Office 365 – Using jQuery with SharePoint Online

Jan30
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

JavaScript, whether you love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. Now, JavaScript does have its quirks and irritations, especially if you’re used to managed code such as VB.Net or C#. However, despite the bad rep a lot of folks have given it, it is one heck of a powerful language.

If you’re like me, you like to get the job done. Sure, sure, it’s fun to dig into the code to see exactly how stuff is done, but that is not really an option when you have a deadline. That is why I choose to use jQuery when I need to liven up a web page or do some web programming magic.

JQuery was first released in 2006 and has since become one of the most popular JavaScript libraries on the web. Microsoft has thrown its weight behind it and now also provides developer support as well as adopting it in their AJAX and ASP.Net MVC frameworks.

So, how do we use all this jQuery goodness in SharePoint Online? That is what I hope to show you in today’s article where we’ll write a fairly simple SharePoint WebPart and add some jQuery logic to it.

Read more at Add-in Express.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, jQuery, Office 365 - Tagged , ,

Moving your existing Access database to Office 365

Jan27
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

A few years ago I had a client who since they started their business used a Microsoft Access database to track their projects and the time their consultants worked on projects. As the company expanded the database grew up to a point where they realized an upgrade is needed. I was asked to move the database to a Microsoft SQL server backend, whilst keeping MS Access as the front-end. This worked fine for a year or so until they realized they needed to give their consultants the ability to add their time worked from anywhere.

Another year and a considerable amount of money later a new system was written (not by me unfortunately :) ) to enable their employees/consultants to bill from anywhere.

In today’s post I want to look at how they could’ve leveraged Office 365 Access services to web-enable their database.

Read more at Add-in Express.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, Office 365 - Tagged , ,

Office 365 – Attach files from SharePoint to Outlook E-mail programmatically

Jan23
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

In my last post I showed you how you can write a Microsoft Outlook Add-in that will save all the attachments on an e-mail to the Office 365 SharePoint Online Shared Documents library.

In today’s post I would like to show you how to do the opposite, e.g. how to attach files from SharePoint Online to Outlook e-mail messages. This could be useful if your customer has a shared library with documents they send via e-mail on a regular basis.

Read more at Add-in Express.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, MS Office, Office 365, SharePoint 2010 - Tagged , , ,

Office 365 – Save Outlook e-mails & attachments to SharePoint Online programmatically

Jan19
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

If you’re following Ty’s Office 365 Newswires and read this article about Microsoft already having sold five million Office 365 seats in roughly two and a half months, I’m sure you would agree with me that Office 365 is set to change, if not revolutionize the way people use and interact with Microsoft Office.

Of course this opens a whole world of possibilities to developers and even more so for the few, the proud Office developers. I love to dream up ways to integrate Microsoft Office with different applications and online services and in today’s post I’ll show you how to write a Microsoft Outlook Add-in that will save an e-mail’s attachments and/or the entire e-mail to an Office 365 hosted SharePoint Online list.

Read more at Add-in Express.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, Office 365 - Tagged , ,

Office 365 – Share Outlook contacts with Lync Online contextual conversations

Jan17
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

At first glance Microsoft Lync can, to most people, look like just another instant messaging application. However, upon closer inspection it can mean so much more for organizations especially if they start to integrate it into their current day-to-day business systems. For example, if you’re an insurance firm running a system that maintains all your clients and their policies and you want to give your employees the ability to discuss a client without having to send e-mails. You could integrate with Lync and add a feature to start a contextual Lync conversation based on the currently selected client the user has open in your management system.

To illustrate my point we’ll create a simple WPF application with which users can share and discuss their Microsoft Outlook contacts.

Read more at Add-in Express.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, C#, Office 365 - Tagged , , ,

Reading PDF files with C#

Jan16
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

Recently I needed to grab some text values from a number of pdf files. Instead of having to manually open each and every pdf file I just knew there had to be an easier way.

After a quick search, I found the solution; iTextSharp, an open source C# library that allows you to do a host of awesome stuff with pdf files. It is a port of iText which is a Java library. You can find more info about iText on their website at www.itextpdf.com . I just knew this library is something else when I saw they had an entire book dedicated to it.

Manipulating and reading pdf files is no trivial task, but luckily for me the pdf files I needed to read were fairly straight forward and I used the following code to return the contents of the file as one big string:

private string ParsePdf(string filePath)
{
    string text = string.Empty;

    PdfReader reader = new iTextSharp.text.pdf.PdfReader(filePath);
    byte[] streamBytes = reader.GetPageContent(1);
    PRTokeniser tokenizer = new PRTokeniser(streamBytes);

    while (tokenizer.NextToken())
    {
        if (tokenizer.TokenType == PRTokeniser.TokType.STRING)
        {
            text += tokenizer.StringValue;
        }
    }
    return text;
}

From there I used some string manipulation to grab the values I needed and perform some additional logic. Easy!

Links from this post:

Posted in C# - Tagged ,

Office 365 – Exchange Online examples

Jan12
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

In this blog post on Add-in Express I show you how to do various tasks in Microsoft Exchange Online. A lot of code examples are included as well as a sample project with all the source code. Enjoy!

Read it on Add-in Express.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 - Tagged , ,

Office 365 – SharePoint Online building blocks

Dec20
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

Our blog is buzzing with news and updates about Office 365 and I hope you’re following us on Twitter to get up to the minute updates. One of the biggest components of Office 365 is SharePoint Online and from a developer’s point of view it is also one of the most customizable.

We’ve already taken a high level look at what is in SharePoint in my Office 365 from a developer point of view post and in today’s post we’ll have a more in-depth look at the building blocks for SharePoint that are available to developers.

Read all about it in my latest Add-in Express blog post.

 

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, Office 365, SharePoint 2010 - Tagged , ,

SharePoint Ribbon UI customization with Add-in Express Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365

Dec15
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

I’m pretty excited about the product I’m about to show you. It is not every day that you are able to work with a utility or tool that literally makes an activity a thousand times easier. In my previous post Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon, you most probably noticed the amount of work as well as trial and error that went into customizing the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon UI.

Well, I’m about to show you how you can customize the SharePoint ribbon in less than five minutes. We’ll be using a new product from Add-in Express called the Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365.

Read all about it in my latest Add-in Express blog post.

 

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, SharePoint 2010 - Tagged ,

Office 365 – Lync Online: to customize, or not to customize, that is the question

Dec12
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Pieter van der Westhuizen

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?”

Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1

Like the main character Hamlet in the Shakespeare play wondered in this scene whether to continue to exist or not, so too do we as developers sometimes have to wonder whether to integrate with or customize certain applications or leave the standard functionality be.

Maybe I’m being overly dramatic but let us continue… So, what is Lync Online and why should developers care? Essentially think of Microsoft Lync as a combination of Microsoft Live Messenger, Microsoft Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Communicator. It is a next generation cloud communication service that is a hosted version of Microsoft Lync Server 2010.

Read more in my latest Add-in Express blog post.

 

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

Posted in Add-in Express, Office 365 - Tagged , ,
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