I've finally come full circle. I initially intended to write about a pre-existing wizard that I rebuilt before I found out about xaml controls. Ignore the irony about writing a series on using xaml controls and giving the final how-to article using the old controls but I did build the wizard(s) before I discovered the system; so there's that. Also, as I mentioned at the end of the first article, there's a sample tutorial wizard provided by Sitecore, built using the new xaml controls which can be used if you're up to converting it.
The previous articles explained what Sheer UI was and how to do basic integrations into your system but what else can it do? There's a good deal of syntax that is supported and a number of useful controls at your disposal.
With the previous article explaining a bit about what Sheer UI is, setting up a hello world will make much more sense. For this, I'm going to setup the XML control and supporting class file and then give examples of calling them from Applications and Item Editor Tabs
My journey began with a rebuild of a Sheer UI Wizard. I didn't build it, but I was about to learn to. After finding a dearth of literature on Sheer and realizing the documentation was a little out of date (I'm guessing SC 4), I knew I was going to write something on it. When I began writing I thought I knew a fair amount about Sheer from my experience creating different utilities but as it turns out, I knew very little. Though, from some of the applications I've seen, there seems to be a few who have faced the abyss and become steely Sheer developers, I'm betting there are more like myself with passable knowledge but not the whole picture. There was a recently released video walkthrough from the 24 hours of Sitecore led by Robert Hock that details setting up a Sheer UI application that's also worth watching and a video of the presentation I gave to the Sitecore User Group.
update on 9.13.2011 - Sukiyoshi's open source license has changed to the MIT open source license.
update on 3.8.2012 - Sukiyoshi has been updated to work on Sitecore 6.4 and up and has a specific release for it you can jump over to the Sukiyoshi open source repository for the specifics.
Over the past few years I've been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to work with Brightcove and was given a development account for their platform that I could work against. In that time I went and took the existing .NET SDK Tanaris that had implemented the video read methods and blew out the rest of the read and write methods for the videos and playlists. I ended up learning a lot and had started my own branch of the code. I named it Sukiyoshi, after my wife. I did a lot of work on Sitecore sites at the same time and after having built More Interop with Douglas Couto, which used a lot of video, I realized that being able to outsource the video management aspect of a Sitecore website could have greatly simplified our task.
updated on 8/11/2011 regarding the order of the tabs. specifically to the position of the content tab .
So during the course of developing websites for Sitecore there are a lot of opportunities to create custom functionality. One feature that I like to use is a custom editor tab. If you're unfamiliar with the concept then you've seen them and just didn't notice. If you have a media folder selected you'll see options to "upload" or "upload advanced".
Sitecore is an incredibly good platform that provides a lot of functionality out of the box, but one of the great things about Sitecore is that if there is something custom that you'd like to add in, there's always a way to do it. I'm going to walk through the process of adding a custom piece of functionality to Sitecore's Rich Text Editor. There are a lot of reasons you would want to do this but for the sake of this example we'll build a simple text insertion demo that you can expand upon.