SharePoint is an amazing product and there are some fantastic opportunities to make awesome applications. It also has a great API which has had improved further in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. But there are several features available in the platform/API that just isn’t available to all of us, unless we sit in Redmond and are building the actual product.
There are so many classes or methods that are marked internal or sealed, that I really would like to use. I’m not going to nag about the search Web Parts this time, but instead focus on some classes that I really would like to be changed from internal to public.
When working with Web Parts and especially Editor Parts, where you can create your own interface for fiddling with the Web Part properties and its configuration. I really would like to be able, without writing numerous lines of styling code, to create neat looking Editor Parts that align with the rest of the Web Part tool pane. In particular I’m thinking about the BuilderButton class which is used to create the little ellipsis button, which you get a popup to edit the text in. Why on earth is that class sealed?
Dear SharePoint Product Team, you still have a few months until RTM of SharePoint 2010. Please make the BuilderButton public. And while you are there please go through the PropertySheetRow and Utlity classes and expose some of the methods or put them in a Tool Pane Utility class. Pure and simple…
Meanwhile I continue to use Reflector…