Ok, I guess I should stop daydreaming, huh? Let's talk about how this works. First, as I mentioned in my previous post, most of the HTML for Sharepoint sites is generated by a Windows DLL. I, of course, got really frustrated that I would have to code my own DLL in order to get this going. I immediately started to use my network to see if there were any Sharepoint resources within IBM who could help me do this. I eventually ended up with Jeff Calow, who is an STSM for Composite Application development. He suggested that instead of doing .NET development, I instead use JavaScript and the DOM (document object model) to parse out the resulting HTML and inject the necessary JavaScript. I wasn't too happy with the idea, but I figured "this is a POC and we just need something quick-n-dirty" so this should work.
Suneil Berajawala had provided me with a test page that quickly explained how to expose the Business Card in a typical web page. All that's required is the user's email address and 2-3 lines of JavaScript. One of those lines of code, has to go in an HTML's HEAD element. The problem is that Sharepoint doesn't provide a way for me to insert a HEAD element (every time I did, the server would crash because it wasn't able to compile the ASPX page). Anyway, after pinging Suneil for a while, I found the following tag in the page:
<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead" runat="server">
and I asked myself: "Could this be the place where I would insert stuff that would typically go in an <HEAD> element?". I gave it a try and it worked!!!!