Lately I’ve been playing around with Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint. I’ve been trying to come up with examples on how to use each of the available item templates. Today I created a Module. A module can be used to deploy files to your SharePoint environment and the scenario I came up with was to use a module to deploy a master page. I started out by creating an Empty SharePoint project. This can have any name you like and it can be both a farm and a sandboxed solution ...

If you are building a custom search solution based on SharePoint 2010 you might want to build your own custom query to query the SharePoint index. If you do you probably need to use the FullTextSqlQuery class, just like I am for my custom Birthday web part. While building that web part I ran into a couple of things that I might be able to spare others. First thing to note is that the FullTextSqlQuery is available in two different namespaces. There is Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Query.FullTextSqlQuery for SharePoint Foundation and there is Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Query.FullTextSqlQuery for SharePoint Server. Be aware of which version...

With over 90 visitors the first DIWUG event of 2010 was a huge success. The event was hosted in Lijnden in the Wortell office. The evening started out very well with proper Dutch food, various “stamppotten” were served!   The first session of the evening was “Social Computing in SharePoint 2010” by Daniel McPherson, Mark van Lunenburg and Robin Meuré. Social Computing is one of the new buzz...

In SharePoint 2007 it was possible to save a site as a site template with a .stp extension. Saving a site as a template can be done from the site settings user interface. The .stp file is, like most SharePoint specific file extensions, a .cab file. The .stp file contains a link to the original site definition that the saved site depended on and the delta between that site definition and the saved site. In SharePoint 2010 we can still save sites as templates in much the same way. However, saving a site as a template won’t create a...

In a lot of SharePoint projects you will be required to deploy customizations after the customer has started using the solution. In cases like this it’s very important to test all customizations extensively on a test and/or user acceptance environment before deploying them to production.  In order to be able to do tests that, to a certain degree, can guarantee that both the current and the new functionality will work on your production environment you need an environment that matches your production environment in a lot of ways. As similar a hardware setup as possible ...