Sharepoint Foundation 2010

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By Boyd, December 9, 2009 2:16 am

Although it may seem like most of Microsoft’s resources are tied up in the Windows 7 launch, you can rest assured knowing that MS developers have been hard at work on new versions of their enterprise products, including  SharePoint.  I created a Windows 2008R2 virtual machine with SharePoint Foundation 2010 (the lightweight version of SharePoint formerly known Windows SharePoint Services) to take advantage of all that extra RAM and CPU on my new Windows 7 desktop. After testing the beta, I can safely sum up the next iteration of this web-based content management and collaboration software in just one word: ribbon.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 Ribbon

The tab-based toolbar that first appeared in Microsoft Office 2007 has now been tied in (pun intended) to SharePoint, most likely to further associate it with the Microsoft Office branding. It is by far the most obvious change in SharePoint and probably one of the best. It’s also a very crucial part of the new in-browser WYSIWYG editor for editing pages. Yes, it works in Firefox! Overall, the SharePoint 2010 interface is a huge improvement. Here are a few screen shots:

I’m investigating some of the new Visual Studio 2010 features for developing SharePoint 2010 content. I’ll have another post about that in the near future.

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Visual Basic: Parse Command Line Arguments from a String

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By Boyd, December 1, 2009 1:15 am

Sometimes I write code that I think I need but never end up using. This was the case with the parseCommandLineString() function that I wrote in Visual Basic .NET. I needed a function that would take a command line string that included arguments and parse it in the same way that Environment.ParseCommandLineArgs() does. Why? Because System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo uses two properties that separate the executable file name from the arguments. Why Microsoft left this functionality out of the framework is beyond me. Anyway, there is a method build into the Windows API that can parse arguments from a command line string: CommandLineToArgv(). Unfortunately, calling it in VB .NET requires Marshalling and I couldn’t find a good example online. Here’s my code:

    Private Declare Function CommandLineToArgv Lib "shell32.dll" Alias "CommandLineToArgvW" (ByVal lpCmdLine As String, ByRef pNumArgs As Integer) As Long
    '''
    ''' Summary: Parse the command line string so that it can be used with System.Diagnostics.Process. I chose to use the Windows API here to ensure that the command line parsing is consistent with how Windows handles it.
    '''
    ''' Parameter command: The string that should be parsed
    ''' Returns: An array of command line arguments similar to what Environment.GetCommandLineArgs() produces.
    ''' It sure would be nice if the framework had a method for doing this. It becomes a drawback of using System.Diagnostics.Process, which requires arguments to be separated from the executable.
    Private Function parseCommandLineString(ByVal command As String) As String()
        Dim numargs As Integer
        Dim t As Integer
        Dim ptrCommand As IntPtr = Marshal.StringToHGlobalUni(command) 'Marshal the string to a pointer
        Dim ptrSplitArgs As IntPtr = CommandLineToArgv(ptrCommand, numargs) 'Pass the pointer to CommandLineToArgv for parsing, retrieve the pointer of the result.
        If ptrSplitArgs = IntPtr.Zero Then Throw New System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception 'Is it a valid pointer? Throw an exception if it isn't.
        Dim splitargs(numargs - 1) As String

        For t = 0 To numargs - 1
            splitargs(t) = Marshal.PtrToStringUni(Marshal.ReadIntPtr(ptrCommand, t * IntPtr.Size)).Trim  'Iterate through the arguments and add them to an array.
        Next
        Marshal.FreeHGlobal(ptrCommand)
        Marshal.FreeHGlobal(ptrSplitArgs)
        Return splitargs

    End Function
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