CAML Designer
Finally! The new CAML Designer is released! I did not do this alone this time, I co-developed the tool with Andy Van Steenbergen, one of my friends at the BIWUG board.
When I developed the first version of the U2U CAML Builder back in 2004, CAML was an exotic language that nobody knew and nobody wanted to learn. In the beginning the tool lived on the blog of my dear friend Patrick Tisseghem, who unfortunately died in september 2008, far too early. Thanks to the tool, which is used all around the world, each SharePoint developer knows how to use CAML.
The user interface is completely designed in WPF. If you install the tool on a server where you have installed SharePoint 2010, you can logon using the SharePoint server object model. But if you have to use the tool remotely, you can connect to SharePoint 2010 using the .NET client object or the SharePoint web services.
For the moment you can only build queries for SharePoint 2010, but once SharePoint vNext is out, we will upgrade the tool. Once you are logged in to SharePoint, you are able to build queries from very simple to very complex. You can also view code snippets in C# for the SharePoint server object model, for the .NET client object model and for the SharePoint web services.
You can download the tool from the download section of the biwug site. You can find detailed documentation on the tool and on CAML here.
Updated: The version downloadable from the site is a click-onnce application, meaning that each time you start the application, it checks online if no newer version exists. If this is inconvenient to you (because f.e. your server is not connected to the internet) and you want to download an off-line version, you can click this link.
The tool is still in beta and I know there are still a few glitches. We are working on it and will post new versions of the tool frequently. But with the click-once way of installing it, you will be asked to update your version of the tool as soon as we release a new version of it. If you find bugs yourself or if you have ideas please do not hesitate to post a message to camlfeedback@biwug.be.
I hope you enjoy this one!
About
I’m Karine Bosch and currently I’m working as a freelance O365 and SharePoint Solution Architect .
I still do a lot of work for my previous employer Recomatics, a company located in Destelbergen near Ghent.
Previously I also worked as a Premier Field Engineer for SharePoint @ Microsoft Belgium.
For 5 successive years I’ve been rewarded as SharePoint Server MVP for my contribution to the SharePoint community: I developed the U2U CAML Query Builder and its successor the CAML Designer, which I develop together with Andy Van Steenbergen.
In the many years I worked for U2U, I worked as technical assistant for Patrick Tisseghem who unfortunately died on 3th September 2008. Together with Patrick we developed the alfa and beta versions of the Silverlight BluePrint for SharePoint which contains several samples on how to integrate Silverlight with SharePoint. You can download the samples from http://www.codeplex.com/SL4SP.
I’m also proud board member of the belgian user group BIWUG.
If you don’t find the answers to your questions on this blog, you can always post your questions to the SharePoint 2010 forum or the SharePoint 2013 forum.
Karine Bosch's Blog 