Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

934 Part IX: Maintaining a Server in Windows SharePoint Services
Web services provide their functionality through the _vti_bin virtual directory,
which maps to the :\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\ISAPI directory in the server.
The Alerts Service
The Alerts service provides methods for working with alerts for list items in a Share-
Point site. This code example will show you how to create a simple Windows form
that uses the GetAlerts method of the Alerts Web service to retrieve information
about alerts within a SharePoint site.
First we have to create a new Window Application project and add a reference
to the Alerts Web service, that is http://servername/_vti_bin/alerts.asmx. We will
drag a label and a button onto the form and add the following code in the button
click event handler. This code will first declare and initialize a variable for the Alerts
Web service, that we have called in our example WebAlerts. Next we have to
authenticate the current user by passing the default credentials to the Alerts Web service
from the system credential cache. Then we can use the GetAlerts method to get
all the alerts on this SharePoint site. The following information will be displayed in
the label control: the name of the server, the URL of the server, the title of the Share-
Point site, and the number of alerts that are made on the SharePoint site.
WebAlerts.Alerts alertService = new WebAlerts.Alerts();
alertService.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
WebAlerts.AlertInfo allAlerts = alertService.GetAlerts();
label1.Text = "Server: " + allAlerts.AlertServerName +
"\nURL: " + allAlerts.AlertServerUrl +
"\nWeb Title: " + allAlerts.AlertWebTitle +
"\nNumber: " + allAlerts.Alerts.Length.ToString();
Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities Namespace
The Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities namespace is used for various utilities purposes,
including encoding of strings and processing of user information. This namespace can
be found in the Windows SharePoint Services assembly (in Microsoft.SharePoint.dll).
Table 33-6 shows the classes of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities namespace.
Table 33-6 Classes in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities Namespace
Name Description
SPEncode Provides methods for encoding strings
SPPropertyBag Stores arbitrary key-and-value pairs that contain custom property settings
SPUtility Provides tools for converting date and time formats, for getting information
from user names, for securing access to sites, and for various other tasks in
managing a deployment of Windows SharePoint Services