MSDN Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 33)

Simplify SharePoint Development with STSDEV TED PATTISON started developing for Windows® SharePoint® Services solutions for SharePoint development that adhere to (WSS) 3.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server best practices. (MOSS) 2007 back in the summer of 2005. Since that My goal in this month’s column is to discuss how to time I have created hundreds of new class library projuse the STSDEV utility to create and extend a Visual ects and configured them by hand to develop various Studio project that produces an effective and flexible types of SharePoint components such as Features, Apenvironment for SharePoint development. The application Pages, Page Templates, and Web Parts. proach outlined here provides flexibility because it After a while I started to standardize on a common can be used with either Visual Studio 2005 or Visuproject structure of files and folders within the solu- Figure 1 Folders al Studio 2008. Furthermore, this approach will ease tions I created with Visual Studio® 2005 for SharePoint Within RootFiles migration when it’s time to move from one version of development. However, this had a painful aspect: for Visual Studio to the next. each project, it would always take me about five or ten minutes just to create the basic structure that would be my start- The RootFiles Directory ing point. Very little was different in the source files from project An important aspect of understanding how deployment works to project other than the project name. in SharePoint development is knowing where your templates files Another painstaking issue many developers face with SharePoint need to be copied on the front-end Web server. A significant perdevelopment has to do with creating the necessary files to gener- centage of the files must be deployed on each and every front-end ate the solution package file (.wsp) required for testing and deploy- Web server inside a location known as the SharePoint RootFiles ment. Like many other SharePoint developers, I grew accustomed directory, which in WSS 3.0 is located here: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12 to creating and updating a manifest.xml file and a .ddf file by hand in order to generate my solution packages. Take a look at Figure 1 to review the child directories nested inOver the past year I have been collaborating with some other side the RootFiles directory. The directory into which you most SharePoint MVPs including John Holliday, Andrew Connell, and commonly need to deploy Scot Hillier, who had all come up with very similar yet slightly custom templates files is It is a best practice in MOSS different schemes to accomplish the same goal. We discussed the the TEMPLATE directo2007 development to idea of designing and implementing a code generator that could ry. But it is also sometimes automatically produce all the source files needed for a new Visual necessary to deploy files deploy all custom templates Studio project and solution. The goal, of course, would be to pro- inside some of these other and components using vide a much faster technique for getting up and running with a child directories, such as solution packages. new SharePoint development project. the ISAPI directory when Once we created a code generator that could build every new you are deploying a custom Visual Studio solution with a common folder structure, it would Web service and the Resources directory when you need to deploy then also be possible to write the code required to regenerate the .resx files with global resources. manifest.xml file and the .ddf file required to produce the solution The TEMPLATE directory also contains several important child package .wsp file. This would eliminate the need to modify mani- directories. For example, each custom feature requires its own named fest.xml or the .ddf file by hand. directory within the FEATURES directory that contains a feature This month’s column is accompanied by a proof-of-concept ap- manifest named feature.xml. Application pages should be copied plication named STSDEV.EXE that demonstrates how to create a to a child directory within the LAYOUTS directory. simple code generator for SharePoint development. STSDEV is a console application that makes it easy to develop components Automating the Building of Solution Packages for MOSS 2007. Furthermore, the fact that it generates code in a It is a best practice in MOSS 2007 development to deploy all repeatable fashion also makes it possible to build Visual Studio custom templates and components using solution packages. In march2008 33 I

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - March 2008

MSDN Magazine - March 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Data Points Advanced Basics Office Space Introducing ASP.NET MVC Loosen Up CI Server Performance Office Development Test Run Security Briefs Extreme ASP.NET Foundations .NET Matters {End Bracket}

MSDN Magazine - March 2008

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