Mark Jones' Blog

• SAF is released!

  Mark Jones - Wednesday, June 17, 2009

  At Last! Finally, we have released the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) on CodePlex!! Please take a look at : http://saf.codeplex.com .

  Now that I can take a minute, I just wanted to spend a bit of time detailing why we have spent the best part of 18 months (with lots of late nights building it!) Here's a FAQ to give you some answers:

  If you are developing with SharePoint, do you suffer from any of these ?

  • Lots of Defects caused by differences in SharePoint Farms. – eg. “It works on Integration, but not on QA!” .
  • Your Development team find it time consuming telling your Release team what to do for each release. “How hard can it be to put 5 columns in a Content Type?”
  • You have release documents (notepad, word, etc) that don’t contain enough information on how to deploy, or they always miss things and are extremely time consuming to create. “By heck surely there must be a better way of telling the Operations team what I need doing ?”
  • Deployments to key farms are always late and very stressful. “I hope we don’t get a release like that again, I didn’t finish till ...

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  Comments (0)

  Category: SAF

  Tags:: SAF SharePoint

• Upgrading SharePoint Site Columns

  Mark Jones - Saturday, May 16, 2009

  Introduction

  In a previous post, I explained my findings with "Upgrading Content Types", but now I want to test out a few scenarios with upgrading Site Columns. On the whole, the test results for Site Columns were pretty similar to that of Content Types. Although, I wanted to test what we can do when it comes to updating site columns that contain data. If you don't want to read each test case, please check out the "Summary" at the end of this post.

  Test Cases – Removing a Site Column

  Can we remove a site column by deactivating the Feature that deployed it? Yes

  Test Steps:

  1.       Deploy a Site Column (via Feature and CAML)

  2.       Deactivate the Feature

  Outcome:

  1.       Site Column will be removed

  2.       Feature is deactivated

  Can we remove a site column (thats referenced by a List Column) by deactivating the Feature that deployed it? Yes

  Test Steps:

  1.       Deploy a Site Column (via Feature and CAML)

  2.       Add the Site Column to a List (as a List Column)

  3.       Deactivate the Feature

  4.       Recycle Application Pools

  Outcome:

  1.       Site Column will be removed

  2.       ...

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  Comments (3)

  Category: SAF

  Tags:: CAML Deployment SAF Best Practices