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:
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:
