Just recently I started using AC’s Visual Studio CodeRush/Refactor Tools for SharePoint Developers. I know that the AC’s Tools have been there for a while. Somehow I missed them. Lucky for me, just recently I stumbled upon them once again and decided to give them a try and guess what: they are great and they save you a lot of time typing SharePoint XML.

Programmatically provisioning Web Part instances is an important piece of structured and repeatable deployment of SharePoint solutions. Preferably you would like to be able to deploy preconfigured Web Parts at particular places in your SharePoint solution. In order to do that you need two at least things: the target location where do you want to deploy the Web Part instance and the preconfigured Web Part itself. SharePoint Web UI allows you to export Web Parts. While it’s definitely doable to export a couple of them manually, wouldn’t it be better if we could automate the process?

It’s finally going to happen: the very first SharePint in the Netherlands - SharePoint by day, SharePint by night.

During the last SharePoint Black Belts meeting we talked about deploying of all kinds of things in SharePoint. One of the topics was deploying and updating custom Site Definitions. Did you know that changing existing Site Definitions is unsupported?

SharePoint Features allow you to provision all kinds of assets in a declarative way - we all know that. Using XML you can provision not only branding resources like CSS, JavaScript files and images but also Page Layouts and Master Pages. But did you know that using exactly the same mechanism you can provision Publishing Pages?