Just a note to regular readers to say it's time for my annual holiday, so no posts or replies to comments for 2 or 3 weeks. I'm off to San Francisco (which is where Suzanne is from), so it should be a nice break. I am taking a SharePoint virtual machine, but am under strict instructions the only times I'm allowed to use it are on the plane journeys! Fine by me actually.
More posts when I get back..
C.
Most often when creating SharePoint solutions, the requirements often map fairly well to one of the out-of-the-box site definitions which can be used to create new sites. If we're creating heavily-branded internet/intranet sites (WCM sites), we'll probably start with the 'publishing site' template. If we are deploying SharePoint in a document management/collaboration scenario, we'll probably start with the 'team site' template, and so on. Where it gets interesting it when the project requirements effectively have a mix of this functionality. Characteristics of such a site might include:
Such requirements present a few challenges, and a current project of mine fits into this category. At a high level, one consideration is that site users will also use 'system' pages provided by SharePoint in many scenarios (e.g. working with document libraries/lists, workflow etc.) and this doesn't happen in most WCM sites. This can lead to situations where there is a disparity between the look and feel of the 'published view' of the website and the 'system' areas. I don't intend to provide answers to all the issues here, but I do want to discuss a few as some food for thought. I'll probably revisit this post at the end of the project and provide a better insight into the issues and solutions, but for now let's cover some high-level decisions:
Approach for master page development
Options for starting development here include:
Partly this decision depends on where you are heading. Since the aim in my project is for formatting to be controlled by CSS rather than layout tables, starting with a minimal master page makes more sense (the shipped page layouts use tables). This is an interesting area since there's a lot of rework to be done to eliminate tables in a mixed publishing/collab site (and in fact it often won't be possible to eliminate them completely), and for me the benefit is debatable. Certainly all the 'system' pages which site users will be exposed to use layout tables, so I'm not sure how much is gained by only having some pages using CSS for layout.
Other things to consider here are the usual questions of how to factor responsibility of content items between the master page and page layouts, how to define content types etc., but these are standard decisions in WCM site development so I won't cover them here.
Use of Content Editor web parts vs publishing RichHtmlField controls
Most folks in WCM development know there is an overlap in functionality provided by the Content Editor web part and the RichHtmlField control in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls namespace, i.e. they can both be used to enter page content such as text/images. However it's important to consider the differences - the RichHtmlField control stores it's content in a column of the list item for the page, whereas the CEWP is a web part and thus stores content in the web part storage architecture. This is important, since if deployment to a different environment is in your project plan or ongoing architecture, things will likely be simpler if you use the field control, since this content will then travel with the page properly.
Additionally, there are some URL fix-up issues with using the CEWP across different environments, as documented in the HawaiianAir.com write up.
In summary, I'd recommend considering the CEWP as a means of entering content in non-publishing SharePoint sites only.
Use of collaboration web parts - in layouts or in WebPartZones?
In a similar vein, since we are mixing the collaboration features into our site we are likely to need to use certain web parts which we wouldn't in a straight WCM site. In our situation the ListViewWebPart is fairly key to some areas, and is used as a means of allowing users to work with different lists from one page. The first decision here is whether the page layouts should include web parts directly (by adding them in SharePoint Designer), or just web part zones to which the individual parts would be added later through the browser. In most WCM scenarios I prefer to add web parts directly to page layouts since they will not be customized/personalized by end users (the main usage scenario for web part zones), and when web part zones are used, again the web part config is not stored in the page which can make deployment more complex. Using the other approach of adding directly from SPD, config is stored in the actual HTML markup of the page and so travels with the page layout itself.
However! The ListViewWebPart has some quirks which means it isn't always possible to use directly from the page layout. Specifically, it is only possible to configure the part to consume a list from the current web, and in the case of a publishing page layout, this means the root web since this is where the master page gallery is stored. Since our lists are stored in a child web, this is problematic - the other solution of using a DataView also had issues. Additionally, the ListViewWebPart configuration stores values specific to it's location, meaning the config XML is not very portable (i.e. export web part definition, modify, use). I'd like to think it would be possible with time to work out exactly which IDs do need to be changed, but alas we don't have time on this project.
As a result, using the ListViewWebPart in a web part zone is actually the best solution in these circumstances as far as I can see. We'll have an extra few steps at deployment, but this will take less time than the alternatives it appears.
Look and feel of system pages
As mentioned earlier, for a mixed WCM/collaboration site there can be a disparity of the look and feel of the main pages of the site and the 'system' pages users will see, i.e. pages from the '_layouts' directory. Note this happens even if both the site and system master page is set to point at your custom master page, since these pages are set to use 'application.master' (also on the filesystem in '_layouts') which neither of these properties affect. Sure it would be possible to simply replace 'application.master' with your own version, but that's not an elegant solution and would probably be unsupported. Unfortunately it seems that the architecture doesn't provide an easy way to change the master page used by '_layouts' pages - you have to go a level deeper to explore ways of doing this. Many .Net 2.0 developers will know it's possible to switch a master page dynamically in .Net, and to be fair this is what SharePoint does with the maser pages stored in the master page gallery anyway. I'm not aware of a truly elegant solution to this problem, but this discussion on Serge van den Oever's blog presents a viable approach using this technique.
So those are some of the issues to consider. There are certainly others, including navigation, CSS customization of standard styles (to ensure collaboration web parts integrate well with your look and feel), and possibly the choice of authentication mechanism. I'll cover these and any others which arise in an upcoming post.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I've been a reasonably keen advocate of Microsoft's Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS) for certain SharePoint development tasks. If you read more than a couple of SharePoint blogs, you won't have avoided the news that MS have just released version 1.1 of this tool, as announced here by Alex Malek over on the SharePoint Designer blog. At the time of writing, this is a CTP (Community Technology Preview) meaning it is pre-beta, so bugs can be expected. So today I wanted to run through the changes, so folks who aren't familiar with the tool or haven't had a chance to take a look themselves can quickly get a sense of what's in there.
In essence, VSeWSS helps by simplifying the process of developing Features for SharePoint - this approach is generally regarded as the way to do SharePoint development in such a way that assets can be more easily deployed to other environments. In previous articles, I detailed how to create and deploy lists and how to create and deploy web parts with VSeWSS. For me, these are probably the scenarios where VSeWSS comes in the most useful, though there definitely are others depending on how you work. However, the most common gripe of developers who used the tool was that since VSeWSS 1.0 regenerated Feature files with each change, it wasn't possible to manually amend the files. This was often necessary to add things not directly supported by the tool, such as Feature receivers.
So let's run through the different areas where the tool has been improved.
WSP View
The big change with this release is that it is now possible to amend Feature files in the development process. Instead of hiding the generation of these files behind the scenes, the tool now makes these bona fide VS project items which can be edited before the Solution package is built. Certainly auto-generation of the final files still happens (that's the point) and there are some files lurking which are needed to support the tool, but VSeWSS now does a good job in presenting to you what you can modify through the WSP View (View > Other windows > WSP View). This is shown below for a project with some different artifacts:
Some nice things which can be done here are that entire Features can be deleted with a single click (all files will be removed), and the Feature activation order can be changed. Toolbar buttons are provided which modify the sequence of FeatureManifest elements in the manifest.xml file.
So the WSP View provides the mask onto the editable files, but I wanted to drill into why this is useful. Some examples would be:
Event receivers
VSeWSS 1.1 also provides some enhancements around event receivers (handlers for events raised by lists). Version 1.0 also provided some support in this area, but the main scenario was adding a list/item receiver at the time the list was being created (i.e. "create list with receiver"). Version 1.1 now makes it easy to add an event receiver to an existing list, which simplifies those scenarios.
My favorite improvement in this area however, has to go to event receivers on content types. This effectively means that the event-handler code travels with the content type - so your code will run on all lists the content type is associated with. This is interesting as I had no idea this was possible in the WSS 3.0 platform! So I did some digging. I haven't yet done any testing of the results, but what VSeWSS does to support this is add some custom attributes to a standard list event receiver. For those interested, these are defined in the SPDevTools namespace in a file which is added to your project (out of the way in the Properties folder, alongside AssemblyInfo.cs) by the tool. I've not yet worked out exactly what picks up these flags in the Feature activation process, but it's clear that standard list event receivers are actually being used as the generated class derives from SPListEventReceiver. The image below (click to enlarge) highlights the new attribute being applied which supports all this:
Web parts
This was where I thought VSeWSS was a winner, and it's good to see the support for web part deployment has been extended further still. With 1.1, a default web part definition file (.webpart) is now generated for you to edit before deployment to add custom property settings. This is useful, since it means that developers can avoid the "deploy web part, add to page, configure, export web part" process which is otherwise required to obtain a configured definition.
Performance
One of the first things VSeWSS 1.0 users will notice is that a full IISReset is no longer performed on each deployment. This was something of a pain with version 1.0, since it meant the "edit, deploy, get feedback" cycle took longer than was necessary. So having been used to the IISResets, personally I was pretty pleased to see the message below in the Visual Studio status bar during the first deployment!
So those are the good bits, and it's a great step in the right direction. However I'd still like to see the following:
On a "bigger picture" note, I'm reminded of a common view in the SharePoint community which made complete sense when I heard it first from Ted Pattison. Unlike .Net, where Microsoft has gone to great lengths to ensure the tools are in sync with the platform (same team [Scott Guthrie], same timeframe for development phase, same ship date), a different thing is happening with SharePoint. Effectively the tools are 18 months behind the platform, so SharePoint development can be pretty painful at the moment - however, this shouldn't be taken as a reflection of the platform.
This release of VSeWSS should help though, and it'll be interesting to see what comes in the future.
The download link is http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3e1dcccd-1cca-433a-bb4d-97b96bf7ab63&displaylang=en.
