SharePoint Saturday: Developing and Packaging a Third Party SharePoint Solution

Here are some notes from my presentation at SharePoint Saturday this past weekend in Virginia Beach, VA. Included are my slides, code that I demo'd, and hopefully answers to all of the questions that people asked.

The Slides

Download my slides in PDF form for quick reference.

Download my slides as a QuickTime movie to view the presentation with all animations. Unfortunately, to keep the file size low, I had to sacrifice a lot of quality. I suggest you download both the PDF and movie to get the full effect.

The Code

The Feature that we worked on uses a toolkit called DotImage. If you're interested in using the feature for testing, feel free to get an evaluation license.

Download the source code.

Download the WSP file (you will need to get an evaluation license for DotImage)

SPWebConfigModification

Here are links to Dave Terrell's 6 part series on using the SPWebConfigModification object to edit the web config of a given Web Application in SharePoint.

1. The Problem
2. Take this for example...
3. Time for some code
4. Why doesn't this work?
5. The Remedy
6. Putting it to work

WSPBuilder

Check out my short blog post on WSPBuilder with instructions on how to use it in a NAnt build script.

SharePoint Solution Installer

I will post a more extensive article with instructions on how to use this product and some ideas on how it might be improved, but for now, you can find the SharePoint Solution installer on CodePlex.

AllowUnsafeUpdates

Check out Hristo Pavlov's blog on AllowUnsafeUpdates here.

My Presentation Setup

Here's a little more detail on the setup I used in my presentation: the computers I was using, which ones were VMs, how I switched between them and my slides, what presentation software I used, and how I tied it all together.

SharePoint Box

Since SharePoint is a bit of a beast, I decided to run it on an external machine. It was running on a Sony Viao with Vista. WSS 3.0 was installed directly on Vista. I will post on that in a week or so explaining how that's possible with steps on getting it done yourself.

Visual Studio Machine

I prefer to run Visual Studio on a different machine that I run SharePoint. The primary reason for this is so that I can quickly revert the VM that's running SharePoint in my development cycle without worrying about losing work.

For my presentation, I ran Visual Studio on a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion for Mac running Windows XP Pro.

Tying them Together

Since there was no guarantee of wireless offered at the Advanced Technology Center, I made sure I was all set by hosting a wireless network from my Mac and connecting to it from the Vista laptop. From there, I was able to remote in and get to SharePoint.

Presentation Software

I enjoy using Apple's Keynote software. It lets me make very attractive slides and is very easy to use. Plus, it exports to many formats that anyone can read without losing anything like transitions or animations.

Switching between Everything

To switch between my slides and my 2 demo machines, I used a built-in Mac feature called Spaces. It's a beautiful implementation of multiple-desktops.