Upgrading Content Types in SharePoint 2010/2013

Most developers who used SharePoint 2007 faced issues with adding fields to content types post deployment. The fields were usually not propagated to the lists and libraries when deployed through the solution package.

SharePoint 2010 introduced new elements in the CAML schema to offer a solution for this problem.

The solution was providing an  element within the element to indicate that a feature has to be upgraded. The UpgradeActions element can have a child element  to add a new field to the already provisioned content type. 

Using this technique allows for propagation of changes to the content type to the child lists and content types.

Please find the usage below:

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<Feature xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

  <UpgradeActions>

    <VersionRange BeginVersion="1.0.0.0" EndVersion="2.0.0.0">

      <AddContentTypeField

              ContentTypeId="0x010XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

              FieldId="{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}"

              PushDown="TRUE"/>   

    </VersionRange>

  </UpgradeActions>

</Feature>

Reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff595308.aspx

Custom Sign Out Page for SharePoint 2010

Many a time there would be a requirement to implement a custom action when the user clicks on the Sign out link in SharePoint. 

SharePoint provides as option via PowerShell to achieve this. Clicking on the Sign out link can be made to point to a custom application page to implement the functionality required. This can be customized for each Web Application.

The PowerShell command is given below:

Set-SPCustomLayoutsPage -Identity "Signout" -RelativePath "/_layouts/MySignOut.aspx" -WebApplication "http://mywebapp"

SharePoint 2010 Developer's Certification Exam preparation books available on amazon.com

Wrox has published a book to aid SharePoint Developers prepare for the SharePoint 2010 Developer certifications 70-573 and 70-576. The book is available on amazon

http://www.amazon.com/SharePoint-2010-Developers-Certification-Toolkit/dp/0470912340%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAJK4PAUN27E77K2EA%26tag%3Daglspt-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0470912340

SharePoint 2010 Crossword puzzle

My colleague, Jackson, came up with a nicely done SharePoint 2010 crossword puzzle for an event we had at work.Really smart work on some of the clues :)

He blogs @ Confessions of a SharePoint Consultant

Wanted to share it with a larger audience

Web part versioning in SharePoint 2010

One of the new features added to SharePoint 2010 web part framework is versioning of web part instances.
The versioning comes into effect under the following scenario:

1. When the page is checked in.
2. Versioning is controlled by page level settings
3. Only shared instances of web parts will be versioned

Although, if there are edits when the page is not checked out, then the versioning will not occur.

The only issue would be the amount of storage space needed for the versions, as there is no delta storage of the versions, the entire instance will be stored in each version.

New site template for Content deployment in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 has introduced a new option while creating a Site Collection. It appears under the "Custom" tab of the Select a template section. It gives an option for users to Select the site template at a later stage.

This option mainly serves to create the destination site collection during a content deployment scenario. The feature will also be useful for the "Self Service Site Creation" feature.

SharePoint 2010 Capacity boundry limits

Microsoft have released a white paper on SharePoint 2010 Capacity management: Software boundaries and limits.The white paper can be downloaded here

On a high level:

	Moss 2007	SharePoint 2010
Content DB Size	100 GB	200 GB
File Size	2 GB	2 GB
DB’s per webapp	100	300
Site collection size	100 GB	100 GB
List items per view	2000	5000

Bye Bye stsadm hello PowerShell

Stsadm was one of the primary tools available for deployment operations in MOSS 2007. However, We all have been through a lot of scenarios that stsadm simply did not cover.

The resolution to this was to write a piece of code or develop a custom stsadm extension and deploy it to accomplishing a simple task

SharePoint 2010 has moved to PowerShell which means that you know have full access to the SharePoint API from the command line.

For example : Suppose I want to get a list of features for a specific site collection, we can simply type the following from the PowerShell prompt

$s = Get-SPSite http://siteurl

S$.Features | out-gridview

We would get the list of features in a grid view with filtering & sorting options.

Find a list of all the SharePoint 2010 PowerShell cmdlets reference here

http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010-cmdlet-reference/

and the Help file for PowerShell here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=045F7AF5-B226-4A05-8ACE-4E17CFDEF856&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Microsoft claim to introduce around 1000 build in cmdlets :)

You can use PowerShell with the MOSS 2007 object model and its web services. More on that here

http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=9