Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 34: The SharePoint Portal Server Object Model 943
objects in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace. For example, you
can get a collection of VirtualServer objects that the farm uses and then perform
Windows SharePoint Services operations on those VirtualServer objects to add a
Web Part to all virtual servers in the farm.
Another crucial function that the Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Topology
namespace provides is allowing you to get a PortalContext object from a Console
application or a Windows Forms application. For this, you would use the Topology-
Manager object to get a specific PortalSite object for the portal site you want to connect
to. The following code snippet demonstrates how to get a PortalContext object
from a console or Windows Forms application:
C#
TopologyManager topology = new TopologyManager();
PortalSite portal = topology.PortalSites[new Uri("http://test-server")];
PortalContext context = PortalApplication.GetContext(portal);
VB.NET
TopologyManager()
Private Portal As PortalSite = topology.PortalSites("http://test-server")
Private context As PortalContext = PortalApplication.GetContext(portal)
It is important to remember that the URI you pass as an indexer in the preceding sample
must be the default portal site URL. For example, if you have a portal site available
at http://test-server and the URL http://192.168.0.1 also points to that site, you
can only use http://test-server in the code example. Otherwise, the code will throw
an exception since the object model gets the reference of the site from the database,
and only the default URL is stored.
Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.UserProfiles
The Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.UserProfiles namespace is one of the most useful
namespaces for Windows Forms and Console applications. It is often used to perform
administrative functions. For example, if you do not have Active Directory to
import user profiles from, you could use the namespace to import user profiles from
any other directory service. You could also pre-create My Sites, otherwise known as
Personal Sites, for all users with this namespace so that the server does not have a
load spike in production when a user clicks to create a My Site. Creating My Sites are
expensive in terms of processor time because they are the same as creating a new
Site collection, so it can be beneficial to expend the processor time to create these
before the servers go into production.
With this namespace, you can also work with a user’s profile and My Site. You
can add properties to the profile, add links to all users’ My Sites, or create reports to
see how many users are using their My Site. This namespace provides excellent functionality
for administrative functions. Because this namespace provides administrative
functions, several code samples will be provided in this section for administrators,
whereas other sections might provide just a description of the namespaces.