Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a technology that includes a set of tools for collaboration. These tools provide easy access to documents, content, people, and information. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 also provides eight capabilities or services that enable developers to create rich and scalable Web-based applications, thus providing the means for collaboration. Following are the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (see Figure 1).

• Administration. The classes and features of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace provide administrators with the tools and means for deploying, migrating, maintaining, and administrating their SharePoint sites and SharePoint-based solutions. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Administration Resource Center.

• Data management. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides an intuitive, robust environment for data collaboration and storage. It includes a range of ways to manage the content and metadata of your important business documents and data. Integrated property promotion and demotion maintain synchronization between metadata in Windows SharePoint Services and the metadata in the Office documents.

• Information services. Information services in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include inbound e-mail, e-mail alert notifications, and search. These features help teams to stay connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information. Windows SharePoint Services can help users make well-informed decisions and get work done.

• Pages and user interface (UI). The page model in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0. This creates dynamic new ways to customize and manage page design. The SharePoint pages viewed in the browser are constructed through the control templates of master pages and .ascx files. You can create custom templates that override the default templates, or programmatically modify the menus, treeviews, and navigational areas that are displayed on pages. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Pages and User Interface Resource Center.

• Provisioning. When you create a list or a site, a definition or a template determines how the list or site will be instantiated. Unlike a traditional ASP.NET application, a physical ASPX page does not need to exist for every page on the server. Windows SharePoint Services treats any page that is not customized as a virtual file, which can allow a small number of files to appear in many places. You can learn more about how this works in Understanding and Creating Customized and Uncustomized Files in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. A definition or template determines, for example, the lists, files, Web Parts, Features, or settings with which to provision the new list or site. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Provisioning Resource Center.

• Security. Security features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and the underlying ASP.NET 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0, help give you protection from unauthorized changes to your data, whether deliberate or inadvertent, and help ensure that sensitive information is available only to those authorized to see it. SharePoint Products and Technologies help provide a secure platform by integrating with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Windows Server to provide authentication and authorization mechanisms. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Security Resource Center.

• Web Parts. Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services provide developers with a way to create UI elements that support both customization and personalization. A site owner or a site member with the appropriate permissions can customize Web Part Pages by using a browser or Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to add, reconfigure, or remove Web Parts. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Web Parts Resource Center.

• Workflow. Workflows implement custom business processes that you can attach to SharePoint documents and list items. You can use workflows to control almost any aspect of an item in Windows SharePoint Services, including the life cycle of that item. For more information, see the Workflow Resource Center.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide a managed object model that enables you to programmatically customize SharePoint sites. You can integrate this object model into your ASP.NET application to enable programmatic access to documents, content, people, and information from your application. For more information, see Programming in Windows SharePoint Services.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a server product that builds on the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technology. It provides a consistent, familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration, and site customization. Additionally, Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows you to:

• Conduct effective searches for people, documents, and data.

• Participate in forms-driven business processes.

• Access and analyze large amounts of business data.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 also allows you to create Web-based solutions and sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management, or business intelligence needs. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in components to help you create rich Web-based solutions. As a result, Office SharePoint Server 2007 can greatly reduce the development time and provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs.

Figure 2 shows the capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides six capabilities or services that enable developers to customize and extend rich and scalable Web-based applications, as follows:

• Collaboration and social computing. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides Web Parts that enable functionality for social computing, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, e-mail integration, and task coordination. All of these components use information about your organization, communities, and electronic communications in Public My Site pages to help establish connections between colleagues with common interests. For more information, see Collaboration Help and How-to.

• Portals. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a world class enterprise portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of your business. It provides built-in My Site personal sites, content syndication, user profiles and a profile store, audience targeting, mobile device support, portal site templates, document aggregation Web Parts, and more. For more information, see Developer-Oriented Videos on Building Portals.

• Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides extensive and extensible content gathering, indexing, and querying ability. This service supports full-text searching by using a Structured Query Language (SQL-based) query syntax, and provides a new keyword syntax to support keyword searches. For more information, see the Enterprise Search Information Center.

• Enterprise content management. Enterprise content management (ECM) features provide ways to manage the content and metadata of business documents stored in Office SharePoint Server 2007 document libraries. ECM is a key infrastructure component that can help companies manage and organize high volumes of unstructured content such as forms, documents, records, e-mail messages, videos, instant messages (IMs), and Web pages. For more information, see the Enterprise Content Management Information Center.

• Business process and forms. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in electronic forms and workflow templates. InfoPath Forms Services, included in Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables you to publish InfoPath form templates, designed in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, to Office SharePoint Server 2007 as ASP.NET Web applications. You can open these in your browser to provide a similar experience to filling out and editing a form in InfoPath. For more information, see the InfoPath Forms Services Resource Center. In addition, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in workflows for document approval, feedback collection, signature collection, and disposition approval, and three-state workflows and a translation management workflow. You can also write custom code to create, maintain, and analyze custom workflows, enabling you to streamline your business processes. For more information, see the Workflow Resource Center.

• Business intelligence. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides infrastructure to create dashboards that allows decision-makers to access information. Excel Services server technology, included in Office SharePoint Server 2007, is a shared service that enables you to load, calculate, and display Excel workbooks on Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can use the Excel Services programmability framework to extend Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services functionalities to work with Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists, query tables on Excel Services, external workbook references, SQL write-back, and user-defined functions (UDFs). For more information, see the Excel Services Resource Center. Additionally, the Business Data Catalog functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables you to present LOB data within Office SharePoint Server. By using the Business Data Catalog, you can bring key data from different business applications to SharePoint lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications. The Business Data Catalog allows you to pull data from Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Microsoft Office Access, or other databases by using a connection string. It also allows you to pull business data from back-end server applications such as SAP, Siebel, or other LOB systems by using Web services. You can use the Business Data Catalog: Metadata Model to define an LOB entity and the How to: Get Started with Using the Administration Object Model to manage metadata programmatically. For more information, see the Business Data Catalog Information Center.

Note You can use multiple APIs and Web services to customize and extend Office SharePoint Server 2007. For a complete list of Office SharePoint Server 2007 classes and namespaces, see the Class Library and Web Service Reference in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK.

For more information, see Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Capabilities.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is a developer tool specifically designed to enable you to build and customize SharePoint sites, workflow-enabled applications, and reporting tools. It provides a WYSIWYG design interface, developer environment, and easy-to-use development tools that help simplify the task of building sites and applications. ASP.NET developers can take advantage of their existing knowledge and use this tool to create, view, and modify ASP.NET pages. The WYSIWYG design interface provides precise rendering of Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) code, cascading style sheets (CSSs), and ASP.NET technologies. This tool also provides Microsoft IntelliSense support, Web Parts, and ASP.NET controls.

Additionally, you can use Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to define and control page layout and design, master page creation, list or content type design, creation of sample data, Web Part page creation, Web Part hookup, no-code data views or forms, and no-code workflows.

Using this tool you can easily create SharePoint applications that contain custom list views, forms, data from external sources, and workflows without writing server-side code. Some of the data sources you can use to present data in your SharePoint solutions include SharePoint lists, XML files, SOAP services, server scripts, SQL databases (such as from SQL Server 2005), RSS feeds, and Web services. For more information, see the SharePoint Designer Developer Portal.

As a fully integrated component of Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Tools for the Office system (3.0) offers wider support to extend applications in Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system by using Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C#. Visual Studio Tools for the Office system (3.0) supports, reduces the complexity of, and speeds the creation of SharePoint workflows to help manage business process and information flow. For more information, see Building Office Business Applications Using Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (3.0).

Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.2 is an add-on to Visual Studio 2008 that makes it easier to code SharePoint solutions. It includes a set of Visual Studio project templates for Web Parts and site definitions, and a stand-alone utility program—the SharePoint Solution Generator. For more information, see Announcing the Final Release of VSeWSS 1.1 (and the upcoming version 1.2). Then download the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.2.

Figure 3 shows the different Visual Studio project templates enabled by Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.2.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 offers seamless integration with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Therefore, it is the preferred tool for those who want to build SharePoint applications or to design and customize SharePoint sites quickly, efficiently, and without writing code. However, if you need more flexibility, you can also use Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 to customize and extend SharePoint sites. For more information, see Getting Started with Programmatically Customizing a SharePoint Web Site in Visual Studio.

Many developers use both SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio. SharePoint Designer simplifies the design tasks, and Visual Studio provides a stronger environment for authoring custom code.

As we explained earlier, you can build SharePoint Web Parts just as you build Web Parts in ASP.NET. But in addition, site administrators can deploy your Web Parts to SharePoint sites. As part of a SharePoint site, your SharePoint Web Part is immediately available to end-users to add to pages or use to personalize pages.

For example, let's say you create a custom ASP.NET Web Part that displays driving directions based on a custom start point property that users can personalize. To create this Web Part, you create a custom class library project that contains a control that inherits from the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart class. In this class, you override the CreateChildControls method to control the rendering of HTML. After you finish the code of the class, you compile the project and add a reference to the Web Part project's .dll in your Web project. Finally, to display your Web Part in a Web Form, you add the control to a Web Part zone.

One advantage of developing ASP.NET Web Parts is that you can reuse them in SharePoint sites. Figure 4 shows a custom driving directions Web Part running in an ASP.NET 2.0 Web page and in a SharePoint site. Another advantage is that you can create Web Parts that provide a complete set of Windows SharePoint Services features, such as document services, events, workflow, search, site columns, content types, and more.

For more information, see Working with ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Windows SharePoint Services enables you to create lists and customize them to include specific columns of information. A list consists of items or rows, and columns or fields that contain data. With ASP.NET you must create or get access to a SQL Server database, and then create the tables and columns you need. Then, you have to build UI components to allow the users to populate the columns with this data. Windows SharePoint Services provides a user friendly foundation for managing data structures in the form of lists, and for doing data entry into these data structures.

Let's examine a scenario in which you are a consultant tracking many different development projects. Your manager asks you to create a custom list of projects and share the list by using intranet resources. Because your company has a SharePoint site, you decide to create a custom list that displays the title, delivery date, status, documentation, owners, and cost of each project. Figure 5 shows a custom "Projects" list.

Having this list in a SharePoint site allows you to share project information with your co-workers. Better yet, as a developer you can access data stored in this list programmatically. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides a set of Web services and classes that allow users to access data from SharePoint lists.

In another scenario, you might want to create an ASPX page with a label control that returns items from the "Projects" list where values in the "Cost" field are greater than $5,000. You can display this information by adding the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace and Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities namespace to the class code-behind file. Additionally, you need to write some code that can access the data stored in the "Projects" list, as shown in the following code example.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
    if (!IsPostBack){
        SPWeb oWeb = SPContext.Current.Web;
        SPList oList = oWeb.Lists["Projects"];

        SPQuery oQuery = new SPQuery();
        oQuery.Query = "<Where><Gt><FieldRef Name='Cost'/>" +
        "<Value Type='Number'>5000</Value></Gt></Where>";
        SPListItemCollection collListItems = oList.GetItems(oQuery);

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
           // The indenting of the following lines of code has been
           // modified for readability. Please modify as 
           // needed.
        foreach (SPListItem oListItem in collListItems){
                sb.Append("Item: ");
sb.Append(SPEncode.HtmlEncode(Convert.ToString(oListItem["Title"])));
                sb.Append("::Value: ");
sb.Append(SPEncode.HtmlEncode(Convert.ToString(oListItem["Status"])));
                sb.Append("::Calculated: ");
sb.Append(SPEncode.HtmlEncode(ConvertToString(oListItem["Cost"])));
                sb.Append("<BR>");        }
    }
        Label1.Text = sb.ToString();
}

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
    If Not IsPostBack Then
        Dim oWeb As SPWeb = SPContext.Current.Web
        Try

            Dim list As SPList = oWeb.Lists("Projects")
            Dim query As New SPQuery()
            query.Query = "<Where><Gt><FieldRef Name='ProjectedValue'/>" +
            "<Value Type='Number'>5000</Value></Gt></Where>"
            Dim listItems As SPListItemCollection = list.GetItems(query)
            
            Dim listItem As SPListItem
            Dim sb As StringBuilder = New StringBuilder
            ' The indenting of the following lines of code has been
            ' modified for readability. Please modify as 
            ' needed.
            For Each listItem In listItems
                 sb.Append("Item: ")
sb.Append(SPEncode.HtmlEncode(Convert.ToString(oListItem("Title"))))
                 sb.Append("::Value: ")
sb.Append(SPEncode.HtmlEncode(Convert.ToString(oListItem("Status"))))
                 sb.Append("::Calculated: ")
sb.Append(SPEncode.HtmlEncode(ConvertToString(oListItem("Cost"))))
                 sb.Append("<BR>")
             Next listItem
Label1.Text = sb.ToString
        Finally
            siteCollection.Dispose()
        End Try

    End If
End Sub

For more information, see Lists (How Do I... in Windows SharePoint Services).

Windows SharePoint Services allows you to programmatically create, manage, and retrieve information from documents libraries and lists. Additionally, you can create receiver classes that handle both synchronous and asynchronous events. It is possible to hook up and override multiple event handler assemblies from your custom lists, document libraries, sites, and user operations. This gives you the power of SQL triggers on SharePoint lists.

For example, let's say you want to avoid user deletion of items from a custom "Projects" list. To handle this event, you must override the ItemDeleting event of a list definition. Each time a user tries to delete an item, the user should receive a message. The following code example shows how to override the ItemDeleting event handler. This event receiver will prevent attempts at deleting items—even from users that have delete permission on the list.

public override void ItemDeleting(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
    properties.Cancel = true;
    properties.ErrorMessage = "Deleting is not supported in this list.";
}

Public Overrides Sub ItemDeleting(ByVal properties As SPItemEventProperties)
    properties.Cancel = true
    properties.ErrorMessage = "Deleting is not supported in this list."
End Sub

For more information, see Event Fundamentals.

Workflows allow you to streamline individual tasks and coordinate business processes. Using ASP.NET, you can build a set of Web forms to submit data and initiate workflows. However, you have to write a lot of business logic code to automate a workflow. Fortunately, SharePoint Products and Technologies offer built-in support for workflow customizations.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides support to create document-oriented workflow solutions. You can associate workflows to lists, document libraries, or content types. Because Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 workflows are associated to the data that humans manage, it allows you to integrate a human dimension to your workflow solutions. You can define a set of approvers and users who perform the tasks on a workflow instance.

The Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow namespace provides a set of classes, interfaces, and enumerations that represent workflow functionality encapsulated in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Workflow solutions may or may not have input forms that allow end users to interact with workflows. You can use ASP.NET Web forms to define any of the following kind of workflow forms:

• Association form. Allows you to define the name of and data associated with the workflow when connecting it to a document library, list, or content type.

• Initiation form. Allows you to specify information about the specific workflow instance for an item when a workflow instance starts. This form is presented to end-users only when a workflow is started manually.

• Task forms. Allows you to control the display of tasks associated with a workflow and define special processing when editing a task. This set of forms is implemented with the content type functionality that allows you to display, edit, and customize new forms for any content type.

• Modification form. Allows you to control the state and flow of a workflow by using custom pages, which can manipulate the data that the workflow is using.

• Status form. Allows you to define a custom status page to display to the user when the user checks the status of the workflow. This page can reach into other systems to correlate the SharePoint workflow with the data from other systems.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides additional enhancements for document-oriented workflows. Some of these capabilities include:

• Support for using InfoPath forms through InfoPath Forms Services for any association, initiation, task, modification, or status form.

• Customizable built-in workflows for approval and review.

For more information, see Developer Introduction to Workflows for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007.

To create workflow solutions, you can use Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, or Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides support for simple rules-based workflows. It allows you to define workflows without writing custom code and simplifies the deployment process by automatically storing workflow markup, rules, and supported files in a specific document library. You can associate Office SharePoint Designer 2007 workflows with multiple document libraries or lists.

However, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 provide a set of custom workflow templates that allow a greater level of customization. Both development environments provide a basic activity library that contains a set of predefined activities you can use to define workflows. You can also create custom activities that you can reuse in different workflow solutions. For example, you can create a custom activity to add workflow steps as tasks in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Figure 6 shows SharePoint Sequential Workflow and SharePoint State Machine Workflow templates in Visual Studio 2008.

Note:
Visual Studio developed workflow templates are deployed via Features and solutions. These workflow templates can be reused between libraries in the same site collection, among sites in the same Web application, and even across sites in different SharePoint farms.

For more information, see SharePoint Workflow Solutions.

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET Framework–based media experiences and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for the Web. For more information, see ASP.NET Silverlight Overview.

Silverlight offers improved interactive experiences for Web-based applications. For that reason, .NET-technology developers are interested in providing Silverlight features and components for new Web-based solutions. SharePoint developers can also take advantage of Silverlight in their SharePoint-based solutions.

Silverlight UI elements can help you integrate rich interactive functionality in SharePoint sites. You can create Web parts, document libraries, picture libraries, navigation, and custom field types that provide Silverlight support on SharePoint sites.

The Microsoft Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint provides source code and guidance for developers that describe how to use Silverlight and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies together in business applications and Internet Web sites. This capability enables a fresh look at data exposed through SharePoint Products and Technologies by using the latest graphics capability in Silverlight. Figure 7 shows a Silverlight Picture Viewer sample hosted in an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part that is running on the SharePoint Platform.

For more information, see Microsoft Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 include a set of built-in templates, master pages, and CSSs that allow you to customize the appearance (look and feel) of SharePoint sites.

The ASP.NET page framework provides a set of features that enable you to create and enhance the look and feel of Web applications. Some of these features include the following:

• Master pages. Determine overall layout, structure, and interface elements with master pages (described earlier in this article). Use master pages to provide a consistent layout for Web sites you develop.

• Styles. Define rich design through CSSs and the style property of standard HTML tags, HTML controls, and Web controls.

• Themes. Define the look and feel of Web pages by using a group of files (CSS and images) that compose a theme.

Because SharePoint Products and Technologies use ASP.NET 2.0 as a platform and framework, you can also modify master pages, CSSs, and images of a SharePoint site for branding purposes.

In Office SharePoint Server 2007, master pages are stored in the Master Page Gallery. Windows SharePoint Services exposes the Master Page Gallery as a document library that stores all existing master page definitions of a site collection. You can explore the contents of the Master Page Gallery and modify the built-in templates to create custom master pages as you need. Figure 8 shows a branded SharePoint site that uses a master page.

Note:
The default.master file contains controls such as ASP.NET server and user controls and SharePoint framework controls such as SPWebPartManager, SiteActions, SiteLogoImage, and CSSLink.

For more information, see Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 1 of 3): Understanding Web Content Management and the Default Features.

ASP.NET 2.0 provides a site navigation model that includes a site navigation API, a set of navigation providers, and server controls that allow you to control site navigation programmatically. The Site Navigation API has a SiteMapProvider class you can use to store your navigational data. You can then author a custom provider that derives from the SiteMapProvider class to retrieve other data stores that use other formats.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides the PortalSiteMapProvider class that derives from the ASP.NET SiteMapProvider class. The PortalSiteMapProvider class, in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace, allows you to retrieve site hierarchy data. Therefore, you get enhanced navigation control on SharePoint sites.

ASP.NET also provides a set of navigation controls such as the SiteMapPath, TreeView, and Menu controls. These controls allow you to provide graphical site navigation in your Web sites. In the same way, Office SharePoint Server 2007 uses the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.AspMenu control to provide menu-based navigation. By following the same approach you use for ASP.NET Web sites, you can programmatically customize navigation of SharePoint sites.

Finally, ASP.NET also provides data source controls that allow you to connect navigation controls with the underlying provider of navigation data. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides the PortalSiteMapDataSource control that lets you link navigation controls to navigation data via the DataSourceID attribute of navigation controls. Therefore, you can use a PortalSiteMapDataSource control in the same way you use a SQLDataSource, an XMLDataSource, an AccessDataSource, or an ObjectDataSource Web server control to bind navigation data to server controls such as a TreeView or Menu control.

Master pages in SharePoint Products and Technologies, such as the default.master page, are used to store page navigation providers and controls. The following sample code shows the partial contents of a default.master page that contains page navigation definitions encapsulated in an asp:ContentPlaceHolder control.

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolderHorizontalNav" runat="server">
    <sharepoint:aspmenu
    id="TopNavigationMenu"
    runat="server"
    datasourceid="topSiteMap"
    enableviewstate="false"
    accesskey="<%$Resources:wss,navigation_accesskey%>"
    orientation="Horizontal"
    staticdisplaylevels="2"
    maximumdynamicdisplaylevels="1"
    dynamichorizontaloffset="0"
    staticpopoutimageurl="/_layouts/images/menudark.gif"
    staticpopoutimagetextformatstring=""
    dynamichoverstyle-backcolor="#CBE3F0"
    skiplinktext=""
    staticsubmenuindent="0"
    cssclass="ms-topNavContainer">
        <StaticMenuStyle/>
        <StaticMenuItemStyle CssClass="ms-topnav" ItemSpacing="0px"/>
        <StaticSelectedStyle CssClass="ms-topnavselected" />
        <StaticHoverStyle CssClass="ms-topNavHover" />
        <DynamicMenuStyle BackColor="#F2F3F4" BorderColor="#A7B4CE"
        BorderWidth="1px"/>
        <DynamicMenuItemStyle CssClass="ms-topNavFlyOuts"/>
        <DynamicHoverStyle CssClass="ms-topNavFlyOutsHover"/>
        <DynamicSelectedStyle CssClass="ms-topNavFlyOutsSelected"/>
    </sharepoint:aspmenu>
    <sharepoint:delegatecontrol runat="server"
    controlid="TopNavigationDataSource">
        <Template_Controls>
            <asp:SiteMapDataSource
            ShowStartingNode="False"
            SiteMapProvider="SPNavigationProvider"
            id="topSiteMap"
            runat="server"
            StartingNodeUrl="sid:1002"/>
        </Template_Controls>
    </sharepoint:delegatecontrol>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

For more information, see Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 2 of 3): Extending WCM.

Web services allow your Web-based applications to connect to other software applications over a network, and therefore enable you to build distributed, service-oriented systems. As an ASP.NET developer, you may have already connected your Web-based applications to multiple Web services. If that's the case, you will be pleased to know that both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server offer a wide variety of Web services that you can use to retrieve and configure information from SharePoint sites.

Windows SharePoint Services Web Services

Windows SharePoint Services Web services are part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer namespace. These Web services include methods for accessing and customizing SharePoint site content such as lists, site data, forms, meetings, document workspaces, and permissions. Figure 9 shows the various Windows SharePoint Services Web services.

Figure 9. Windows SharePoint Services Web services

To add a reference to a Windows SharePoint Services Web service in Visual Studio, add a Web Reference using the path of the SharePoint site for which the Web service is available. For example, to connect to the meetings Web service, you need to add a reference to the following: http://MyServer/[sites/][MySite/][MySubsite/]_vti_bin/meetings.asmx.

For more information, see Windows SharePoint Services Web Services.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web Services

As explained earlier in this article, content types are designed to help users organize their SharePoint content in a more meaningful way. A content type is a reusable collection of settings you can apply to a certain category of content, such as documents and folders. For example, you can define a custom purchase order document type. Windows SharePoint Services allows you to define custom columns to track metadata and behaviors such as workflow, forms, event handlers, and information policies that are specific to this document type. Additionally, you want to define a custom contract for external vendors and store it in the same document library. Content types enable you to store multiple types of content in the same document library or list. Content types are independent of a SharePoint list location. After you define a content type, you can use it throughout an entire site collection. Content types let you extend functionality by allowing you to define additional settings, custom workflows, and attributes.

You can create content types by using the UI in Office SharePoint Server 2007, by using the Windows SharePoint Services object model, or via a SharePoint Feature. The Microsoft.SharePoint namespace provides a SPContentType class that represents a site or list content type that you can use to retrieve information and manipulate a content type programmatically. The following code example shows how to add a Status field to an existing "Projects" content type.

SPWeb mySite = SPContext.Current.Web;
SPContentType contentType = mySite.ContentTypes["Projects"];
StringCollection values = new StringCollection();
sc.AddRange(new string[]{ "Not Started","On Track","Completed" });
contentType.Fields.Add("Status",SPFieldType.Choice, false, true, values);
contentType.Update();

Dim mySite As SPWeb = SPContext.Current.Web
Dim contentType As SPContentType = mySite.ContentTypes("Projects")
Dim values As StringCollection = New StringCollection
sc.AddRange(New String() {"Not Started", "On Track", "Completed"})
contentType.Fields.Add("Status", SPFieldType.Choice, false, true, values)
contentType.Update

For more information, see Content Types.

ASP.NET provides support for role-based authentication. This allows you to programmatically control different access levels for users to Web pages. For example, you can have a Web site that has Web pages that can be seen only by managers, and Web pages that can be seen only by vice presidents. ASP.NET provides a set of different membership and role manager providers that allow you to customize and control authorization in your application.

In the same way, Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows you to define custom user profiles and audiences so you can control authorization to SharePoint sites. In addition, you can use user profiles and audiences to target content and information in content pages. For example, you can show or hide Web Parts in a content page based on audiences. Figure 10 shows how to define target audiences for a Web Part in content pages.

User Profiles

Audiences