SharePoint 2007, Visual Studio 2008, LINQ, and much more.

This month has been overwhelming busy for all of us here, as we are preparing the new stuff for delivery in 2008 R1. As you may have aware, Microsoft has recently released Visual Studio 2008. We have received numerous inquiries regarding our products compability with Visual Studio 2008 and the new technologies that it introduces. So I decided to spend sometime today to write a post regarding Visual Studio 2008, LINQ, and more.

Visual Studio 2008 Compatibility

Technically all our components from 2007 R1 are fully compatible with Visual Studio 2008. This includes the design-time features such as WYSIWYG designer, ClickAndEdit, ClickAndSelect, Component Editor 2.0, Layout Manager etc. The runtime is also working flawlessly in .NET Framework 3.5.

There are couple of known issues related to installation though. The current installer has not supported the Toolbox installation in VS2008 yet. However you don’t have to worry about the installation since the Installer is smart enough to detect the Visual Studio version and ignore unsupported version gracefully. After installation, you simply add the assemblies to Toolbox manually and you should be good to go. We will definitely support the Toolbox Installation for VS2008 in 2008 R1 package.

LINQ

Our databound components have been tested to work flawlessly with LINQ datasource. For several databound components that specifically support DataSource control architecture — such as WebGrid and WebCombo — automatically support LinqDataSource control. Interestingly, the designer and runtime features such as WebGrid’s Data Connect Wizard and automatic structure retrieval are working out-of-the-box.

In the following screenshot, you can see how easy it is to create a new LinqDataSource and bind it to the WebGrid in few clicks.

WebPart Sharepoint 2007

On the other topic, our development team has also put some efforts in supporting WebPart used in SharePoint 2007 technology. We have received many inquiries that asked how our components can be used as WebPart in SharePoint. Our recent dev lab has shown a great progress in this area, where our components such as WebGrid and WebCombo now fully support ShartPoint 2007 as WebPart. The good news is that most of the runtime features such as FlyPostBack (AJAX), Theme Manager, Css Optimizer and other Intersoft’s proprietary technologies are fully supported as well. Our team will post a technical white paper for guiding you to implement the WebPart in near future.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007

In conjunction with WebPart support for SharePoint 2007, our WebUI components will also support Office SharePoint Designer 2007. If you haven’t familiar with SPD 2007, check out this link http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/FX100487631033.aspx.  SPD 2007 allows you to easily author Sharepoint page without the “complexity of WebPart”. This means you can simply drag a WebGrid from the ToolBox in the SPD 2007 and drop it into your Sharepoint page. It’s amazing to see how the entire designer technology worked in concert with the data and runtime features. For example, you can drag a SharePointDataSource control that contains a list of tasks data, and bind it to the WebGrid through DataSourceID.

The following screenshot will give you a better picture on how our components are working along with SPD 2007.

Many thanks to our partners who helped to contribute and investigate the Sharepoint Designer 2007 implementation feasibility, especially to Yoshihiro Kozuki from Microsoft Japan.

We’ll also publish a depth technical white paper around this subject in near future. So stay tuned!

All the best,
Jimmy.