Visual Web Parts in MOSS 2007
Posted
Friday, July 16, 2010 2:01 PM
by
CoreyRoth
Yesterday, I showed you how to deploy a regular web part to MOSS 2007 / WSS3 that was built and packaged in Visual Studio 2010. Today, we can take that a step further and take advantage of the new Visual Web Part and deploy it the same way. If you remember, a Visual Web Part is nothing more than a glorified user control. To get started, create a new empty SharePoint project or use and existing one. If you need assistance with that, look at yesterday’s post. Then, go ahead and create a new Visual Web Part. The user control Visual Studio creates has many references to SharePoint 2010 DLLs that we simply do not need (or can use). These must be removed. Here is what it looks like when we start.
<%@ Assembly Name="$SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$" %>
<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.Web.CommandUI, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePoint" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="Utilities" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="asp" Namespace="System.Web.UI" Assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="WebPartPages" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="VisualWebPart1UserControl.ascx.cs" Inherits="WSSWebPart.VisualWebPart1.VisualWebPart1UserControl" %>
Remove any reference to a SharePoint version 14 DLL and you will have a file that looks like this. Then I’m just going to add a simple label to demonstrate our user control. Here is what it looks like after the changes.
<%@ Assembly Name="$SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="asp" Namespace="System.Web.UI" Assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint" %>
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="VisualWebPart1UserControl.ascx.cs" Inherits="WSSWebPart.VisualWebPart1.VisualWebPart1UserControl" %>
<asp:Label ID="MyLabel" runat="server" Text="Hello, world! Visual Web Part compiled in Visual Studio 2010!" />
You can replace, the version 14 references with version 12 references if you really need them. However, I find that most of the time, I am really only using standard ASP.NET controls so they are unnecessary. That is all you have to do. Assuming you started with a solution from yesterday, you can package the project and install the .wsp file on your SharePoint 2007 server using STSADM. If you created a new project don’t forget to remember to remove the SharePoint version attribute in the Package properties (discussed in yesterday’s post). Here is what my Visual Web Part looks like running on SharePoint 2007.
It’s pretty simple to do. I am able to leverage the simplicity of the Visual Web Part and take advantage of Visual Studio 2010 building my .wsp file. The more I work with Visual Studio 2010, the more I realize I can use SharePoint Project Items in previous versions of SharePoint with just a little bit of work.