Web designer and Web developer since mid 90s, before art
student. Wide-ranging career in SharePoint since the early days,
consulting and training.
• Three-time awardee of the Microsoft MVP award for SharePoint
Server (2011, 2012, 2013).

3. Who Is Marc?
• Co-Founder and President of Sympraxis Consulting LLC, located
in the Boston suburb of Newton, MA, USA. Sympraxis focuses
on enabling collaboration throughout the enterprise using the
SharePoint application platform.
• More than 30 years of experience in technology professional
services and software development. Over a wide-ranging career
in consulting as well as line manager positions, Marc has proven
himself as a problem solver and leader who can solve difficult
technology problems for organizations across a wide variety of
industries and organization sizes.
• Three-time awardee of the Microsoft MVP award for SharePoint
Server (2011, 2012, 2013).

4. About this shared session
• We have collaborated and discussed different kinds of SharePoint
solutions using client coding through the years and share the same
deep passion for data view web parts and jQuery solutions in
SharePoint.
• For this SEF, we thought it would be fun to set up a typical business
problem and see how we could solve this with no managed code and
how we could tackle this from our different perspectives.

5. Tutorial Overview
• In this session, you will learn how you can devise
powerful solutions from beginning to end without
deploying any managed code with two of the biggest
proponents of this approach. We’ll take a business
problem and go through the actual solution in SharePoint
2013

6. What Are the Available Tools?
SharePoint
2010
SharePoint
2013
Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)
JavaScript / jQuery
Data View Web Parts (DVWPs)
Content Query Web Parts (CQWPs)
Workflows (SharePoint Designer)
Display Templates
Content Search Web Parts (CSWPs)

7. Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
• Usually not seen as part of the
coder's toolset
• Modern Web development relies
on a firm understanding of CSS
• Necessary to add animations and
useful client side behaviors
• Used in tandem with scripting and
DOM manipulation

8. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)
• Used in Data View Web Parts,
Content Query Web Parts
• Not most people's favorite data
formatting tool
• Might be considered outdated
• Moving away from XSL toward client
side rendering (jQuery, Knockout,
many more)

9. JavaScript / jQuery
• SharePoint has always used JavaScript
• jQuery is "supported"
• Taken Web development by storm
• Most modern Web sites rely heavily on scripting
• More and more integration with SharePoint,
especially in SharePoint 2013

10. Data View Web Parts (DVWPs)
• Processed on the server
• XSL-driven
• Can "join" multiple data sources
• Useful not only for displaying data, but also for building forms
• Can roll up content across the Site Collection using
DataSourceMode="CrossList"
• Much harder to work with in SharePoint 2013 (SharePoint
Designer missing Display View)

11. Content Query Web Parts (CQWPs)
• Processed on the server
• XSL-driven
• Long-time workhorse of Web Parts
• Enables rollup of content across the Site Collection
• Predefined formats can be extended but somewhat
cumbersome to do so
• A lot of filter options; for example on content type,
metadata and audience targeting

12. Workflows
• Right up front: neither of us are big fans
• Great for frequent, repetitive tasks; information work
tends to be highly exception-driven
• Often used to get around things that are seen as
SharePoint limitations
• Sometimes can use script to accomplish similar things
• Can be unreliable

13. Display Templates
• New in SharePoint 2013
• JavaScript-driven
• Might be the new DVWP?
• Documentation is not great

14. Content Search Web Parts (CSWPs)
• New in SharePoint 2013
• "Soon" available on Office365
• Display Template driven
• Depends on indexing schedule
• Continuous crawling helps, but not a
panacea

15. What Can’t [Shouldn't] You Do Without
Managed Code?
• Deploy files to the server’s file system
• Event Receivers
• Timer Jobs
• Elevate Permissions
• Deployment of a large number of sites or
other objects

16. Client Side vs. Server Side
• Contrary to some reports, client side development
is not always a good thing
• Be careful when you have large data volume,
mathematical processing, etc.
• You must know the "Lowest Common
Denominator"

17. Development Must Also Follow Good
Governance Practices
• Coding practices
• Deployment mechanisms
• Testing methods
• Documentation
• Training
• Maintenance planning

18. To our Demo
• Let’s take a look at concrete business problem.
– A employee award nomination system
– Let’s say that our goal is to find an easy way to store,
submit and report on nominations submitted by
various users – how can we do that?

19. Employee Award Nominations
• First thought… Maybe we can use a SharePoint list and create a submission form
using InfoPath. Exporting the list to Excel would allow the admins the necessary level
of reporting they should be looking for.
• The team’s requirements is in this example are fairly basic. Automatically populating a
few fields using user profile services is necessary but should not be any problem.
There is one requirement that held us up. If the fictive customer wants to limit how
many submissions any one user can do AND provide a current count of how many
submissions that user had made on the form.
• We could use another list with users and a count of their nominations combined with a
workflow to either add a new user to the list or add 1 to the current count for an
existing user on the list. The form would reference this secondary list to provide the
count display on the form.
• But wait: there has got to be an easier way, right?

20. WE LIKE SIMPLE SOLUTIONS!

21. Contact Information
eMail christian@humandata.se
Blog http://chrisstahl.wordpress.com
Twitter @Cstahl
LinkedIn christianstahl
eMail marc.anderson@sympraxisconsulting.com
Blog http://sympmarc.com
SPServices http://spservices.codeplex.com
SPXSLT http://spxslt.codeplex.com
Books http://sympmarc.com/books