Mark Jones' Blog

• Roadmap for SAF 1.4

  Mark Jones - Wednesday, July 29, 2009

  It’s 6am and I am bored, so I thought I would give you a quick heads up on what’s coming in the next version of SAF (due by the end August). Here’s the Feature list :

  DSL with Diagram capabilities inside Visual Studio 20008.

  This is probably been the most exciting one for the release. We have been spending a few months working on a way to create SAF Macros visually via a VS 2008 designer window. This will give you the following advantages :

  • You don’t need to know the Schema for a SAF Macro (which happens to be a Spring IOC Container)
  • It’s much easier to see what a Macro will do. (a “picture paints a thousand words (or Xml Elements in our case)
  • It’s nice to demo – much nicer than showing you how to create a Macro in Xml anyway.

  Usage will be very simple and will happen like this :

  1. Load a new VS2008 Project –(more than likely a WSP Builder project).
  2. From the menu, choose “Add new SAF Macro”
  3. …Designer loads…
  4. Select one or more actions and drag onto the design surface
  5. Configure the parameters for each of the Actions
  6. Connect the  actions to ...

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  Category: SAF

• Technorati Claim

  Mark Jones - Sunday, July 26, 2009

  This post is purely to claim my blog on Technorati code : ymw9k6n57q

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• Deploy new and existing Content Types with SAF (using standard CAML)

  Mark Jones - Sunday, July 26, 2009

  The Problem

  If you have ever deployed a SharePoint Content Type via a Feature (using standard CAML) you will more than likely run into one or more of the various “quirks”, namely :

  • The Content Type deploys correctly if its not already in the Farm, but if your Content Type is in use, or customised via the GUI then updating Feature has no effect. In this situation you are forced to create your Feature with CAML, but upgrade and maintain it with Feature Receiver Code.
  • If you want to “push” your changes down to any lists, this has to be done in code.

  I have detailed most of the issues in “Upgrading Content Types”. Becky Bertram also wrote an awesome post on the issues in “Updating Content Types and Site Columns That Were Deployed as a Feature”.

  How “EnsureContentType” (in SAF) solves these problems

  The reason for this post is to tell you about a SAF Action that removes some of these barriers and offers the following benefits :

  • The Action uses a standard SharePoint CAML file containing one or many <ContentType> elements (as defined in the ”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/” schema).
  • Content Types that don’t already ...

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  Category: SAF

• Early morning news!

  Mark Jones - Thursday, July 09, 2009

  Well, the hayfever has got me again! Here I am at 6am with a bunged up nose and itchy eyes wide awake. So I thought I would do the sensible thing and give you a heads up on what’s due in the next release of SAF.

  Here’s the Feature list : 

  New Actions

  STSAdm Action. This allows us to call STSAdm commands and pass arguments from a SAF Macro.

  Powershell Action. Allows us to to call Powershell “Function” and pass arguments from a SAF Macro.

  Adapters

  In SAF, we think of “Adapters” as being components that allow a SAF Macro to be run from a particular technology. In the current release we have :

  STSAdm Adapter. Allows you to run SAF from an STSAdm extension.

  Feature Adapter. Allows you to SAF run from a SharePoint Feature. This is simple as creating a Feature.Xml and a Macro.xml file. Check out the Quick Start for more info.

  In the next release here’s what’s coming :

  MSBuild Adapter. This will let you hook SAF directly into your MSBuild process. This is going to pretty useful for companies that already have a MSBuild process, but want to hook SharePoint ...

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  Category: SAF