I few months ago I posted on RenderPatterns and how they are used when creating custom fields for SharePoint. In that post the point I was trying to make was that when viewing data in a list nothing else matters except the render pattern. None of your highfalutin C# SPField derived classes can save you from the madness that is the render pattern. Never mind what MSDN says about using an .ascx control - there is no other way. So with that said, given that we’re stuck with the render pattern, it would be good to know a bit...

A few weeks ago I promised to post a few articles about extending CAML to deal with some of the elements that you’d normally have to write code in order to package. To be honest I’ve been putting it off in the hope that SharePoint 2010 and VisualStudio 2010 would make all these problems go away but it seems that that isn’t going to happen, at least not completely. So no more excuses, I may as well get on with it! I wanted to cover Lookup fields in this post. Somebody recently asked about this on the forums and...

When developing an application based on SharePoint, a lot of the work goes into packaging and deployment. If you’re working as part of a team this becomes an even bigger problem since you need to be sure that your code can be deployed to each developers machine without causing mayhem and requiring a disproportionate amount of effort (quite literally two steps forward and three steps back!) As it stands at the moment, CAML is a grand idea but it doesn’t go far enough when it comes to packaging complex solutions. It’s my aim to fill in the blanks, making...