I came across an article in MSDN that talks about Project Subtypes. It gave me an idea for a useful way to extend an existing project type, but I don't see anything that actually walks through the steps of creating a new subtype (is there a tool to get started, what classes do you need, how do you register it with Visual Studio, etc).
What little information I'm seeing is also leading me to believe that this extensibility point is really only used for code projects. I'm looking to extend the SSRS project type (available in BIDS or SSDT). Does anyone know if this is possible?
Any help would be appreciated.
Related
I just started to play around with EntityFramework. In VS2012 I can use the designer which nicely creates all the boilerplate code. However, I am now at a point where I wanted to start playing with overriding DbContext.Seed() to initialize the database with some data. While there is this quite easily done writing the DbContext myself, I was not able to find a way to do this from within the designer. It seems to be no option to modify the Designer created 'Context' class. The comment at the top of the file tells me, that all manually added code will be lost when the file is regenerated.
Am I missing something? Can someone please point me in the right direction. How can I do all the nice more advanced things and still continue to use the designer.
try to find a package in Nuget there will be a ready solution to connect. Read more here http://nugetmusthaves.com/Tag/POCO or search in google poco Nuget.
I am starting to do a lot of sharepoint development lately, and some of the things that I have done and I dont like is to use sharepoint designer directly for things like pagelayouts, lists definitions, master pages, etc.
From my point of view I think its more organized to do everything in Visual Studio. In that way you can connect each solution to a source control database and deploy/retract/upgrade easier with scripts.
My idea is to create a vs solution like this:
1. One for list and content type defintions.
2. One for webparts.
3. One for branding
but maybe this approach has any disadvantage, what other approaches are you using?
The real answer is going to be: it depends.
I do not think there is one best way to organize a Visual Studio solution or SharePoint solution packages. In the end, you need to find what works best for your organization and go with that.
The only guidance I have seen is from the SharePoint Online documentation:
If the development team is designing a solution that requires more than 10 WSP files, the team should reconsider its architecture. It is difficult to manage and deploy so many WSP files within a single deployment window, and the solution risks rejection because of the complexity for SharePoint Online of managing it.
A large number of solution packages (WSP files) that need to be tracked and managed pose a challenge for deployment. The more solution packages in a customization, the greater the possibility that something will not be installed correctly, the longer the solution will take to deploy, and the easier it is to mix incompatible versions of solution packages. We recommend that customers scrutinize their deployment plans and keep the number of solution packages to the minimum number needed for the project. Keep in mind that a solution package can contain several features, so there is no necessity to have one solution package for each feature.
And I would agree with this. You seem to be outlining 3 Visual Studio solutions and/or SharePoint solution packages for what really are 3 Features within a single SharePoint solution package.
I tend to create one Visual Studio solution for each project. For a very large project, that single Visual Studio solution might contain several projects where each represents a SharePoint solution package.
For Farm solutions, each SharePoint solution package will contain a number of Features and files that are all related in terms of functionality or application. If two or more SharePoint solution packages share common Features, I will put those shared Features into a separate solution package.
Sandbox solutions tend to be much smaller than Farm solutions. While my Farm solutions usually represent an application, my Sandbox solutions are more focused to solve one particular issue. So my Sandbox solutions usually only contain one Feature that does not rely on other custom Features or solutions.
As I said in the beginning, I do not believe there is one hard or fast rule. It is usually determined by the preferences and style of a particular development team. Try a couple different ways in the beginning and eventually you will find what fits your team best.
How can I hand code a custom content type, and with all its fields.
If you know of a step by step guide.
My whole plan to extract a content type, and reuse it , has gone sour (no surprise there, after all we are dealing with MOSS).
I guess I would like to know how to do it completely by hand, so that NOTHING can go wrong.
Thanks ( please help before I get even more furious with sharepoint).
Apologies if I haven't already mentioned this before, but have you read the various "Getting started with SharePoint" questions on the site? These will give you good pointers and hopefully ease your frustrations:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1110341/getting-started-developing-for-sharepoint
SharePoint for a C# ASP.NET Developer
Learning Sharepoint
How to start learning SharePoint
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/119968/good-book-for-learning-sharepoint-development
What is good for SharePoint beginner user tutorials?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/182449/how-to-begin-as-a-net-and-sharepoint-developer
In particular a good book like Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 will help you a lot. It's clear and takes you through the basics very well.
What would make development with SharePoint easier?
A better product.
Right now it is to many things that doesn't behave as a development environment should.
Dispose of objects
Performance of traversing small lists with 3000/4000 items
Lack of support of transactions
Hopefully next version will have the SQLServer based lists where you can have transactional support and better performance......
Bill G raised the question in feb 2008 that it is something strange with Sharepoint that you get problems when you have 3000 items in a list and SQL Server easily supports million of items....
The build and deployment process needs to be simplified. There are numerous tools available to create WSP files, but they are all decent at one thing another, but you ultimately need to extend or rework the solution WSP deployment package for you environment.
Standard HTML and better support for the DOM.
Informative error messages.
While easier debugging and less XML are very tempting (as people suggested), I would settle for something much more modest.
SharePoint usually "swallows" exceptions or other error messages. Very often when a customized page or a web part fails, you get an obscure 'page cannot be displayed' message. With luck, the designer will direct you to the problem, or you might find some details on the logs or the system event viewer. But in many cases you have nothing.
Examples - Business data catalog xml monstrosity that worked on the editor but not on the site, xml web parts that fail randomly, xsl typos or mistakes, etc. All take much longer to find than they should, and some are impossible to debug.
Remote Deployment:
- 1 central Sharepoint, and transparent remote debugging.
Less XML (schema.xml etc).
Making the dev process more like "traditional" asp.net development, in other words making the integration with VS better. You should develop against SharePoint from within VS not from within SharePoint (ie SPD).
SPVisualDev on codeplex has made that process better but I hope (an I say hope) for better support within VS2010 together with SP2010.
Should check out #SPDevWiki's page on this also http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=7340352
Less people trying to abuse the product would make things a lot easier too ;)
Does anyone have any strategies/tips/traps for moving to Team System? Should it be done in baby steps, or all at once? Should we migrate our SourceSafe library over, or draw a line in the sand and move forward? Is it worth brining SharePoint into the mix? Any thoughts are appreciated.
I've never had to migrate to TFS, but have used it pretty extensively for the past couple of years.
Regarding your question on Sharepoint, we've found it pretty useful in conjunction with TFS. We use it primarily for documentation management and for storing other "non-technical" artifacts related to the project. Some dev teams advocate keeping documentation in source control alongside source code, which is OK, but in my experience our project stakeholders have an easier time accessing relevent project documentation via the Sharepoint portal than they would having to interface with source control.
I basically was able to distribute the URL to the sharepoint site associated with our TFS team project to the concerned non-technical team members and have been able to avoid constantly e-mailing documents around, so it's been great for us.
It may just be too much work to do it all at once.
I feel that it is easier to divvy out projects to different people one at a time.
That way they can move them across and ensure that each works okay before closing out the SourceSafe.
You will always want a backup of the SourceSafe "database" around just in case.
I do not know how to migrate from SourceSafe to TFS and keep the comments and versions.
By far the easiest it to just add the projects in, but having migrated that way in the past, we always missed the ability to find out what others had done to particular files.
If you find a way to migrate, I would go that way unless it is hideously expensive.