I'm working with a large state project that is utilizing SharePoint 2010. I came on 3 years into a 4 year project. From what I can tell, they had a vision of organization from the start but didn't stick to conventions so at this point the site is somewhat chaotic. I've seen documents nested 8+ sub-folders deep. Currently there are around 30,000 documents on the site in total.
My job description is vague, and I usually get pulled in a lot of different directions (some interesting, some rather mundane.) One of the more tedious tasks that falls on my plate is to periodically (biweekly or so) send out reminders to team-members with checked out files. People often forget to check files back in, or even mistakenly and unwittingly check files out to begin with. At the moment, I have a view that displays all files in a library that are checked out and groups by Checked Out To column. I can extract a distribution list for email reminders from this view. To direct the users with checked out files to the files they have checked out, I created a public view that displays files when Checked Out To = [Me]. I know there are probably a dozen ways to streamline this process.
My real question pertains to the CheckedOutDate property that I know exists in the code underlying SharePoint, but which doesn't have any OOB support. While looking for ways to streamline the check-out-reminders process, I became interested in the CheckOutDate property and tried to figure out how to implement it in my own SharePoint environment (I have a SharePoint Server 2010 trial that I'm running from my Windows 7 laptop). What I really want is to code a read-only column similar to the default Modified column, but which populates with DateTime at the time of checkout. With this, I could get a list of all files checked out for 2+weeks for instance.
I have Visual Studio 2010, and I've been training in C# for my job (like I said, my job description is vague. I'm halfway between developer in training and IT guy). This is my first venture into programming and I love it so far. Apologies for the convoluted post, this problem has been bugging me for a while.
TL;DR
Can somebody help me figure out how to [programatically] create a CheckOutDate column for SharePoint 2010?