Lately I’ve been working on some Sandboxed solution for Office 365. We all know that they differ on lots of points from Farm Solutions. On the coding end by now we know all the limitations and best practices but how about deployment of these solutions. Some experiences from my end in this post.
One quick tip when using Powershell to create a SharePoint sitestructure combined with custom Web Templates (In my case Sandboxed). The correct syntax for creating Webs based on your custom (sandboxed) Web Template is:
$site = Get-SPSite http://myserver/sites/mysite $web = New-SPWeb http://myserver/sites/mysite/subsite $web.ApplyWebTemplate(“{FeatureGUID}#MyTemplate”)
The CAML to get SharePoint items from lists has a nice feature when it comes to Calendar data. Using the <DateRangesOverlap/> it is possible to check if a given date is within a range of dates and when passing the ExpandRecurrence property it even takes the Recurrence Data into account. Using Sandboxed Solutions to do so we can easily set this property SPQuery.ExpandRecurrence = true; However when it comes to the JavaScript Client OM we cannot use this property.
The only way to query SharePoint for Recurrence Data using Client OM is by using theGetListItems Method from the List WebService (/_vti_bin/lists.asmx). The XML passed into the WebService can handle QueryOptions and we can use this to specify if ExpandRecurrence should be true. The Soap XML looks like this: Continue reading
When developing custom solutions on the SharePoint platform we don’t really think about using DateTime objects anymore. We just build solutions using server-side DateTime.Now or DateTime.Today to check Date and Time and to check that with the values we get back from SharePoint. Because we have full control over our On-Premise environment we can be sure that the Server Date and Time is correct. However moving this principal to the Cloud we loose that bit of control. We have to make sure again we get the right Date and Time from the server to do accurate checks.