Tag Prefixes Let You Do Server Things

Sharepoint is a weird agglomeration of technologies, built by a massive team of people, and it tends to need some handholding for the sake of its own security. Much like yourself, when you think about the hollowing of the middle class, wonder how you got here.

So, coming from a raw and rather old-fashioned web development background, where one might be accustomed to installing LAMP and going for it, what is a Tag Prefix?

As far as one can tell, a tag prefix tells your Sharepoint frontend page or layout to expect weird tags to turn up, which call specific underlying functions from a given document reference/the appropriate MS namespace. That's it, and that should be all, except they frequently have registration problems; "Unregistered Tag Prefix" as an error means that there is a tag somewhere in your page that is calling to a prefix that has not been properly entered up top.

Tag Prefix: a way of bringing access to various server controls into a front-end dev space.

The tag prefixes explicitly tell your page what things your page is allowed to call, presumably to protect your server and make sure everything is running the way it should. If you read the tag prefixes on your page, you can usually tell what functions are permitted within the page.

This means your page won't choke when it runs across <SharePoint:ListProperty /> somewhere within it, and, should you be genuinely writing your own libraries - which, should be stressed, you will probably not be doing if you're mostly helping people use the calendar function - you can make your own.


This is where a more professional blog, such as one that hearts the heck out of Visual Studio, would point out that you can develop in VS2010 and deploy things as Solutions to Server Farms and that Solutions come with a Manifest, but I do not drink kool-aid, I drink gin, so here, a very simple custom tag prefix use:

<% Register TagPrefix="booze" TagName="gin" Src="~/UserControls/TheBarCode.ascx"%>

This would allow you to call delicious <booze:gin Title="drink" runat="server"> and then you'd be fired forever because gin + servers = juniper-smelling magic smoke. The most exclusive only. It will take your whole budget to smell it even once.

Probably Visual Studio is coming into this soon. To the horror of all involved.

PS: I got Reddit'd. They said you shouldn't listen to me, because I am grossly inexperienced and deeply unprofessional, with many Wrong Answers, and that I should read more and blog less. Accurate!