Sharepoint 2010 Beta – What Can Be Improved – Part 8 – Save and Restore Site to/from WSP Does’t Work Properly

Jan 10, 2013 9:09 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

I tried to save a site as WSP and then when I restored it I get the following error:

This error was caused by a workflow that I attached to a list of which it has custom Collect Data from User task. I tried to collect 2 fields from a user:

– Manager Approval (choice with 2 values: Approve and Reject)

– Manager Comment (multi-text field)

I then opened the WSP and open ElementsFields.xml. I found out that somehow Sharepoint appended the following for the Approval field:

<Field Name=”FieldName_C830E315_F175_4656_8A4A_F7162BAB4141_” Format=”Dropdown” Type=”Choice” BaseType=”Text” DisplayName=”Manager Approval” Description=”” Direction=”None” ID=”{60ad5230-f828-4831-9d73-3563655b8a01}” SourceID=”{af99aa24-3ce2-458a-a028-ee9e28c98709}” StaticName=”FieldName_C830E315_F175_4656_8A4A_F7162BAB4141_” Overwrite=”TRUE”>

<CHOICES>

<CHOICE DisplayName=”Approve”>Approve</CHOICE>

<CHOICE DisplayName=”Reject”>Reject</CHOICE>

</CHOICES>

</Field>

On a choice field there is no DisplayName attribute and that’s what failed it.

I hope that this will be fixed on the released version.

Cheers,

Tommy

Sharepoint 2010 Beta – What Can Be Improved – Part 2 – Visual Studio 2010 Custom Deployment Steps

Jan 10, 2013 9:06 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

In Visual Studio 2010 you can actually modify the deployment configuration and steps. By default you will get the following:

– Default

– No Activation

Default

With the default one, when you do “Right Click -&gt; Deploy” VS will then retract your solution, re-deploy your latest solution and re-activate the features.

No Activation

With this option it will do as Default except it won’t activate the features.

You can also create your own deployment step. However, the list of steps are quiet limited. You can only choose from the following:

– Run Pre-Deployment commands

– Recycle IIS Application Pool

– Retract solution

– Add solution

– Activate features

– Run post-deployment commands

It would be nice to have an “Upgrade” option. The reason is because, with content types and columns especially, since they’re the core of Sharepoint development project, if you try to retract, re-add solution then re-activate the feature that deploys content types and features, it may break your Sharepoint site completely.

Plus, if you have a feature that creates content (eg. pages and sites) programatically, you obviously will not want it to be activated twice.

I tried to also open the .csproj file with the hope that I can somehow “hack” it but it actually calls a class with namespace:

<DeploymentConfiguration Name=”Upgrade Solution”>

<DeploymentSteps>Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.PreDeploymentCommand;Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.RecycleApplicationPool;Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.RetractSolution;Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.AddSolution;Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.PostDeploymentCommand</DeploymentSteps>

<RetractionSteps>Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.RecycleApplicationPool;Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.RetractSolution</RetractionSteps>

</DeploymentConfiguration>

Therefore, at this stage I still don’t know how to add my own “Upgrade” deployment step.

Hopefully this will be fixed in the released version of VS 2010.

** UPDATE **

This article actually mentions what I want to exactly do:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee256698(VS.100).aspx

I’ll try that soon and let you know how it goes.

Cheers,

Tommy

ElementFile vs ElementManifest

Jan 10, 2013 9:04 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

I just noticed that when you add a linking Module in your VS 2010 for your custom Feature project, and when  you add a file into the module, VS 2010 automatically marks it as a ElementFile.

When I tried to develop custom content types and fields, I needed to add 2 XML files into the module (eg. ContentTypes.xml and Fields.xml) and they have to be marked as ElementManifest instead of ElementFile. If I don’t do this, the custom content types and fields won’t be loaded in Sharepoint at all.

To do that, edit your Module .spdata file and modify the content manually:

<ProjectItem Type=”Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.Module” SupportedTrustLevels=”All” SupportedDeploymentScopes=”Web, Site” xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2010/SharePointTools/SharePointProjectItemModel”>
<Files>

Hope this helps,

Tommy

How to Change From Sandboxed Solution to Farm Solution

Jan 10, 2013 9:01 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

PLEASE FOLLOW YUBIN’s COMMENT BELOW. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP YUBIN.

I’ve arrived at a stage where I wanted to create my own custom Sharepoint solution using Visual Studio 2010.

When I created a new blank Sharepoint project it asked me whether I want to deploy the solution as a Sandboxed Solution or a Farm Solution.

I first selected Sandboxed Solution but then I found out that I couldn’t build and package my solution when I had a Sharepoint Mapped Folder within it.

Therefore, I needed to change the type of the deployment to Farm Solution. I looked everywhere (from Project Properties, Solution Properties, etc) and I couldn’t find the setting for it.

I tried to re-create the project and now selected Farm Solution as the deployment type and I then tried to compare the project properties manually. This included opening the .csproj file in Notepad and compared between the two apple-by-apple.

I noticed the following missing tag within the project file (.csproj) that was deployed as Sandboxed solution:

<SandboxedSolution>False</SandboxedSolution>

I added that tag to my .csproj and now my Sandboxed Solution project suddenly became Farm Solution project.

Hope this helps,

Tommy

Sharepoint 2010 Beta – What Can Be Improved – Part 1

Jan 10, 2013 9:00 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

So far I’ve found the following bugs (or things that can be improved in later releases):

– Administration breadcrumb is all over the place. It’s really-really hard to navigate to where I was before without going back to the main Central Admin screen. Especially when I was in a particular Service Application page, the breadcrumb didn’t trail correctly. It only displayed Central Administration &gt; Current Page.

– User Profile Sync page didn’t display information correctly. I have started my sync process but the page keeps saying: “Idle – Completed in 0h 0m 0s”. And even worse I still saw the link saying “Start Profile Synchronization”. As a user I thought there must be something wrong with the process. I clicked on the link again and now it gave me popup error message saying User Profile sync is still running bla bla bla.

– As mentioned on various blogs, when you first started the User Profile Sync service it keeps saying “Starting” until you visit the Monitoring – Job Status page and waited until the process is finished, that’s when Service page will say “Started”. See http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/19/user-profile-sync-setup-in-sharepoint-server-2010-beta.aspx.

– It couldn’t crawl AD unless I’m using the service account to login to the farm. I was trying to login using the account that I used to install Sharepoint (SEGORO\sp_admin) – which I assumed it would be the “God” mode account – which it was in MOSS 2007 – and it still failed. I had to use SEGORO\sp_farm instead.

– It would be handy if stsadm (and other Sharepoint-related commands) command can be added to Environment Variables automatically upon installing Sharepoint since we (the SP developers) will be using these so much.

That’s what I’ve found so far, I’ll keep posting the bugs I found on SP 2010 Beta.