WebTemplate training materials–Introduction to reusable labs

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image Full package updated on 14th of March 2012

During past few years I’ve been doing quite a lot of training materials which have been then published globally in MSDN or in other places. Every now and then some of the material don’t get officially released due miscellaneous reasons, so I’m quite often left with numerous demos and HOLs which were cut from some package.

This post is introduction post for that kind of material, which is now released in this blog and you can also download the full package from my personal  sky drive (word format with supplementary files). This material has created by me for one hands on training where objective was to continue building existing solution from scratch to finish – as in step by step, rather than doing individual bits and pieces as the exercises. These kind of exercises have received excellent feedback, since they keep the context for the technologies covered in individual labs.

Now released package will contain following exercises or topics, which will be released also as blog posts.

  • Creation VS2010 solution structure for WebTemplate and feature deployment following up naming guidance's and folder structures
  • Creating features and feature receivers
  • Debugging feature receivers
  • Creating site columns and content types
  • Developing custom navigation control for controlled html
  • Deploying custom master page using feature with custom navigation control
  • Adding and deploying custom page layout to solution
  • Creation of WebTemplate with publishing features enabled (WCM site) utilizing above customizations
    • Business case - Creation of Events site to show information concerning upcoming events in corporation
  • Creating custom Upgrade application page to site settings for feature upgrade management
    • Check Chris O'Brien's solution for more comprehensive functionality for feature upgrade management from central administration application
  • Upgrade existing sites created using old version of the web template with feature upgrading techniques

Here’s the links to released blog posts

Just a teaser on the web template created publishing site with custom navigation and master page…

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You can also download zip package, which includes Word document versions of the hands on labs, all required prerequisites for the labs and example implementations of the labs. Downloadable package is available from here. Exercises assumes that you have extracted this package to c:\Student folder of your development server. If you want to copy-paste xml and code used in the exercises, Word format is much more suitable – it’s up to you…

Labs can be performed almost in any environment and they are using same domain information as in the publicly available Hyper-V image with Contoso corporation demo structures. Simply adjust the url and domain information to match your own environment, if you have some alternative SharePoint environment for your consumption.

Feel free to utilize now published material anyway you like – you can freely utilized parts of it or update it as you like. Please note that I don’t take personally no responsibility what so ever with the now released package, so they are meant for learning exercises, not directly to be used in any actual SharePoint deployment.

If you find any issues on the labs, please send comments, so that we are able to fix them as fast as possible. You can also suggest any enhancements for the lab, but due other on-going projects, I can’t promise to have time to include them with the exercises. Thanks for your comments and feedback advance.

- Vesku