Getting Started with the Business Data Catalog

In this article I will guide you through the very basics of getting started with Business Data Catalog, BDC:

1. Install the AdventureWorks 2008 Sample Databases
   1. We will use this database as our example for retrieving data using the BDC.
      
2. I will step you through the simple process of creating your ADF (Application Definition File)
   1. We will use this file as our import connection
      
3. I will guide you through how we can import this ADF file and create our BDC Application
   
4. Lastly, I will guide you through the process of creating a basic site and use some of the basic BDC Web Parts

Install the AdventureWorks sample database

• You'll need to go and download the AdventureWorks sample databases
  
  
• Just finish the installation by clicking next a couple of times and let the installer do it's normal Microsoft-installer magic.
  
• You should now see a couple of new databases in your SQL Server Management Studio:
  
  AdventureWorks, AdventureWorks2008, AdventureWorksDW, AdventureWorksDW2008, AdventureWorksLT, AdventureWorksLT2008
  

Alright - We've got our databases, now we need to start thinking about how we will get data from our SQL server into SharePoint. This is done by creating/generating an Application Definition File (ADF) as you will see in the next section.

Creating the ADF (Application Definition File)

Alright, there's a few different options to create your ADF (Application Definition File). I will show you how to get started with using the free tool called "Application Definition Editor" that comes with the latest SharePoint Server SDK.

Note: See the bottom section in this article for a summary of links to all resources mentioned in the article.

After you have installed the latest SDK, you can choose to install the "Microsoft BDCTool" located here by default: "C:\Program Files\2007 Office System Developer Resources\Tools\BDC Definition Editor". Which will give you the following item in your Start Menu:

Launch the BDC Application Definition Designer

Click the application and launch the editor. You will see an interface like this:

Create or import your ADF file

There's basically two alternatives when it comes to editing an ADF (Application Definition File).
One is to create a new one (which I will guide you through first), and the other is to import an existing one (which I will show you after the first alternative).

Alt 1) Creating our own ADF file
Now we're going to connect to our newly created sample-databases and create an ADF file for use with those databases.

• Click on ADD LOB System
• Choose Connect To Database
• You will see a nice popup-dialog where you will be able to enter the connection details to your desired database
  • Enter your connection details, example:
    
    
• You are presented with the "Designer Surface" that looks something like this:
  
  
• In our case, we're going to use the table called "vEmployee" which exist in the AdventureWorks database in order to pull out some information about our employees.
  • Search for the table called vEmployee and drag it out to the Design Surface
  • Search for the table called vEmployeeDepartments and drag it out to the Design Surface
  • It should look something like this:
    
    
  • Make any necessary changes, then click OK
  • You'll see a view similar to this one after some tweaking:
    
    
  • After you've done the necessary changes to your configuration, making sure it's a valid ADF with proper filters, enumerators and methods or whatever you need in your application then smile, because we're done with that part!

Alt 2) Importing an existing ADF file

If you don't want to do everything from scratch or you've already got an ADF file that you wish to modify, you can do so by importing an existing ADF file into the Definition Editor. Here's how:

• Open the BDC Definition Editor tool, then click the "Import" button in the menu:
  
  
• Browse to your existing ADF file and choose to import it. Simple as that.
  (I am importing a file called BDCAWDW.xml, which contains definitions for Product, Reseller, ProductSubcategory, ProductCategory as shown below)
  
• You'll see the imported ADF file's structure immediately in the designer, under the prerequisite that your SQL connection string in the ADF file is valid:
  

Note: I will not detail how you create filters, finders, methods etc. in this article. You can read more about that here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms145931(SQL.90).aspx

I may cover the topic of ADF-functionality in another article later on.

Generate the ADF file from the designer

I really don't need to tell you this, but there's a button called "Export" which you use to export the definition you've created using the definition editor to an xml file:

Import the ADF file

If we have gotten this far, we might as well get the last few bits in place.
What we now need to do is to import our ADF file into SharePoint, since that's where it should reside. Follow along with these few simple steps to make sure you're properly importing your file into SharePoint.

• Navigate to your Shared Services Provider Administration site (You can access your SSP through Central Administration)
  
• You are presented with a section called "Business Data Catalog" where you'll find a bunch of different alternatives.
  
• Make sure you have the permissions to modify the BDC (See the link Business Data Catalog permissions)
  
• Click "Import application definition"
  
  
• Browse for your .xml file and click "OK":
  
  
• You'll see a progress bar (You don't see that a lot in SharePoint. I love it!), telling your how the import process is going:
  
  
• When it's done, you'll click "OK" and be presented with an overview of your imported BDC Application:
  

Configure permissions on the BDC Application Definition

In order for all users to be able to select/read data from your BDC Application, you'll need to make sure they've got the appropriate permissions to actually do so.

Usually I do this setting on each of the imported entities, in case you want specific permissions on different entities - instead of on the entire application.

• Select the DropDown list on your first entity and choose "Manage Permissions":
  
  
• Choose "Add Users/Group":
  
  
• Enter "NT AUTHORITY\AUTHENTICATED USERS" and choose "Select in Clients":
  
  
• Repeat these steps for the other entity as well.
• You're done.

Now we have created or imported an ADF file with the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool, exported it to an .xml file, imported it into SharePoint, set basic permissions on the entities.

Next, we should make sure that the application works in SharePoint by adding a Business Data Catalog-WebPart to a page.

Use the basic built-in BDC Web Parts

Awesome. Now that we have gotten this far by importing an ADF file into SharePoint and set appropriate permissions on the entities - We're ready to actually use the ADF connection to view stuff in our database.

Note: I have created a new blank site where I can easily show the built-in BDC Web Parts - so that's where I am adding my Web Parts.

• Add two Web Parts to your page called "Business Data List" and "Business Data Item":
  (Note that when you've configured a BDC application, you'll see the Business Data web parts)
  
  
• Choose to edit the properties of the Business Data List Web Part:
  
  
• Click the Browse-icon to the right to pop up the BDC entity chooser:
  
  
• It will present you with the following interface (note, BDC applications will of course vary depending on what you have imported..):
  
  
• Double click the "Employee" type, and then click "OK" in your Web Part property window.
• Repeat this process for the "Business Data Item" Web Part, and select "Employee" in the BDC Type Picker as well.

Now we've got one BDC List Web Part which will list all employees, and one BDC Item Web Part that will display details about the employee we select.

In order for this to work we must connect the two Web Parts.

• Edit menu of your Web Part -> Connections -> Send Selected item To -> Employee
  

Test our BDC Application out, and make sure it works!

• Choose "LastName" then "contains" and enter "smith":
  
  
• Select one of the results by clicking the radiobutton to the left, and see that the result (details) about the Employee shows up in the connected Web Part:
  

Resources and links

• AdventureWorks Sample Databases [This is the one I've used in my sample]
• Microsoft SQL Server Community Projects & Samples
• ADF Reference
• Complete Sample ADF File
• SharePoint Server SDK

Summary

This article is a basic step-by-step guide to getting started with BDC in MOSS 2007. I've shown you every step from creating the databases required (in our case some sample databases) to creating the ADF file and to finally utilize the BDC connection from a site, using the BDC Web Parts.

SharePoint 2010 New Features

Microsoft has released a couple of sneak peek videos about SharePoint 2010 at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

Here are some of my notes from these videos

Business Value

The SharePoint pie from MOSS 2007 has been changed for 2010. Instead of focusing on generic portal topics, the focus is more on the business value of SharePoint. Here is the new pie

Sites

Sites are all about sharing info with employees/partners/customers – empowering customers across all mediums
Team Sites, Internet Facing sites, extranets for customers and partners

Communities

Ad-Hoc Communities
Communities in terms of hierarchy (comes from AD)
Communities now include Business Partners. You could search for users who are non-employees

Content

Collaboration Content
Line of Business Content
People Centric Content

Search

FAST Search is integrated into SharePoint
Highly scalable Search engine
Emphasis on getting the right results on the first page
Enhanced People Search
Enhanced Business Data Search

Insights

Combination of all the above
Microsoft’s vision is a decision engine that brings other tools into unison

Composites

Help rapidly create dynamic business solutions
End user applications
Business Processes
Tools and integration with SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio

New Features

1. Ribbon inside SharePoint
2. Customizable Ribbon
3. Contextual
4. Removable and users have the option to go back to the MOSS 2007 interface
5. Asynchronous user interface – minimal postbacks
6. Dialogs employ DHTML effects to gray the background and provide user dialogs

Functionality previously available under the Content and Structure pages are now available in the main library

Multi select documents to checkout /check -in/delete etc.

Customization Capabilities

1. Page edits are called Web-Edits – This replaces the Site Text and font etc.
2. Live Preview of fonts/colors etc, similar to Office 2007
3. Upload and modify Images directly instead of uploading first to a image library
4. Picture Tools provide Resizing of pictures directly using the picture
5. Changing styles like having borders etc. for images

SilverLight

1. Add SilverLight web parts without additional configuration
2. Just point the web part to a XAP file in a document library
   Interactive zoom is available on SilverLight web parts

Theming

1. You can theme SharePoint using the same theme as PowerPoint
2. e.g Upload a Powerpoint theme
   Choose the theme and apply it to the site
   Now the site looks like the Powerpoint slide
   You can preview a theme on the site before applying it
3. Firefox is fully supported and can do the same things as IE
4. Completely redesigned Sharepoint Designer with Ribbon

Visio Services

1. Visio can connect to backend and visualize the data
2. Can publish visio into SharePoint and can render them without the need for visio on the client (similar to Excel Services)
3. This functionality is called Visio Services
4. Can zoom in and zoom out of diagrams
5. Needs a good Visio design first for Business processes

BDC is now Business Connectivity Services

1. Can take LOB data offline using SharePoint workspace Manager(previously Groove)
2. Tools in SPD and VS for modeling LOB entities
3. External data are called Entities – they live in BCS and you can work with them in SPD
4. External Content types based on these LOB entities can be created within SPD
5. There is a browser within SPD which can browse SQL Databases and provide views/stored procs etc.
6. You can right click on an entity and create CRUD operations on it using a simple wizard and publish from SPD
7. External data gets converted to a list like view
8. Users can filter and sort BCS data and work with it like they would with a SharePoint list
9. Users can seamlessly update data in 2010, which will automatically update the LOB system
10. You can create a Word template with BDC elements and publish to a library. When the user creates a new document they can pick those BCS entities within Office
11. To take items offline use Groove – SharePoint workspace manager – Click on Sync to Computer
12. Lists/Libraries are all synced
13. LOB data flows offline in Groove
14. Can edit LOB data when offline and sync back when connected

Whats New for Developers

1. Visual Studio 2010 has Visual Web part Designer. No more building tables for layout. You can drag and drop and create controls within web parts, similar to ASP.NET forms
2. Developer Dashboard – can allow any page to provide debug info
3. LINQ for SharePoint has been released and allows developers to use LINQ objects to query SharePoint lists
4. Client Object Model – can run code on the client using JS/.NET. This is especially useful when building Silverlight applications
5. Supports TFS , automated builds
6. New Project Templates are available in Visual Studio 2010
7. Comes with a SharePoint Server Explorer within VS
8. Can lookup Sites/Lists etc. as just like SQL Explorer in visual studio
9. Can automate post deployment tasks – no more post deploy batch files required, UI to specify deployment steps
10. There is a BDC explorer within VS to explore LOB data from within VS
11. Visual Web part project comes with Features and Packages automatically. Complete drag and drop functionality to visually build a web part
12. SilverLight can use Client Object Model to access list data using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client namespace
13. Runs CAML queries asynch and provides a rich client side object model to access data

Whats New for Administrators

1. New SharePoint best practices analyzer – Comes with a set of pre-built rules , You can build your own rule if you need. It can automatically correct issues provided you set it up to do so
2. New Central Admin Console look and feel. Items are grouped differently compared to the 2007 version
3. New Backup and Restore Tools in the UI
4. Visual Upgrade option – Can upgrade 2007 to 2010 and keep the old layout and customizations
5. New SQL Logging Database – Developers can write code to log to this SQL database , Can write your own events into the logging database, Whole bunch of out of the box reports for logging
6. Scalable List infrastructure - Can control how many items get returned from a list , Can set happy hour deadlines to filter the number of items in a list based on time of day
7. Unattached Content DB recovery – If you need to recover sites/lists from a DB backup you can do so without restoring it onto a temporary site. You can also – Browse content, Backup the site , Export site and all of this without restoring it onto a site
8. Upgrade looks and feels like 2007 – Can preview the new look and feel and revert back to the old version

InfoPath FormViewer Webpart

It's been a while since I last posted and there is a very good reason for it! I will save the reason for another post in the very near future but right now I wanted to share this webpart I've been working on. As the title suggests it's a webpart that views the content of an InfoPath form. Now it's not a webpart that just renders the xsn file (like the FormViewer webpart). No, what it does is displaying all the promoted columns of a particular submitted form.

The big question is ofcourse.. "Robin.. why on earth did you build this" Well it has something to do with posts I made in the past ((Approval) Workflow thingies continued & (Approval) workflow thingies) where I copied information from the promoted columns of the form into a tasklistitem. By doing this, an user can easily see what he/she needs to approve in just one or two click(s). Now I was getting tired to copy every promoted column by hand in SPD for each Action I created per step. So I decided to build a webpart which did the following :

• Show the promoted columns without specifying them per form
• Show headers to group columns
• Have the ability to Approve or Reject the form
• (optionally) show the approver which phase of the workflow status he/she is approving

Now within defining the workflow in SPD, the only thing I need to copy each time into a new taskitem is the ID of the form and the person who must approve that step. The webpart takes care of the rest by using that information. How? Well you drag the webpart onto the 'editform.aspx' page of the task list. Using this page, it will give me the ID of the task (querystring in the URL) and by having both ID's (task and form) I can display and update the information.

Now a screenshot tells you more than a lot of words so here's what it looks like:

Pretty impresive eh? (I know I need to fix the layout;) .. Now the only input this webpart needs is the following :

• FormLibraryName, the name of the library where the information should be fetched from
• Name of a view, this view is being used to show the columns that you want to have in the webpart.
• TaskName, the name of the tasklist where the tasks are created for the workflow
• Headers, a comma separated string where you can specify where headers should be placed and what the title should be.

So how does the code look like? Well.. it's quite big so I will only post the relevant stuff.

• Hiding the default EditForm formfield

writer.Write("");

• Getting the reference of the taskitem and the formitem

SPWeb web = SPControl.GetContextWeb(Context); SPList tasklist = web.Lists[_tasklist]; SPListItem taskitem = tasklist.GetItemById(Convert.ToInt32(Page.Request.QueryString["ID"]));  SPList formlist = web.Lists[_formlibrary]; SPListItem formitem = formlist.GetItemById(Convert.ToInt32(taskitem["ListItemID"].ToString()));

• Displaying the status of the workflow by using a column named "Status" in the formlibrary

SPFieldChoice status = (SPFieldChoice)formlist.Fields["Status"]; writer.Write(""); foreach (string _status in status.Choices) {     if (_status == formitem["Status"].ToString())     {         writer.Write("");     }     else     {         writer.Write("");     } } writer.Write("
");          writer.Write(_status.ToString());         writer.Write("
");         writer.Write("You are here");          writer.Write("
");         writer.Write(_status.ToString());         writer.Write("
");         writer.Write(" ");         writer.Write("
");

• Displaying all the columns based on a view. And when given, display a header

//Render the columns with their values based on the view that is selected writer.Write(""); SPView view = formlist.Views[_view]; System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection strCollection = view.ViewFields.ToStringCollection();  for (int i = 0; i < splitter =" {" seperator =" _separators.Split(splitter);" x =" 0;" _splitter =" {" colom =" seperator[x].Split(_splitter);" y =" 0;" i ="=">");                     }                     break;                 }              }         }         finally         {              //Write all the columns that are in the view with their values             writer.Write("");             writer.Write("");         }     }     catch (Exception error)     {         writer.Write(error.Message.ToString());     } } writer.Write("
 
" + colom[1] + "
");             if (formitem.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(strCollection[i]).Title != null)             {                 //ColumnName                 writer.Write(formitem.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(strCollection[i]).Title);             }             writer.Write("
");             if (formitem[(strCollection[i])] != null)             {                 //ColumnValue                 writer.Write(formitem[(strCollection[i])].ToString());              }             writer.Write("
");

jQuery in SharePoint Example - Rounded Corners

A recent project involved the branding of MOSS to incorporate custom design elements as supplied in a PhotoShop page mockup. One of these design requirements was rounding the external corners of the quick launch menu.

Hmmm, what to do. There are plenty of techniques discussed on the web for achieving this outcome, but often the basis for these techniques is to start with clean, web-standards compliant HTML. That's certainly not what SharePoint provides - I needed to work with the HTML that is created by the mixture of master pages and user controls, and did not want to override standard elements for this styling exercise. One aim was to minimize the changes, if any, to the master page.

Many of the rounded corner approaches use JavaScript. And I was, at the time of this project, starting to see the potential of jQuery combined with SharePoint. So a little more research located a neat way forward - the jQuery.Round plug-in.

After a few minutes (hours?) experimentation I derived the jQuery statements to apply rounded corners to the menu. This of course also required adding references to the jQuery and jQuery.round libraries in the master page - so it was necessary after all to change that page!

The statements were:

function AddQuickLaunchCorners()

{

    $(".ms-quicklaunchouter").corner("10px");

    $("div.ms-quickLaunch h3.ms-standardheader span div.ms-quicklaunchheader").css("background-color", "#c1ecff").corner("top 7px");

    $("table.ms-recyclebin:last td").corner("bottom 7px");

}

Note the assumption in the last JavaScript statement that the recycle bin will be the bottom row in the quick launch menu.

These statements, together with modifications to some of the other CSS styles, resulted in the following look for the quick launch menu:

But then I came across a very annoying behaviour. Imagine the following scenario:

• I view a page containing this menu in one tab in IE7
• Then I open another tab in IE7 and navigate around any page in that second tab

Not an unusual behaviour really. But on returning to the first tab displaying the SharePoint page with menu, this is what the menu then looked like:

Yeuch! More "minutes" of investigation lead to the inclusion of the following code in the JavaScript file applying the dynamic styling to the page:

window.onfocus = ReapplyQuickLaunchCorners;

function ReapplyQuickLaunchCorners()

{

    RemoveQuickLaunchCorners();

    AddQuickLaunchCorners();

}

function RemoveQuickLaunchCorners()

{

    $("div.ms-quicklaunchouter>div:not(.ms-quickLaunch)").remove();

    $("div.ms-quickLaunch h3.ms-standardheader span div.ms-quicklaunchheader>div").remove();

    $("table.ms-recyclebin:last td>div").remove();

}

Not a nice solution (OK, it's a hack!) but it works and I ran out of time.

So where am I leading with this post - well, just to illustrate the great things you can do with jQuery to mould SharePoint. Sometime I'll blog about using jQuery for AJAX calls to the MOSS profile search web services, but that's for another time.....

Renaming a stand-alone SharePoint 2010 server

Have you gotten around to trying out the SharePoint 2010 public beta yet?

In an effort to provide everyone that would want one access to a virtual machine with SharePoint 2010 Beta, Visual Studio 2010 Beta and SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta, I decided to create such VM and put it up on a file share so that anyone can grab a copy and get going and thought I’d blog about how I did it.

I decided to use Windows 7 on the image, just to prove that it works. Now, SharePoint 2010 requires a 64-bit OS, which means that Virtual PC is out unfortunately. But VirtualBox and VMWare Player are both excellent and free. Personally, I created the image using Virtual Box, and then exported a copy in VMWare format so that our developers could choose whichever VM solution they preferred.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as just running the SharePoint 2010 installation as you would on server OS. As described in this article, you need to extract the setup files and modify a configuration file to allow the installer to run on Windows 7. Another caveat I came across was that the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard would fail on step 8, “creating sample data”, with an error message about “Unrecognized attribute ‘allowInsecureTransport’”. But installing the hotfixKB976462, I could finally run the wizard successfully.

The last thing I had to figure out was the easiest way of renaming the VM after cloning it to avoid name collisions on the network. I found this guide for SharePoint 2007, and it still works, but since SharePoint 2010 includes the PowerShell based Management Shell, I performed some of the steps using it instead.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Start the management shell
2. Run “Rename-SPServer -Identity -Name ”
3. Change the name of the server (in the computer properties dialog)
4. Reboot
5. Start the management shell again
6. Run “Set-SPAlternateURL -Identity -Url
7. Run “Set-SPAlternateURL -Identity -Url
8. And you’re good to go!

If you run in to access denied errors, try running the management shell as administrator.

Knowing just how lazy we developers are, I created a PowerShell script that performed the entire name change after prompting the user for the new server name and the central administration port and put the script on the desktop on the original VM image. That way, the developer just has to run the script after booting a newly cloned image. Clean and easy.

Here’s the source for the PowerShell script:

Echo "Loading SharePoint extensions..." $ver = $host | select version if ($ver.Version.Major -gt 1)  {$Host.Runspace.ThreadOptions = "ReuseThread"} Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell  $newSrvName = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter new server name" $caport = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter Central Administration port"  echo "Renaming server..." $ComputerInfo = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_ComputerSystem $oldSrvName = $ComputerInfo.Name $ComputerInfo.Rename($newSrvName)  echo "Updating alternate access mappings..."  Set-SPAlternateURL -Identity "http://$oldSrvName`:$caport" -Url "http://$newSrvName`:$caport" Set-SPAlternateURL -Identity "http://$oldSrvName" -Url "http://$newSrvName"  echo "Renaming server in SharePoint configuration..." Rename-SPServer -Identity "$oldSrvName" -Name "$newSrvName"  echo "Done! RESTART the server for the changes to take effect" $restart = Read-Host -Prompt "Restart now? [Y/N]" if ($restart -eq "Y") {  shutdown -r -t 10 -f -c "Restarting server after name change" }

SharePoint Workflow Authoring in Visio Premium 2010

Visio has long been the tool of choice for documenting processes. Ever since the introduction of workflow support in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have been hearing from customers, “wouldn’t it be great to visualize SharePoint workflows in Visio like flowcharts? Wouldn’t it also be great to go from Visio business process diagrams to executable workflows on SharePoint?”

In Visio Premium 2010, we have partnered with the SharePoint Designer team to bring you that functionality to life. In this blog post and the next, we will introduce to you how you can author SharePoint workflows just like any flowcharts in Visio, and how such workflows can then be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010 for further editing before it can be executed in SharePoint.

What are SharePoint Workflows?

First of all, what are SharePoint Workflows? Workflow is just another way of saying process flow, something most Visio users are already familiar with. In SharePoint, there are pre-defined common activities (e.g. Send email) that can be executed together with others, and together this forms a “workflow”. Some SharePoint workflow examples include: document approval workflow, expense approval workflow, and document review feedback workflow. A user may originally create the business workflow in Visio, as shown below:



That same workflow, implemented as a SharePoint Workflow, can look like the following in SharePoint Designer 2010:


So how can you go from a business flowchart in Visio to a workflow published to SharePoint?

Starting from Visio: New SharePoint Workflow Template

In Visio Premium 2010, we are introducing a brand new drawing template just for SharePoint Workflow. When you start up Visio, you can go to New->Flowchart->Microsoft SharePoint Workflow in order to start authoring a Visio SharePoint Workflow from scratch.

This is especially handy for Business Analysts or

Process Analysts who are already familiar with flowcharting in Visio, but would like to automate the workflow to be executed in SharePoint.

Upon opening the drawing, you will notice that key SharePoint activities are available in three separate stencils: SharePoint Workflow Actions, SharePoint Workflow Conditions, and SharePoint Workflow Terminators. Every SharePoint activity directly maps to those available in SharePoint Designer 2010.

To start authoring a SharePoint workflow, simply drop shapes to the drawing canvas, just like creating any basic flowchart in Visio. Note you can modify the original shape text and replace it with text more relevant to your business process:



Exporting Workflow to SharePoint Designer 2010

When you are done with authoring your workflow, you can export it in a file that can be imported by SharePoint Designer 2010. By exporting the workflow to SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint specialists or IT professionals alike can further parameterize the workflows by binding workflow activity fields with SharePoint lookups and then publish as executable workflows.

To export, simply go to the Process tab, and click Export:

Visio will automatically validate the workflow first to make sure the workflow is valid (for more information about our validation feature, see this earlier blog post). In the event that your workflow has issues, an Issues window will pop up, and the shape with the issue will be highlighted.

After you fix all issues, the workflow will be exported as a Visio Workflow Interchange (*.vwi) file, which can be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010.

Upcoming Post: Part 2 of SharePoint Workflow Authoring in Visio Premium 2010

How to build the Silverlight web part?

Steps to create this on your own site using SharePoint Designer (no server access or web part installation required).

Note: Copy any code below into notepad first. Only PNG and JPG are supported by Silverlight 1.0.

Assuming you have a SharePoint picture library already created.

1. Create a Document Library to hold your web part page and the required SilverLight files (set template to Web Part Page)
2. Create a folder called script in the document library
3. Copy the following files from http://www.codeplex.com/bjsspv/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=6444 into the script folder
   1. Createsilverlight.js
   2. Main.js
   3. Silverlight.js
   4. Scene.xaml
   5. Photoitem.xaml
4. Create a Web Part Page in the library
5. Edit the web part page in SharePoint Designer
6. Insert a Data View of your picture Library (just select one field from the data source view)
7. Set the data view layout to Plain Layout
   
8. Add the following code immediately before the tag in the

   
   
   
   

   Loading...]]>
   

9. Replace the dvt_1 template with the following

   
   PlnTitl