SharePoint Saturday DC Session Materials and Wrap-up

First of all, a big thanks to all of the attendees who made it out to Reston, VA at the Microsoft Office, to listen to all of the speakers talk about SharePoint, for free (I do no think anyone requested a refund that I am aware of), on a Saturday, in the snow. We had a good crowd, even with the weather, and I had a great time. Thank you all for coming out, definitely made the trip down there worth it! It was great to meet you all, and I had great interaction in my session from the attendees, as well as some sideshow humor, photo ops, heckling from Mark Rackley and Dan Usher (just kidding, you had some good questions!), and some live pair programming with the help of Christina Wheeler.

Another go out to the organizers of the event, Dan Usher, Dux Raymond Sy, and Gino Degregori. They all did a great job of putting this together, and for the sponsors for making this happen! These are great events that really drive the SharePoint community. It is events like these that make the virtual of social networking and online learning actual and physical.

Wow, I just realized that is probably the first animated gif I have posted in an extremely long while. Sorry for that… So, you may want to scroll down a bit to stop that and read the rest of this [code, slide presentations, etc.].

Anyhow, as per my presentation, I said I would get these up here as soon as possible, so here they are. Below is the presentation hosted at SlideShare.net, with short clips hosted at screencast.com, without audio, of the demonstrations themselves. I hope to soon re-record those and post them here, as those were my backups, just in case my virtual image did not want to play nice during my demos (it’s happened before, so now I always come prepared!).

And even further down the page away from the annoying applause animated gif above, are the code samples from my demonstrations as well. In addition to what we reviewed in the demos, I also included two additional sources (with pre-compiled WSPs, per the request of an attendee, they are included in the ZIP files below), that were briefly mentioned.

However, before I do that, I would kindly request from some of my attendees, that you please respond in the comments of this post to let me know what you thought of the session, if you will be using Custom Actions in your SharePoint development, if you have put this to use, and any questions you have regarding any of the material that I had presented. This goes a long way in helping me craft future versions of this topic, and plants seeds for others. Thanks in advance!

• Demo #1 – Creating a Simple Custom Action
  • Screencast: http://www.screencast.com/t/YjlhZTU0
  • SPS.SiteActionsSolutionManagement
    • This was the link to the Solution Management page within SharePoint Central Administration off of the Site Actions menu. This is hard-linked however to my local system, to: http://litwareserver:9999, you will need to modify this within the solution, and rebuild the WSP to use for your CA URL and port.
    • Download: SPS.SiteActionsSolutionManagement.zip
  • SPS.SiteRecycleBin
    • This was the second deployment I quickly ran through, which added a Site Recycle Bin link to the Site Actions page under the Site Administration Custom Action Group
    • Download: SPS.SiteRecycleBin.zip
  • SPSDC.SiteActionsRecycleBin
    • This is the solution that I walked through during the first demonstration. This will add links to both the current site recycle bin, as well as the site collection recycle bin to the Site Actions menu.
    • Download: SPSDC.SiteActionsRecycleBin.zip
• Demo #2 – Creating a Slightly More Complex Custom Action
  • Screencast: http://www.screencast.com/t/ZDRhOTFkZmIt
  • SPS.CompleteTask
    • This is the solution from the second demonstration. This solution will add Complete Task links to the Tasks and Gantt Tasks (Project Tasks) lists shown in the Edit Control Block. This will allow you to set the task Status field to Completed, and the Percent Complete field to 100% for the given task.
    • Download: SPS.CompleteTask.zip
• Demo #3 – Hiding Custom Actions
  • Screencast: http://www.screencast.com/t/YmQwNWI1
  • SPS.HideCustomAction
    • This solution hides the custom action on the Site Settings page under Site Administration for ‘Delete This Site’. There is a README.txt within the solution as well, which gives direction on the STSADM commands that need to be run to activate and deactivate this feature, as we have it hidden from the Site Features page, and it can only be activated by using STSADM.
    • Download: SPS.HideCustomAction.zip
    • Additional Resource: http://gvaro.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B06529FD3FC75473!415.entry
• Demo #4 – Custom Action Groups
  • Screencast: http://www.screencast.com/t/YjM2YzAzZmI
  • SPS.CustomActionGroup
    • This solution creates a Custom Action Group within the Site Settings page, that links to a few Custom Action resources on MSDN.
    • Download: SPS.CustomActionGroup.zip

Some additional resources for Custom Actions I have on my blog that I had made mention of during my presentation:

• Combining Multiple CustomAction Elements Together
• RecurrenceId Attribute of the CustomAction Element
• Delete this site
• SharePoint SPBasePermissions Enumeration
• SharePoint List Type IDs

The presentation and code samples above will also be made available on the SharePoint Saturday DC website.

Thanks again for attending, and please let me know what you thought of the event and the session! Dux mentioned that the DC events will be taking place twice a year. My plan for the next time, is to show how Custom Actions are used within SP2010, and possibly a session on building features and solutions… so be sure to keep an eye out for the next SharePoint Saturday DC!