Tuesday 11 October 2011

My ribbon samples from SPC11 (session with AC) + revisions to my ribbon articles

I had an awesome time at the SharePoint Conference 2011 – all the clichés about catching up with friends and meeting new ones were true, and it was a privilege to be on stage speaking to people. Both my sessions were huge fun! Here I want to focus on the level 400 session Andrew Connell and I co-presented, “Deep Dive on SharePoint Ribbon Development & Extensibility” – between us we had some great samples and information, and were both pleased with how the session turned out. I should mention here that as part of this work, I revisited my original ribbon articles and fixed up some samples and added additional info. These articles were written way back in January 2010 during SharePoint 2010 beta, and Microsoft changed a couple of things after these were published. So if you ever used these articles and hit an issue, it is now resolved – apologies. Anyway, here are some things AC and I covered:

  • Ribbon architecture/how it works
  • Fundamental ribbon tasks – adding a tab/group/button
  • Contextual ribbon tabs (e.g. tied to a web part)
  • How to respond to ribbon commands (including analysis of CommandHandler vs. page components)
  • Working with dialogs
  • Sandbox considerations
  • Cool ribbon controls – SplitButton, ToggleButton, Spinner, FlyoutAnchor etc.
  • AC’s tips and tricks
  • COB’s tips and tricks

AC has already published his samples, and for convenience here are both links:

  • AC’s ribbon samples (contextual tabs, commands explained, async processing, dialogs)
  • COB’s ribbon samples (adding a tab/group/button, cool controls [SplitButton, ToggleButton, Spinner], static/dynamic FlyoutAnchor samples)

I’m biased no doubt, but I personally think that together they make an awesome starter pack for SharePoint ribbon development. In case you’re wondering what the hell a FlyoutAnchor is by the way, it’s basically a dropdown on steroids, with grouping etc. – here’s the example I used:

StandardDropdown

FlyoutAnchorTeaser

The talk has given me a revived enthusiasm for the ribbon, and I’ll post some more articles about things I’ve learnt since my original articles soon. To be quite honest, I also learnt a number of things from AC during our prep – our Lync calls before the conference had quite a lot of “No way, I didn’t know that!” from my end, and so he may well write more in the future too.

Oh by the way - if you were at the session, you will have seen Andrew’s “Help” ribbon button which (unexpectedly) popped a dialog with a somewhat comical photo of me with a beer in hand. What a nice surprise, and how kind to choose such a flattering photo! Ha! Anyway if you see him, be sure to remind him I’ve got a long memory, OK? :)

That download link again was:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The SPC402 session related code zip file is being reported usafe to download and is being blocked by the Microsoft's IE Smart Screen Filter. Is there another location from which this zip file can be downloaded?
Thanks

Chris O'Brien said...

I've tried on different PCs/networks and can't reproduce this! I'm happy to put it somewhere else if needed, but does anyone else see this?

Thanks,

Chris.