Part One of this series gave a general overview of SharePoint 2010 code deployment using Visual Studio 2010. Part Two described the creation and use of SharePoint Commands. In this installment we will explore SharePoint Deployment Steps and their relationship with both SharePoint Commands and SharePoint Deployment Configurations. Introduction A Deployment Step defines the order […]

Part One of this series gave a general overview of SharePoint 2010 code deployment using Visual Studio 2010. Now it’s time to dig deeper and take an in-depth look at how developers can customize the deployment process. We will begin at the lowest level by creating some custom SharePoint Commands, then move into creating Deployment […]

One of the most exciting aspects of Visual Studio 2010 is the tight integration it will have with SharePoint. The Visual Studio team has worked hard to make the SharePoint developer experience much more streamlined and less dependent upon manual configuration files and custom scripts. They have also made a tremendous investment into extensibility, allowing […]

Thanks to Alan Stevens for retweeting this blog post by Steve Smith. I’ve met Steve at a number of conferences and he’s a really sharp programmer. If you read his post and come away thinking his anti-patterns and anti-practices don’t apply to SharePoint then you need a hefty dose of the red pill – and […]

Good friend and fellow SharePoint MVP Rob Bogue has a great new article on developer.com about general principles for developing high-performance custom code solutions. Rob and I have shared many a beer agonizing over these issues – especially related to SharePoint programming – so I applaud his effort to get as much information as possible […]

A number of SharePoint MVP’s – Andrew Connell, Rob Bogue, Todd Bleeker, Matt McDermott, Todd Baginski, Maurice Prather, Scot Hillier and myself – got together at TechEd North America 2009 to talk about SharePoint Development for TechEd Online. See what happens when we all get in a room together and talk SharePoint for an hour […]

I thought I was doing something simple – I created a site collection on a development server, built out everything the way I wanted it, then tried to export and import it into my production environment. The export went smooth with no errors but when I tried the import I got the following: "FatalError: The […]

The guys over at the SharePoint Podshow have posted the discussion I had with Andrew Woodward regarding SharePoint and TDD during the European Best Practices conference. I assure you that no MVP’s were hurt during the taping of this show. Honest. I didn’t even smack Woody with my hat. Go check it out!

Mark Rackley put up a good post on the pros and cons of using SharePoint Designer. I first met Mark at Tulsa TechFest last year when he was just diving into SharePoint. He’s come a long way since then and I enjoyed talking to him at the snowed-in SharePoint Saturday event this past weekend. Keep […]

Paul Culmsee has authored a series of posts (the pertinent portions are here, here and here) on the whole Site Definition argument (see Joel’s original post here, and a deeper dive into the issue from me here and here) that I’m still shaking my head trying to follow. The gist of it seems to be […]