Waldek Mastykarz - Innovation Matters | SharePoint Server MVP

Last year I wrote an article about programmatically provisioning Variation Hierarchies in SharePoint 2007. The point of that article was that there was really no way you could provision Variations in repeatable way in a supported fashion and had to use reflection to get the job done. The situation in SharePoint 2010 has changed a little. The process of creating Variations has been made more reliable my moving it completely to a Timer Job. So a new approach, requires new code, and here it is. Read more »

One of the great capabilities of SharePoint Server is the ability of including reusable content: standard snippets of HTML which you can use in different places over and over again without having to copy & paste it. The great thing about Reusable Content is that you have the option to insert a reference instead of the copy of the content so that if the content snippet ever changes, you won’t have to manually check every single page in your site to ensure that the content is correct: SharePoint will do this for you automatically. While this piece of functionality is really great you wouldn’t believe how inconvenient it is to get to this list to add new content snippets in there. Read more »

When working on SharePoint Solutions one of the common requirements is delivering multilingual solutions. Depending on your scenario you might either need to localize a single Web Part or a complete Solution. Thinking of multiple languages you have to take into account not only the development but also the packaging process for all the different assets in your Solution. One of such assets, where implementing support for multiple languages in SharePoint 2010 might seem complex at first sight, are Site Definitions. However you can easily create a multilingual Site Definition using nothing more than the standard capabilities  of the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools. Read more »

When SharePoint 2007 shipped with the Features and Solutions framework we thought we had it all sorted out. We were able to package our work and deploy it in a structured and repeatable manner. Using Feature Activation Dependencies we were able to ensure that all the functionality that our components require are available prior to provision our custom functionality. And while Feature Dependencies are definitely a great concept they are unfortunately incomplete. If all the different pieces come from a single Solution then Feature Dependencies are sufficient. However if your resources are spread across different Solution the only piece of feedback you will get from Feature Dependencies is message saying that a Feature with some id is missing in your Farm. Luckily this situation has changed with SharePoint 2010 and the introduction of Solution Dependencies. Read more »

Developing localized solutions on the SharePoint 2007 platform wasn’t as straight-forward as we wanted it to be. First of all you had to make your code support globalization and then you had to provision the localized Resource files to your Web Application. As SharePoint 2007 didn’t provide any mechanism to do that, you had to use custom Timer Jobs to get this done correctly. Luckily this situation has changed with SharePoint 2010 which introduces the new App_GlobalResourceFile element in the Solution Manifest which makes it possible to declaratively deploy Resource files in a structured and repeatable fashion. Read more »