Using CoverFlow within Sharepoint

[Simon]

Hi,
Does anyone know whether coverflow can be used in sharepoint with it's picture library?

Thanks

[Nikolay]

Hi Simon,

We have not developed any special SharePoint WebParts for our RadControls for Silverlight, yet. However, if you manage to prepare such a WebPart yourself, you can then easily embed a Silverlight control in it, including the RadCoverFlow control. To get started with SharePoint WebParts you can follow the link below:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms476318.aspx

Regards,
Nick
the Telerik team

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[mark]

Nick, do we need to do anything special to get Telerik Controls to run inside of Sharepoint?  I know dll's need to be marked as "Safe" or installed into the GAC.  I suppose that would be the same for the Telerik dll's?  Would there by anything else we would have to worry about?  I am trying to get a prototype ready by next Monday to have Silverlight with Telerik controls running and talking to each other inside Sharepoint 2007.

Thanks

Mark

[Nikolay]

Hi Mark,

First of all, we deeply apologize for the late reply. We've been pretty busy with the Q2 release these days and I hope you will accept our sincerest apologies for this delay.

I am not a Sharepoint expert, but as far as I know, you should not need to worry about the Silverlight assemblies' security, since they are not "real" .NET assemblies. Silverlight uses its own limited version of the .NET framework, that runs as a web browser plug-in. The Silverlight assemblies are executed on the client (as opposed to the "regular" .NET assemblies, that run on the ASP.NET server) and are downloaded from the server in the form of XAP packages (that are actually renamed ZIP files). There is no GAC for Silverlight assemblies.

To run a Silverlight application in Sharepoint you just need to create a resource that contains your Silverlight application's XAP file and point the <asp:Silverlight /> control's Source property to that resource, or if you declare the Silverlight plug-in as a <object> element, you need to set the value of the param element with name "source".

The Silverlight applications communicate only through web services, so this should not be different than any other application. If you need to provide some values from the Silverlight application to the Sharepoint WebPart, or a server-side control, you should use Javascript, or the Silverlight browser DOM wrapper to initiate a postback, or AJAX callback, sending the values through a hidden field, for example.

Best wishes,
Nick
the Telerik team

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[mark baer]

If anyone is interested, YES you can have the Coverflow inside of Sharepoint.  I have a Portal page with over 12 Silverlight controls working on it and the Coverflow is the "Parent" control.  When it changes, it sends an ID to all the "Child" controls and they reload themselves by calling services.  I found out how to do it in this book:  Sharepoint 2007 Development Using Microsoft Silverlight 2 by Fox and Stubbs. 

Good luck.

mark

[Hristo Borisov]

Hello Mark Baer,

Thank you for sharing with the community your experience with RadControls for Silverlight and Sharepoint. As you heavily rely on RadCoverFlow in your application, I advise you to download our soon to be released beta version of the new controls that contains a new RadCoverFlow. The new control will be a replacement of the current version, and it will be very useful for you to spend some time to check the compatibility of our beta version against your current implementation. This will minimize the learning curve, and any incompatibilities which we will try to minimize.

Thank you again, and we look forward to receiving your feedback on our new RadCoverFlow control.

Kind regards,
Hristo Borisov
the Telerik team

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[Larkin Young]

I am trying to integrate RadCoverflow for rendering images in a SharePoint picture library as well. However, it seems that whenever I add a reference to any Telerik Silverlight controls into my Silverlight application project and attempt to build, I get the following error:

The "ValidateXaml" task failed unexpectedly.<br>System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Core, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7cec85d7bea7798e' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.<br>File name: 'System.Core, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7cec85d7bea7798e'<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.ModuleHandle.ResolveType(Int32 typeToken, RuntimeTypeHandle* typeInstArgs, Int32 typeInstCount, RuntimeTypeHandle* methodInstArgs, Int32 methodInstCount)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.ModuleHandle.ResolveTypeHandle(Int32 typeToken, RuntimeTypeHandle[] typeInstantiationContext, RuntimeTypeHandle[] methodInstantiationContext)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.Reflection.Module.ResolveType(Int32 metadataToken, Type[] genericTypeArguments, Type[] genericMethodArguments)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.Reflection.CustomAttribute.FilterCustomAttributeRecord(CustomAttributeRecord caRecord, MetadataImport scope, Assembly&amp; lastAptcaOkAssembly, Module decoratedModule, MetadataToken decoratedToken, RuntimeType attributeFilterType, Boolean mustBeInheritable, Object[] attributes, IList derivedAttributes, RuntimeType&amp; attributeType, RuntimeMethodHandle&amp; ctor, Boolean&amp; ctorHasParameters, Boolean&amp; isVarArg)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.Reflection.CustomAttribute.GetCustomAttributes(Module decoratedModule, Int32 decoratedMetadataToken, Int32 pcaCount, RuntimeType attributeFilterType, Boolean mustBeInheritable, IList derivedAttributes)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.Reflection.CustomAttribute.GetCustomAttributes(Assembly assembly, RuntimeType caType)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.Reflection.Assembly.GetCustomAttributes(Type attributeType, Boolean inherit)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at System.Attribute.GetCustomAttributes(Assembly element, Type attributeType, Boolean inherit)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at MS.Internal.Xaml.MS.Impl.XamlSystemBinding.AddPairsFromAssembly(XamlSchemaContext schemaContext, Assembly asm, String uri, List`1 pairs)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at MS.Internal.Xaml.MS.Impl.XamlSystemBinding.SearchForXamlNamespace(XamlSchemaContext schemaContext, String uriString, IEnumerable`1 referenceAssemblies)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at MS.Internal.Xaml.XamlSchemaContext.GetXamlNamespace(String xmlns, Assembly localAssembly)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at MS.Internal.Xaml.XamlSchemaContext.GetXamlNamespace(String xmlns)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at MS.MarkupCompiler.ValidationPass.ValidateXaml(String fileName, Assembly[] assemblies, Assembly callingAssembly, TaskLoggingHelper log, Boolean shouldThrow)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at Microsoft.Silverlight.Build.Tasks.ValidateXaml.XamlValidator.Execute()<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at Microsoft.Silverlight.Build.Tasks.ValidateXaml.XamlValidator.Execute()<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at Microsoft.Silverlight.Build.Tasks.ValidateXaml.Execute()<br>&nbsp;&nbsp; at Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine.TaskEngine.ExecuteInstantiatedTask(EngineProxy engineProxy, ItemBucket bucket, TaskExecutionMode howToExecuteTask, ITask task, Boolean&amp; taskResult)<br><br>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;ADSIC.Portal.WebParts.ImageFlowViewer

If I remove the reference to the Telerik assembly, the build error goes away. I am developing using VS 2008 SP1, ASP.Net 3.5 SP1, and the Telerik RadControls for Silverlight Q2 2009 on Windows Server 2008 64-bit.

The approach I am trying to use is to create a base UserControl and Application class that takes in a XAML string as an init param and parses the XAML (which is the entire Telerik control declaration) and loads the instantiated control inside the RootVisual control's Children control collection. The approach has nothing to do with the error, however, as I can reproduce the same problem in a clean project created using Microsoft's Silverlight Application project template and adding a reference to a Telerik Silverlight control assembly.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Larkin

[Larkin Young]

Even though the Telerik RadControls for Silverlight documentation states that the controls are built against Silverlight 2 (you should probably fix this) everything else on your site says they are built against Silverlight 3. Strangely, it seems as if they reference System.Core from Silverlight 2. Any ideas why this might be? Why is it, when I add a reference to Telerik Silverlight Q2 2009 (Aug. 12) assemblies, do I get the above mentioned error? Why is it looking for the Silverlight 2 version of System.Core?

[Larkin Young]

Well it seems that the second time I removed and reinstalled the Silverlight 3 Tools for VS 2008 SP1 fixed the cause of my problem. I can now build the project without any errors. Very odd.