git-askpass.exe: No such file or directory.

To resolve this I had to:

1. Remove Git from Control Panel -> Uninstall
2. Remove Git Windows Credential Manager from Control Panel -> Uninstall
3. With Visual Studio 2017 Installer, remove Git for Windows
4. Install Git
5. Install Git Windows Credential Manager
6. With Visual Studio 2017 Installer, install Git for Windows

The post git-askpass.exe: No such file or directory. Visual Studio appeared first on Blog IT.

By default, the assembly is included in the package and is deployed to the Global Assembly Cache. You can change both configurations by clicking on the project in Solution Explorer and editing the properties on the Properties window.

However, there is no project property that allows you to specify you want to add the assembly to the Safe Controls section on the web application configuration file. To do this, follow the steps below:

1. On Solution Explorer, click on the project
2. On the Properties window, specify you don’t want the assembly to be included in the package (set Include Assembly in Package as False)

3. On Solution Explorer, double-click the Package folder to open the Package editor
4. On the Package Editor, click the Advanced button (bottom of the screen)

5. Click the Add button
6. Select Add Assembly from Project Output…

7. Select the current project (which contains the package)
8. Add the safe controls information

The post Adding an Assembly to Safe Controls in SharePoint Tools for Visual Studio 2010 appeared first on Blog IT.

If you create a new SharePoint project named MyProject, and then create a feature inside it named MyFeature, the final name and folder for the feature will be MyProject_MyFeature.

I don’t know about you, but I like the features to have the names I give them, without the project’s name added to them. The good news is that you can change it 🙂

Here’s how:

1. On Solution Explorer, double-click the Feature name to open the Feature Editor
2. On Packaging Explorer, click on the Feature name
3. On the Properties window, change the value in the Deployment Path property

By default, the value for this property is:

$SharePoint.Project.FileNameWithoutExtension$_$SharePoint.Feature.FileNameWithoutExtension$

To remove the project’s name from the Feature name, just remove the first token (and the trailing underscore), leaving it as:

$SharePoint.Feature.FileNameWithoutExtension$

The post Renaming a Feature in SharePoint Tools for Visual Studio 2010 appeared first on Blog IT.

I downloaded the assemblies, then i added the assembly references on the project, and then i tried to compile the project. But the compiler found the following error message:

I found solution to fix this on the Rob’s blog.

To fix this you need to open the Properties for each assembly (via file system) and then click Unlock as you can see in the following screenshot:

The post Visual Studio Build Error (HRESULT 0x80131515) appeared first on Blog IT.

This was the second session I attended on the second day of the SharePoint Conference 2009 and it was given by Rolando Jimenez from Microsoft.

Business Connectivity Services

According to Rolando, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) are “a set of out-of-the-box features, services and tools that enhance SharePoint to streamline solutions of deep integration of external data and services.”

In the SharePoint Pie, Business Connectivity Services belongs to the Composite slice. It’s the new and much improved version of the old Business Data Catalog, introduced in SharePoint 2007.

Regarding BCS, Microsoft has invested in three main areas:

• Presentation: extend Office and SharePoint’s user experience and capabilities to external data and processes.
• Connectivity: read-write capable connectivity from client and server to databases, WCF/Web Services and .NET sources.
• Tooling: integrated tooling experience scales from simple solutions to advanced applications with rich client packaging and deployment.

Core Concepts

The main building block for BCS is the new concept of External Content Type (ECT), which is the new name for what was previously known as BDC Entity. An ECT describes:

• How to connect to the data
• Schema of the data
• Behavior within Office and SharePoint

This definition will then be used by the BCS Runtime, both in SharePoint (thin client) and in Office Client applications (rich client) to access the external data.

The other important concept is the External List. This is a new type of list in SharePoint 2010 that allows you to surface data retrieved by BCS as defined by the External Content Type associated to it.

BCS Tools Overview

There are three types of solutions that use BCS:

• Simple No Code solutions, which can be built by Power Users using SharePoint Designer
  • Surface data in SharePoint using External Lists
  • Connect those lists to Outlook and SharePoint Workspace and take them offline
• Intermediate No Code solutions, which can be built by developers using SharePoint SDK (and eventually also SharePoint Designer)
  • Customized InfoPath forms
  • Customized Office Ribbon and TaskPanes
  • Customized QuickParts in Word
  • Customized Workflows
  • Customized Web Part Pages
• Advanced Solutions, built by Advanced Developers using Visual Studio (and SharePoint SDK and SharePoint Designer).
  • Custom connectivity for data aggregation, transformation, security, …
  • Using custom code to integrate data into any Office application (even the ones that don’t support BCS directly)
  • Business logic in forms
  • Create reusable components (UI parts, ECTs, actions) to be included in simpler solutions

Regarding solution creation, there are mainly two approaches:

• Client-Server Environment – PowerUsers use a live connection to the server and directly build simple no code solutions on the server or rich client.
• Single Machine Development Environment – Developers use a combination of SharePoint Designer, SharePoint SDK and Visual Studio to produce advanced solutions, packaged in WSP files that can then be deployed to any SharePoint farm.

Demos

After the overviews, Rolando demonstrated a few Advanced Solution scenarios. Here are the notes I gathered from the demos.

Demo 1: BCS Hello World

• There is a new project type in Visual Studio 2010 called Business Data Connectivity Model Project which can contain a collection of ECTs
• The graphical designer makes it very easy to build ECTs
• An ECT is a class with at least:
  • One property called ID
  • A method called ReadList
  • A method called ReadItem
• Visual Studio 2010 includes a BCS Explorer tool which graphically shows the structure of the XML-behind generated when designing the ECTs
• Visual Studio 2010 can package and deploy the ECT directly to SharePoint

Demo 2: Author Custom Connectivity in Visual Studio

• If you want to retrieve data from multiple tables and aggregate it in a single ECTs you have to develop the code yourself (for each ECT class method).
• If you want to allow writes on ECTs, you must add an Update method to the ECT class.
• SharePoint automatically generates and Edit Form for External Lists that support writes.

Demo 3: Discover and Configure ECT for Outlook Offlining in SharePoint Designer

• Using SharePoint Designer you can define a mapping between ECT properties and Outlook objects, allowing you to connect an external list to Outlook (really neat stuff).
• When packaging the solution, Visual Studio will generate a WSP for SharePoint deployment and a Click-Once package for Office Client deployment (similar to Office Add-Ins).
• The same code (ECT assembly) is executed by the BCS Runtime on the Office Client and on SharePoint.

Demo 4: Custom Rich Client Integration (Excel) with VSTO

• Using the BCS API, a developer can built an Excel Add-In, using VSTO, that loads the data using the ECT and inserts into a spreadsheet.
• The developer can specify if it allows BCS to cache the data or if the data always has to be live.

The post SPC’09: Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services using Visual Studio 2010 appeared first on Blog IT.

This session was given by Mike Morton, from Microsoft, and it focused on an overview of the new Visual Studio 2010 features for SharePoint Development. It was a demo intensive session, but very effective in showing how much easier SharePoint development will become with these new tools.

Debugging got a lot easier with the new SharePoint project templates of Visual Studio 2010 which all automatically create Packages (WSP files, previously called SharePoint Solutions) and associated Features, and allow one-click deployment to SharePoint.

Mike introduced the concept of SharePoint Project Item (SPI), which represents every possible artifact you might want to develop for SharePoint, from SharePoint Workflows to List Event Receivers, and from Web Parts to List Templates.

Using Visual Studio 2010, you can add an SPI to the SharePoint project when you want to create one of those artifacts. Visual Studio will automatically create the necessary files to package that artifact (which can be Feature Manifests, Resource Files, Element Manifests or Class Files) and updates the Package Manifest.

In addition to automatically creating all the XML files for Features and Packages, Visual Studio includes the Package Designer and the Feature Designer which allow you to graphically edit the contents of a package and the elements included in a feature, respectively. SharePoint deployment will never be the same again…

Other new concepts:

• Visual Web Part: an SPI that allows you to develop a Web Part using a Visual Designer, like if you were a creating an ASP.Net page. This was a really welcome addition 🙂
• SharePoint Root: previously called “Hive” or “12 Hive”, it should now be called SharePoint Root. You can use the token {SharePointRoot} to point to this folder which can be either a physical folder in the server’s hard drive (like the previous “Hive”) or some location on the SharePoint database (for Sandbox Solutions).
• Mapped Folders: SharePoint folders (inside the SharePoint Root Folder) that are mapped in your SharePoint Project as virtual folders. All files that you place inside these folders will then be placed inside the project package when Visual Studio generates it (e.g. Layouts folder, Images folder, …).

Visual Studio 2010 has a new project template which allows you to Import an Existing SharePoint Package (WSP file) and build a new deployment project with the components of that package that you select. This project template will also analyze dependencies between the components so that your new deployment package contains all the required components (and not only the ones you selected). The great thing is that, this WSP file you are importing could have been exported by SharePoint Designer or the result of a Save Site as Template action in the Web UI.

When you press the deploy button on Visual Studio (or press F5 to Debug a SharePoint project), it will perform the following actions, by default:

• Pre-deployment actions (scriptable actions)
• Recycle application pool
• Retract package
• Add package
• Activate features
• Post-deployment actions (scriptable actions)

You can, however, customize the deployment steps to include less steps or even develop you own steps by extending Visual Studio.

The post SPC’09: Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Development Tools Overview appeared first on Blog IT.

He wrote in his blog entry, SharePoint tools support in Visual Studio, that Visual Studio would provide two major features:

• Project templates, designers, and deployment infrastructure that will make any .NET developer instantly more productive on the SharePoint platform.
• An extensibility API that will continue to foster the ecosystem of third party developers who create development tools and technologies.

Visual Studio 2010 will support debugging, Intellisense, and statement completion for SharePoint projects. You'll be able to import existing SharePoint content. You'll also be able to quickly navigate and browse your SharePoint site directly in Visual Studio.

We will be able to navigate and browse a SharePoint site directly in Visual Studio 2010 using the Server Explorer but we still have the old problem that is remote SharePoint development, in this version this feature isn’t available, and the reason is the following:

“To achieve the level of scalability SharePoint needs, SharePoint is architected to use one web application to serve many individual sites.  That's great for SharePoint's ability to scale, bad for Visual Studio's ability to debug an individual site or customization without adversely affecting other sites or developers using a shared server.  In the extreme case, when stopped on a breakpoint in a custom web part for example the site could appear frozen to another developer working in a different area of the site or different site that happens to be part of the same web application.

Addressing that behavior was not something we could accomplish in this product cycle.  So we decided it was better to limit our support to the more predictable local development experience.

We're also investing in the ALM experience to better support teams of developers working together on a SharePoint solution (source code control, VSTS team build, etc.). Those investments should make it significantly easier to collaborate on a SharePoint solution, publish the solution to test or staging environments, etc.”

So we will need to have SharePoint installed on our development OS and SharePoint Designer maintains is purpose.

Since we have to installs SharePoint in our developer environment would be great to have a SharePoint version for development client OS like XP or Vista or Windows 7.

For more information, see SharePoint Development with Visual Studio on Channel 9.

The post Sharepoint “2010” tools support in Visual Studio 2010 appeared first on Blog IT.

The solution is:

if "$(ConfigurationName)" == "Debug" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\"gacutil /i "$(TargetPath)" /f

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