SharePoint Development Practices and Techniques

Using the SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 2012

The release of SharePoint 2007 was a significant milestone for SharePoint as a development platform because in this version, Microsoft introduced support for features and solution packages. Soon after SharePoint 2007 was released, however, it became clear within Microsoft and throughout the industry that more and better developer productivity tools were needed. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft extended the developer platform by introducing the SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 2010. These new tools made developing for SharePoint 2010 much faster and easier because they automated grungy tasks and hid many of the low-level details that developers had to worry about when developing for SharePoint 2007. For example, every SharePoint project in Visual Studio 2010 is created with built-in support to generate its output as a solution package. The SharePoint Developer Tools also integrate commands into the Visual Studio 2010 environment that make it easy to deploy and retract the solution package for a SharePoint project during testing and debugging.

With the introduction of SharePoint 2013 and Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft has further improved the SharePoint Developer Tools. For the project types that were available for SharePoint 2010 there are now also SharePoint 2013 versions. There are also Office add-in project types that can be used to create add-ins for the Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 2010 applications. The biggest change, however, is that the SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 2012 contain two project types that allow you to create two different types of apps:

• Apps for Office 2013
• Apps for SharePoint 2013

You can find the app for SharePoint 2013 C# in the New Project dialog box within Visual Studio 2012 by navigating to Visual C#\Office/SharePoint\Apps, as shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6 Selecting the App for SharePoint 2013 project type to create an app

When you click OK you are asked to confirm the name of the app and specify the site to which you want Visual Studio to deploy the app and how you want to host your app, as shown in Figure 2-7.

Figure 2-7 Specifying a name, test site URL, and trust level for an app

SharePoint apps will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4, “SharePoint apps.” For now, you will create a SharePoint-hosted app, which means that all of the app will be deployed to a SharePoint site. When you click the Finish button in the SharePoint Customization Wizard, Visual Studio takes a few seconds to create and configure the new project. Figure 2-8 shows what the new SharePoint project looks like in Solution Explorer.

Figure 2-8 An app’s Features node, Package node, and some standard content

A SharePoint app is created with some default content. There is a style sheet, an app icon image, a default page, and several JavaScript files. The AppManifest.xml file contains metadata such as the name and the title of the app, the app icon, and the scopes at which the app needs to have permissions. You use the Features node of the App for SharePoint 2013 project to add new features to the app. Notice that the Features node of a SharePoint app contains one feature, called Feature1, when the app is created. Feature1 contains the default content and is web scoped. A feature in a SharePoint app can only be web scoped, it is not supported to use a SharePoint app to deploy a site, web application, or farm-scoped feature. You use the Package node to track project-wide settings related to building the project into a solution package .wsp file and an app package .app file.

Just like normal SharePoint projects, SharePoint apps also have three special menu commands to support deployment and packaging of the app: Deploy, Package, and Retract. These menu commands are available when you right-click the top-level project node in Solution Explorer. You can run the Package command to build a SharePoint project into a solution package. You can use the Deploy command to run a sequence of deployment steps that deploy the solution package in the local farm so that you can test and debug your work. The Retract command reverses the act of deployment by retracting the solution package from the local farm. When you click the Deploy button, Visual Studio deploys the app to the site you listed in the Customization Wizard. You can find the app on the Site Contents page and in the navigation pane on the left side of the page, under the Recent heading, as shown in Figure 2-9. Clicking the app name or icon will open the app’s default.aspx page.

Figure 2-9 The WingTip app on the Site Contents page and in the navigation pane on the left side of the page