Slides from Tech.Ed Australia 2007 - Templates and Features

Here are the slides I did in my presentation with Milan Gross (his slides are not included here, as they are his to publish):


I start we had the Tech.Ed image:




Next, our names and titles:





Some links and referances:

• http://www.microsoft.com/communities/default.mspx
• 
  Solution Deployment with SharePoint 2007 [MSDN]
• 
  SharePoint Solution Installer
  Scott Hillier’s Open Source SharePoint 2007 Features
• 
  How to: Deploy UDFs Using Windows SharePoint Services Solutions [MSDN]

The agenda of the session (Milan covered that):





Here I spoke about the difference between templates (save as template for a list or a site) and definitions (file system xml and aspx files that allow developers and administrators have more control over the sites after deployment)




A quick explanation of how a solution package is built. For example I showed the package of the "print list" feature as it was done by Scott Hillier.



Next I discussed what are DDF files and why we need them (we need them to let makecab.exe know how to build our cab file - using folders), as well as giving some alternatives such as cabarc that allows you to build a cab file with folders in it - no need for a definition file. I also mentioned a tool I never used - WSPBuilder




Now to my part of the demo - I showed how to create a feature for a webpart and how to package it. I used my own Enhanced Content Query WebPart solution package to demonstrate this, and you can download that from codeplex!









After that Milan took over and showed a scenario that used the Solution Generator (part of the WSS extensions for Visual Studio) to create a site definition, with lists that are connected to workflows and have BDC fields and all. It was pretty complex, and I felt we needed more time to really explain it all.


And that was my first presentation. I will let you know about the second one soon.