Author / Simon Doy

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Posts by Simon Doy

I am an avid SharePoint enthusiast who works as an Independent SharePoint Consultant based in Leeds, United Kingdom. I am one of the organisers of the Yorkshire SharePoint User Group in the United Kingdom. I have been designing and building SharePoint solutions since 2006.
by Simon Doy

>SharePoint 2010 – What I have been reading at home (Part 1)


>With the SharePoint conference starting this week and seeing all the Twitter posts about all the great new feature I have been feeling a little left out. To counter this I thought I’d post the things that I have been reading.

Firstly SharePoint 2010 looks amazing, some really interesting features for us developers and some super cool resource management for the more infrastructure orientated among us.

To get started I read this post from Oliver Marks from ZDNet. Whilst the post isn’t anything ground breaking there is a interesting interview with Kirk Koenigsbauer from Microsoft discussing Groove. I was particularly interested in the offline capabilities which allow document libraries and even sites offline!.  One really cool feature was the ability for a document to be part of a workflow which is started offline and when Groove sync’s then the workflow is kicked off the SharePoint server!

Second port of call was to start reviewing all the new documentation from Microsoft which can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee514561.aspx 

The video from Paul Andrew is great and shows some of the new features such as accessing data in SharePoint from a client app using REST and ADO.NET. Also he goes over a SharePoint Site Workflow and a sandbox solution which is a wsp which is uploaded to a site. The differenct between a sandbox solution as opposed to a farm solution is that the code is run in a separate process which has its resources managed so that if the process was to run away it will get terminated.

Finally for tonights reading is the new SharePoint 2010 SDK beta…

Happy Reading!

by Simon Doy

>Command Prompt from Visual Studio


>I use the stsadm commands to add/deploy/upgrade/retract solutions. I got fed up with having to start a command prompt and then change directory to within the solution and then drill down to the project directory, where the wsp solution is found.

So instead (and I don’t know why I didn’t do this ages ago) I setup an External Tool within Visual Studio which will open up the command prompt within the currently selected project.
To do the same do the following:-
  • Open up Visual Studio
  • Click Tools->External Tools
  • Click Add
  • In the Title call it something like Command Prompt (Project)
  • Command: c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe
  • Initial Dir: $(ProjectDir)
  • Untick Close on Exit

If you wish to have the command prompt open within a different directory then put the path to that directory, there are all the variables which are available when using post build events such as SolutionDir.

To use select the project that you wish to open the command prompt in and then do Tools->Command Prompt (Project)

Enjoy!