Anyways, let’s get to the point.

So in the current project I’m working on, I build SharePoint web parts. A lot of them. As with typical SharePoint projects, the web parts need to be deployed to the GAC/assembly. before they can be added to the pages.

The problem with this as you can imagine, is that every change no matter how small or big it is, needs to be built and the assembly copied to the GAC (C:\Windows\assembly). If you are using the WSPBuilder Visual Studio plugin, this is probably a bit less cumbersome than going to the location of the DLL and manually copying it and pasting it in the assembly folder, you know, using good old Windows Explorer.

This is great if you are big fan of the mouse. Just 4 clicks/gestures. One for the build. And 3 for the GAC deployment – Right click on the project, Click on WSPBuilder, Select Copy to GAC.

But for people like me, that prefer keyboard short cuts over mouse clicks, here’s how we can make this much faster – Map custom short cut keys to do the build and deploy.

You may already know that Ctrl + Shift + B builds the project. But it builds not just the current project but every other project related to it (and may be even the independent ones too if I’m right).

Now that is still 3 keys. Let’s see if we can bring it down to 2 keys.

Here we go.

1. Click on Tools – Customize in Visual studio as shown below. 

2. Click on Keyboard

3.  We need to find “Build.BuildSelection” command. So start typing that in the “Show commands containing” textbox. It’s autocomplete as you can see below. So just select the item as soon as it shows up.

4. After you select it from the list, move your cursor to the “Press shortcut keys” textbox below and press the short cut keys. I chose Shift + F1 since I just have to use my left hand fingers and the keys aren’t too far apart.

Note that you CANNOT type your shortcut. You HAVE to press the keys on your keyboard as the text above the textbox says.

5. After you select your short cut, the “Assign” button gets enabled as shown below. Click on that to assign the short cut to “Build.BuildSelection”. “Assign” button now becomes “Remove”. It took it. Good.

6. Now click OK.

7. Test the short cut now. Open up a file in a project and use your short cut. If everything worked ok, the project that file belonged to, would have been built. Just that project.

8. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Do the same for “Copy To GAC” feature.

9. Look for “copytogac” in the commands text and you may notice that once you select the command as shown below, there already might exist a short cut for it. In this case it is Ctrl + Shift + Alt + B.

I don’t know about you but that is lot of keys to press for a simple command. It is ok though. You can leave it alone and map yet another short cut to the same command.

I chose Shift + F2. 

10. Click Assign and then OK. And all done! Now we can easily build and deploy the currrent web part/dll to the GAC with the press of just 2 keys per command.

Shift + F1 to build. Shift + F2 to deploy to GAC.

I suppose it must save some amount of time in the long term. Enjoy!

Now consider you are working with SharePoint and you are in a tight spot as mentioned above. You probably want to ensure that WSS/MOSS has been configured properly and that the problem is not with the webpart you are working on, for example.

Here’s a quick and easy way of writing a “hello world” webpart that doesn’t involve features and layouts and WSPs and stsadm commands and etc.

1. Open up Visual Studio 2008 and create a new class library project (name it something unique, for example, DingDongBellWebPart) and add the following code in Class1.cs

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

namespace DingDongBellWebPart

{

public class Class1 : WebPart

{

protected override void RenderContents(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)

{

writer.Write(“DingDongBell test”);

base.Render(writer);

}

}

}

}

2. Check the “Sign the assembly” checkbox in Project properties “Signing” tab as shown below

(Click on image above for better resolution)

3. Under “Choose a strong name key file” dropdownlist, select “New”.

4. Uncheck “Protect my key file with a password” as shown below

5. Give it a name and click OK.

6. Build the project.

7. Drag the project’s dll from the bin folder and drop it in C:\Windows\assembly folder. This registers the DLL in the GAC.

8. Replace the values for the attributes where necessary in the line below and add this line in the <SafeControls> section in the web.config file of the website you are trying to deploy this webpart to. (You can even try the SharePoint’s central admin’s web.config file. should work.)

<SafeControl Assembly=”DingDongBellWebPart, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1af588c27b5f26e0″ Namespace=”DingDongBellWebPart” TypeName=”*” Safe=”True” />

**NOTE**: Don’t forget to replace the PublicKeyToken above. There are multiple ways to fetch the PublicKeyToken of your DLL. Here’s one way. Go to C:\Windows\assembly and right click on your assembly and click properties as shown below.

9. Visit the following URL – http://insert_your_website_url_here/_layouts/NewDwp.aspx [Of course replace "insert_your_website_url_here" with your value]

10. It should show up in that list as shown below. (I know….it says GirishWebpart.Class1 in the screenshot below instead of DingDongBellWebpart.Class1. May be it is because I figured GirishWebpart was a much better name than the ridiculous-sounding DingDongBellWebpart.)

(Click on image above for better resolution)

11. If it doesn’t work, reset IIS. And try again. Should work.

12. Enjoy.

Anyways, enough of bitching. Every Sharepoint developer that i knew, installed VMWare on their machines that ran Windows 2003, SQL Server 2005 and VS 2005/2008 and used that as their development environment. Why? Because WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 runs only on server operating systems. Brilliant! Let me get this straight. We are supposed to build applications that would run on “portal” software that are hosted on servers, and so we are supposed to do our development on server operating systems? Of course! Makes perfect sense! Yay Microsoft!

I don’t know man…i just didn’t want to load yet another software on my box and do all the configuration. Luckily for me, Bamboo Solutions had figured out a way to get MOSS 2007 to run on Vista/XP operating systems. As always, i started off my learning process by opening up a brand new word document and taking screenshots of each and everything i did, right from scratch. That includes pictures of installation wizards, “This program has performed an illegal operation” errors (sugar coated for Vista), dashboards, Visual Studio IDE, etc.

The end result of all this pain is a document that has some blurry images but decent content on how to write a “Hello world” web part and successfully deploying it to a sharepoint portal, all starting from scratch. This tutorial would make more sense if you are a .Net developer and have been doing custom application development for a while. It is meant for someone that has no idea where to begin, in their attempt to learn Sharepoint. So if you feel some of the screenshots in the document insult your intelligence, just remember that not all people are as smart as you, wise guy.

Here’s the doc in PDF – How to get MOSS 2007 development environment setup in Vista.pdf

Enjoy!

Here’s the content of a sample response file.


# This is a response file for MSBuild
# Add custom MSBuild command line options in this file
/p:BuildPath=Source\Ordering\Source.Binaries\
/p:BTSPath="E:\Program Files\BizTalk 2006 Runtime"
/p:BiztalkLibsPath=Source\Ordering\BiztalkLibs\
/p:ExternalLibspath=Source\Ordering\ExternalLibs\
/p:IntegrationServerName=bztlk-m009
/p:IntegrationBizTalkDB=BizTalkMgmtDb
/p:WCFServiceDropLocation=\\bztlk-m009\Mi360\eCommerce.Ordering.ServiceHost
/p:BizTalkHelperDropLocation=\\bztlk-m001\Staging
/p:IntegrationBizTalkInsallDir=BizTalkInstall
/p:IntegrationStagingDirectory=E:\Staging
/p:PsToolPath=E:\Software\PsTools
/p:CodeAnalysisRules="-Microsoft.Design#CA1020;-Microsoft.Design#CA1031;-Microsoft.Globalization#CA1302;-Microsoft.Usage#CA2227;"
/p:BizTalkServerPassword=temp
/p:BuildBranch=MainDev-Branch
/p:AccountsApplication=http://test-m001/Accounts/Accounts.mvc


As you can see above, there are quite a few parameters that you can use in the proj file (which by the way, is by using $<insert_parameter_name_here>.

For example, <BizTalkFiles Include="$(SolutionRoot)\$(BuildBranch)\$(BuildPath)*.dll" />

Now sometimes you might need the build to use a custom response file instead of the default one. For example, if you want to have just one master build file that would use different response files depending on the type of deployment (QA, Development, Testing etc.), you need a way to pass in the response file.

Here’s how you do it using Visual Studio 2008.

1. Right click on the Build Definition you want to use (in my case the build definition is called “Interactive” as you can see below) under the Builds folder in your Team Explorer window and click “Queue New Build…”

2. In the MSBuild command-line arguments (optional) text field, type “@” followed by the location of the response file you want the build to use.

3. And click Queue.

I have written a little windows deployment helper that would do all this and much more for you. For example, it would help deploy builds by TFS labels. I’m thinking about putting it on codeplex after cleaning it up a little bit. Will write about it here soon…

• Windsor Container
• Inversion of Control / Dependency Injection
• LINQ (to SQL)
• Continuous Integration (using Team Build)
• ASP.NET MVC framework
• Rhino Mocks
• VS2008 Team Edition for Devs
• MSTest (unit tests)

Jealous much?

Anyways, so i was working on this unit test case to make some minor changes and after i was done, i tried running it by right clicking in the code window, and hoping to click on the “Run Tests” option in the context menu. Here’s what i was hoping to see.

But i didn’t see that option. Hmm….time for a little investigation.

So how does Visual Studio know when to provide “Run tests” option in the right click menu? How does it know not to display it in a ASPX file or any other normal class file?

There must be some kind of identifier it uses to recognize a file/class as a test class and hence enable the option in such cases.

The test class files are C# files just like any other files in the solution and so you probably are not going to find a lot of differences comparing a test file with a non-test file besides the code it holds, of course.

So the next step is to compare the projects that hold these files. Let’s compare a non-test project and a test project. (I used ExamDiff to compare the .csproj files)

And here’s the result of the comparison. The one on the right is the test project (click on the image below for better resolution).

See where the red arrow points? The test project has a ProjectTypeGuid as shown below.

<ProjectTypeGuids>{3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>

So that’s what differentiates a test project from a non-test project.

And that’s how Visual studio understands whether or not to show the “Run tests” option in the right click context menu for a class under a project.

Coming back to our oriignal problem, why was it missing in the class i was working on? The developer that created that project did not create it as a “test” project – instead he chose the “class library” option in the create new project dialog.

Fixing the problem was easy. Open the csproj file in some text editor and add the ProjectTypeGuids element where it belongs and you are done!

I feel like Sherlock Holmes sometimes….

Anyways, so i download Virtual PC 2007 (download free from MS) and install it and i must say, it was pretty fast! And smooth. And then i installed Visual studio and VSS 2005 on it. Visual studio was painless and easy (surprised again).

But Visual Source Safe asked me to install XP Service pack 2 as a prerequisite. No problemo. Installed SP2 followed by VSS 2005 and voila! Here’s the message i get for successful installation.

Check out the pic below and tell me what’s wrong with the picture.

2 Free 7-11 beverage coupons to the correct answer.

Not cool, babe!

For example, yesterday i was building a custom control and everything seemed fine initially. When i wanted to use the control in another project, it just wouldn’t work. I checked whether i had copied the custom control’s dll to the bin folder of the project i was working with. It was there. I checked if i had in fact added it to the references. I did. Was i using the right syntax? Yes. Then what the hell was the problem? The error message was that you couldn’t find the control in the dll under the given namespace. But the namespace was right. I had specifically set it to “GG” in the control. Here’s how i tried to use it in the test project.

I had no freaking clue what was going on. I tried rebuilding the solution, rebuilding the control and copy-pasting a fresh copy of the dll into the bin folder everytime. Nope. Didn’t work. It was like you were teasing me and i certainly did not appreciate it.

And then finally i remembered what Russ told me about what you do when someone adds a new project to the solution. He said you set the rootnamespace by default to the name of the project and that needs to be removed if i plan to have my own namespace for the project

So i right click on the project in the solution explorer and click on “Properties” as shown below.

And this is what i see

You had in fact set the root namespace to the name of the project by default. Sigh!

Now why would you do that, honey? Please don’t be like that. I love you and i’ll do anything for you and you know that. But please don’t act oversmart. Show some respect here. I know you are smart and i totally dig that. In fact, it turns me on sometimes. But please don’t think i’m an idiot when i’m using you. I know how you are structured and how you work. I know almost all of the features you were built with. I also know how to use most of them to unleash your full potential, babe. Trust me! I can do wonders with you.

Now that we are on the topic, i have a couple of other things to discuss with you. Let’s just get it over with. The other day when i was trying to bind you to the solution in visual source safe (VSS – Your cousin), something pissed you off. I don’t what happened and what triggered your madness. But you just went nuts and used 100% of my CPU and 1.4GB of my memory. And then after 15 minutes, you gave me this message.

I mean…seriously! Is that all you got for me? Catastrophic failure? What am i supposed to do with that? Could you be more specific next time, hon? I know sometimes you have your moments. But i wonder what the guy that actually wrote that piece of code when building you, was thinking when he/she was in fact writing that? “Yeah…i’m just gonna tell them something bad happened. The measure of bad being in the magnitude of a catastrophy. The user can figure out what went wrong.”

Last but not least(cliche!), i still wonder how childish you can be sometimes even after growing up to be such a charming young lady. In fact these days, i think you are a super woman. That’s how i look at you. But you still let the kid in you come out and play once in a while especially when i’m in the middle of rebuilding the solution. I understand that it can be a royal pain the butt to rebuild 16 projects in the solution, one at a time. But c’mon now…that doesn’t call for a peek-a-boo game in the middle of the working hours. You just disappeared during the re-build! Right in front of my eyes…whoosh! Vanished into thin air! I quickly pulled up the task manager and there you were – devenv.exe eating up memory and cpu cycles. But nowhere to be found to the naked eye in Windows. Grow up, sweety! Not all guys think that’s cute.

And while i’m at it, let me clear up something. I’m NOT having an affair with nant. She’s just a friend that helps me out with the build, especially when you are playing your little games of hide and seek. I don’t think she can give me what you can(one word – intellisense) and i don’t have any feelings for her anyways. If you play nice with me, i’ll stop going to her for help..ok?

I know you have tons of complaints against me. Especially the way i write inefficient code that drives CLR crazy. But let’s talk about it another day.