Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint

Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint

Overview of this book

The SharePoint platform is ideal for developers looking to build exciting solutions, and SharePoint 2010 is more equipped than ever for the task. While plenty of SharePoint titles will help you understand general SharePoint development techniques or spend time focusing on one method or tool, "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint" offers you the option of using four different tools and platforms to achieve exceptional end user experience. This book fills the gap for a comprehensive SharePoint title which describes the end goal of a SharePoint developer. So often books focus on development techniques for one tool; this will get you on your way to developing a good business website with a great user experience, however, you choose to get there, be it using PowerShell, Visual Studio, Silverlight, Windows 7 Phone, or a combination of all four. "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint" draws from five separate titles from Packt's existing collection of excellent SharePoint titles: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Windows PowerShell 2.0: Expert Cookbook Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 Expert Cookbook Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Applications on Windows Phone 7 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Development Blueprints "Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint" is an exciting mash-up of five existing Packt SharePoint titles for extending development techniques. It begins with two never before seen Packt chapters from an exciting new title, giving you a quick overview of the options available for extending SharePoint. It then moves on quickly to building a community site and discusses PowerShell scripting, as well as integrating Silverlight animations and helping you get to grips with SharePoint development on Windows Phone. With this book in hand you won't just find techniques for one development tool, you'll learn how to reach your end goal of developing a site with great user experience using a number of options at your fingertips.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer's Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint
Credits
About the Contributors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Creating an external content type


External content types are defined as reusable objects with metadata descriptions of connectivity information to external systems and data definitions. They could also contain the behaviors you want to apply to the external data. They are similar to the content types that we have dealt so far. The difference is that we will be managing the external data in external content types. The external data can be from relational databases like SQL server or Oracle or data coming from some web service.

For our recipe, we will use a SQL server table and create a content type based on the table data. We will use the HumanResources.Department table in the AdventureWorks database. We will create a GetDepartments method that will retrieve the list of all departments and a GetDepartment method that retrieves the single department object.

We will use LINQ to SQL to access relational data as objects. You do not have to use LINQ to SQL for data access in external content...