Becky Bertram's Blog

Since I've focused several of my articles on this blog on the process of manually creating and editing manifest, feature, and element XML files, I thought I should point out that it will be easier to work with these files in the future, thanks to the Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. Although the 1.0 version of this has been around since March, in August, Alex Malek of the SharePoint Designer team announced version 1.1 CTP. Unfortunately this is not available with VS 2008 (aka Visual Studio codename "Orcas"), but it's supposed to ship by year's end, when VS 2008 is officially released.

You can read about the new release on the SharePoint Designer team blog in this post. You can download the CTP for yourself here.

The main new feature of this new release is the "WSP View" tool pane in Visual Studio. Keep in mind that you'll still need a working knowledge of how the XML files work together, but with this added functionality, it will make it a lot easier to modify these files, since they're automatically generated for you. Also, it's easier to understand how they're packaged in their WSP file because you can see the phsycial structure of the files.

I downloaded it and tried using it myself, and found it very helpful. After I installed it, I went into Visual Studio 2005 and said Create New Project. I got a list of the SharePoint templates available to me from within Visual Studio.

I selected WebPart as my project template. This is what it produced for me:

As you can see, it created the web part's .cs file and the .webpart file inside a folder, and created a temporary key. It also added the appropriate SharePoint dll references.

Here you can see the WSP View of the project:

Note that when you use the WSP view, you can open up those files and edit them right from the WSP view, in the same way you would open up the files in the Solution Explorer.

Here you can see the feature.xml file it automatically generates:

And finally, when you are finished, you can deploy your solution directly from the Visual Studio IDE Build menu: