2010 on Matt Thornton

Useful SharePoint script to restart SharePoint services and IIS

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:40:36 +0000

A SharePoint developer’s life is filled with many things, but one of the most common is the old faithful iisreset, coupled with a reset of the Timer Service and the Admin Service. When you’re working on timer jobs, it can get tedious quickly to have to keep resetting things.

So I’m sharing a useful batch script I knocked together to do it for you. It will perform three functions - restart the SharePoint 2010 Timer Service, the SharePoint 2010 Administration Service and do an IISReset. It will prompt you if you want to do each of them, and if you don’t reply within 5 seconds automatically do it.

Updating declarative XML content types

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:37:01 +0000

Becoming a SharePoint developer is always a journey - every new day you spend doing something, the more you learn. More often than not, the more “little subtleties” you uncover about the great wide SharePoint platform. I recently tripped over one such example. This “issue” is not new in SharePoint development - it certainly goes back as far as MOSS2007, but unless you’re actually doing it, it’s not something you’d instinctively just know.

Creating content types via XML Visual Studio

As soon as you start building SharePoint solutions of any real size and complexity, you’ll quickly learn that creating fields and content types via the UI, or SharePoint Designer, is not a great solution. For instance, there’s no supported way to move a SPD designed solution from e.g., Dev to Live - that is, with SPD, you design directly against live. This can be OK for initial deployments, but as soon as the system has data in and you need to start potentially breaking things, this is not a good place to be in. The alternative to this is develop Visual Studio solutions and features, which are deployable pretty much wherever you’d like. You can define fields and content types in XML, and when you’re finished, package it all up and deploy. Simple, right? Well, no, not necessarily - as I mentioned recently, this process is not without its bugs and issues.

I’ve deployed a few solutions in this way, and was (until today) singing the praises of deploying content types via XML, thinking how wonderful it was to have the flexibility to build in dev, test and then deploy (i.e. what you can’t do with SPD). And of course, if you make any changes, you can update your solution and hey presto, nice neat update.

Visual Studio 2010 Workflow + Infopath 2010 forms - troubleshooting

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:58:33 +0000

Microsoft markets that Sharepoint Designer workflows are directly exportable to Visual Studio workflows. And in many ways, this is absolutely true. It’s trivial to create a .wsp from an SPD workflow and import it to VS. However, if you then inspect the workflow that has been created for you, a little concern would not be underestimated. If your SPD workflow was what you wanted, then you could be reasonably confident that its VS version would do the same job. But presumably your reason for importing to VS is because you need more control over the workflow in the longer term, in which case, you’re likely to be left underwhelmed by what the import process creates for you. Imagine creating a webpage in Microsoft Word and you’ll get the drift.

So when faced with a similar proposition, recreating the workflow in Visual Studio from scratch immediately became apparent as the best solution. After all, the intent and purpose of the workflow was clear; recreating it in VS ought to have been a doddle. However, to complicate matters, the SPD workflow used Infopath edit forms. This turned out to be easy in SPD, but non-trivial in Visual Studio. Getting an Infopath form to register with a VS workflow project requires various items, that VS may not do automatically for you.

new SPSite - FileNotFoundException

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:55:05 +0000

It seems to me that every SharePoint developer, at some point in their career, will encounter this particular error. It’s one of those infuriatingly obtuse errors that could be caused by a multitude of different issues - either individually or cumulatively. In my case, I was in the middle of developing a SharePoint timer job and I had a particular piece of code that I wasn’t too sure about, and so wanted to test very quickly, over and over again - without the rigmarole of deploying/retracting solutions, hunting through Central Admin to run the job, etc. I just wanted to run this particular section of code against the SharePoint object model and see what happened. As is a common technique for this, I started up a fresh Console Application project, pasted in my code and figured that would be enough.

2010 on Matt Thornton

Useful SharePoint script to restart SharePoint services and IIS

More fun with deploying Document Sets via XML

Updating declarative XML content types

Visual Studio 2010 Workflow + Infopath 2010 forms - troubleshooting

new SPSite - FileNotFoundException