I’ve been continuously saying that SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation has been launched with some really great features and when saying that I cannot afford to forget its yet another cool feature Developer Dashboard. The Developer Dashboard allows you to monitor page load performance on SharePoint. Simply put, you can see how each element on the page loads! Now isn’t that really cool?
The Developer Dashboard in SharePoint Server displays diagnostic information gathered during the loading and rendering of the SharePoint content. The dashboard, in conjunction with FireBug or the IE Developer Toolbar, helps developers and designers identify issues in their custom projects. This can be set to always display or to only display on demand. The Developer Dashboard has three different states—On, OnDemand, or Off. When the Dashboard is set to On, it will always be shown on every page. When it is set to OnDemand, you have the ability to show and hide the Dashboard. When it is set to Off, it is, as you may have guessed, not available. OnDemand is the best setting when troubleshooting a page or during development since a Site Collection Admin can turn it on or off and for a particular site only. The cool thing about this is that the Site Collection Admin who turned it on will be the only one to see the Developer Dashboard output. Everyday users won’t see the Developer Dashboard output even if it is turned on by a Site Collection Admin.
The Developer Dashboard contains more configuration options than just to turn it on or off. With this feature you can configure all of the options available for the dashboard:
o Display mode (On, Off, On Demand)
o Auto Launch of Developer Dashboard when critical events are tracked
o Enable the ASP.NET tracing output
o Configure the maximum amount of SQL queries traced
o Configure the maximum amount of critical events traced
o The required permission to view the Developer Dashboard (Full, None or Custom)
Summary
The Developer Dashboard is an effective tool that you can use to gain a better understanding on how your various SharePoint components are performing. Take advantage of features available in SharePoint product line of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and associated free SharePoint templates and web parts.
What is LINQ? and why use it with SharePoint List data?
LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query, and what LINQ does is add a native querying syntax reminiscent of SQL to .NET Framework programming languages.
Where to get LINQ to SharePoint?
LINQ to SharePoint Server is available in several forms. Next to a regular installer (MSI-package) the project’s source code is also available for download. The reason for making the code available is to help others in implementing custom LINQ query providers. In order to use LINQ to SharePoint Server 2010, one needs the .NET Framework 3.5. If you want to profit from the Visual Studio 2008 integration, you should have Visual Studio 2008 Professional or higher.
The installer and source for the latest release can both be found in the “Releases”-tab on http://www.codeplex.com/LINQtoSharePoint. The latest sources can be found via the “Source Code”-tab on the same web site.
To install the LINQ to SharePoint libraries, run the installer and this will automatically install the libraries and configure Visual Studio 2008. To use the library you can simply add a new LINQ to SharePoint file. You can do this by right-clicking the project, Add, New Item, selecting the LINQ to SharePoint file and clicking Add. This will automatically add a reference to the library to your project.
If you want to manually add this reference, follow these steps:
1. Add the reference to the library by clicking the “Add Reference” item on the properties menu of your project (right-click on the project node in Solution Explorer and choose Add Reference…)
2. In the .NET-tab of the Add Reference dialog, select the LINQ to SharePoint runtime library (BdsSoft.SharePoint.Linq) and click OK
3. In Solution Explorer, the library has been added to the references
4. In your project’s source code, add a using-statement using BdsSoft.SharePoint.Linq;
5. Now the library is ready to be used
Features of LINQ to SharePoint include the following:
o Custom query provider that translates LINQ queries to CAML, the Collaborative Application Markup Language used by SharePoint for querying
o Support for LINQ in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0.
o Entity creation tool SpMetal to export SharePoint list definitions to entity classes used for querying
o Visual Studio 2008 integration for entity creation (a.k.a. SPML)
o Can connect to a SharePoint site either using the SharePoint object model or via the SharePoint web services
o Planned support for updating through entity types
Take advantage of the SharePoint family of products including SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, MOSS 2007, and associated free SharePoint templates and web parts.
By: MJ
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