I had an idea at the beginning of the year. I am the Site Collection Administrator and am only responsible for administering and developing solutions for my SharePoint site collection in my office (about 2000 employees). I do not have access to the SharePoint servers to install WSP’s, use STSADM, or even PowerShell.

I am in charge of all development for my Site Collection but getting a custom SharePoint web part or WSP solution into production takes weeks….and sometimes months. So, i began working with the Content Editor Web Parts (CEWP’s) to see if I can use the SharePoint Web Services and Javascript as a “Poor man’s” web part. My “Poor man’s” web parts are only CEWP’s which don’t have to go thru a special code review and approval process before being moved into the production SharePoint farm.

If you are under these same kind of restrictions, maybe you’d like to consider this approach as well. However, this isn’t the best approach in that things can ‘break’ easily if someone modifies your code in the CEWP’s.
 
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Up until recently I have been manually adding a Web Service Reference to my WinForms and WPF projects. I have been connecting to the SharePoint Web Services to pull data from my sites because of the limitations of not having access to the server to use the SharePoint Object Model. In an ideal situation, I would much rather use the SharePoint Object Model to access SharePoint data because I can do more with it and it’s not as complicated as using the SharePoint Web Services.

I’ve often wondered how I can reference the ‘lists.asmx’ web service without having to manually add a Web Service Reference in Visual Studio. Following this approach, you can call a web service (any web service) from your WinForms, WPF, Javascript, ASP.NET, etc. applications. (more…)