I came across something very interesting last week and just wanted to make a note of it here. I’ve talked before about including prototypejs in your SharePoint application pages, but a recent announcement from Microsoft has made me consider using an alternative.
You can read about Microsoft’s news to include JQuery in Visual Studio on Scott’s blog.
“The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1)”
I’ll be looking into JQuery in the next couple weeks to see how it performs against prototypejs and i’ll post any findings here, so stay tuned!
Erik was kind enough to post some info related to prototype and the content editor not behaving well together. It seems that JQuery might work better in this scenario. You can read more about that here.
For anyone designing SharePoint Solution Packages (wsp files), typical deployment means either running stsadm commands to add a solution and then deploy it, or automating it via a script. However, if you’re building solutions that will be installed or administered by a client or a user not familiar with the stsadm command, then you’ll want to create something a little more user friendly.
That’s where MSI packaging can help. MSI packages also show up in add/remove programs and that makes it easier to manage for the end user. What i’ll outline in this blog post is some simple steps to get you going on creating MSI packages for sharepoint solutions files. To begin, i’ll assume you have already created a solution file and have it ready to go.
- Create a new Setup project: File -> New-> Project -> Other Project Types -> Setup and Deployment -> Setup Project
- Highlight the project and using the toolbar on the Solution explorer pane, select the User Interface Editor
- Configure the UI screens as you require
- On that same Solution Explorer pane, select the Custom Actions Editor and add the scripts below to the Install and Uninstall folders
- Using the File System Editor, add the wsp and license file to the Application Folder for use within the scripts below
- Building the solution will generate an msi file that you can now use to install your wsp. The msi will include all the necessary files, such as the license file, the wsp and the install scripts.
AddSolution.vbs
' VBScript File Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Dim activationUrl Dim targetDir Dim installDir targetUrl = Session.Property("CustomActionData") installDir = Session.Property("INSTALLDIR") Return = oShell.Run("cmd /C C:\Progra~1\Common~1\Micros~1\webser~1\12\BIN\stsadm -o addsolution -filename " + installDir + "\CurrentlyPublishedPage.wsp", 0, true) Return = oShell.Run("cmd /C C:\Progra~1\Common~1\Micros~1\webser~1\12\BIN\stsadm -o deploysolution -name CurrentlyPublishedPage.wsp -allcontenturls -immediate -allowGacDeployment", 0, true) Return = oShell.Run("cmd /C C:\Progra~1\Common~1\Micros~1\webser~1\12\BIN\stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs", 0, true) activationUrl = "cmd /C C:\Progra~1\Common~1\Micros~1\webser~1\12\BIN\stsadm -o activatefeature -filename CurrentlyPublishedPage\feature.xml -url " & targetUrl Return = oShell.Run(activationUrl, 0, true)
RetractSolution.vbs
' VBScript File Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Return = oShell.Run("cmd /C C:\Progra~1\Common~1\Micros~1\webser~1\12\BIN\stsadm -o retractsolution -name CurrentlyPublishedPage.wsp -allcontenturls -immediate", 0, true) Return = oShell.Run("cmd /C C:\Progra~1\Common~1\Micros~1\webser~1\12\BIN\stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs", 0, true) Return = oShell.Run("cmd /C C:\Progra~1\Common~1\Micros~1\webser~1\12\BIN\stsadm -o deletesolution -name CurrentlyPublishedPage.wsp", 0, true)
