Tips on SharePoint 2010 UI development

If you’ve been doing UI development for SharePoint 2007 – you know it’s comming – migrating your UI to 2010.

Since SharePoint 2010 allows administrators to choose whether their 2010 site will run under old  (current) UI or new slick UI – you will have to make sure to account for both.

One of the 2 handy SharePoint 2010 controls I found are: LanguageSpecificContent, UIVersionedContent

First one allows you to render the content within a template based on the language locale the users are on, which is great for multilingual intranets and internets; here is how something like this would be used:

<SharePoint:LanguageSpecificContent runat=”server” Languages=”1033″>
  <ContentTemplate>
   <a href=’http://www.bing.com’ target=”_blank”> This will be displayed for 1033 locale.   </a>
  </ContentTemplate>
 </SharePoint:LanguageSpecificContent>

The second handy control that will render various output depending on UI version will be used like this:

<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent runat=”server” UIVersion=”4″>
  <ContentTemplate>
We’re using SharePoint 2010!
  </ContentTemplate>
 </SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>

<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent runat=”server” UIVersion=”3″>
  <ContentTemplate>
We’re not yet on SharePoint 2010!
  </ContentTemplate>
 </SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>

This one is great for kicking off specific CSS or javascript declarations depending on the type of UI you’re running

Enjoy!